You've acquired a whistleblowing hotline. You've run whistleblowing training sessions. The compliance box is ticked. You've communicated that your organisation will protect whistleblowers. A sentence about encouraging a 'speakup' culture has been added to company mission statement. So, how's it going? Do you still believe that your business would be better off by relying on […]

Whistleblowing has been successfully commercialised and mythologised. Lawyers, academics, journalists, publishers, and filmmakers have turned whistleblowing into a dramatic brand — big payouts, bestseller memoirs, high-profile legal cases, prestige documentaries. This has done important work: it’s raised public awareness about abuses of power and protected some truth-tellers. But it also has an unintended consequence: It […]

Sometimes doing the right thing feels lonely — especially when it comes at a cost, and society doesn’t quite know what to do with that. There are days I catch myself slipping into old habits, measuring my worth by the usual markers: success, money, things. And on those days, I feel like I’ve failed. Then […]

There are two approaches to building organisational culture: One has a deficit focus: detect errors, analyse root causes, plan remedies, and implement corrections. The second has an appreciative, positive focus: seek and draw out human strengths so the organisation self-organises to be even better. With respect to company ethics, the first approach, deficit focus, is […]