ReelTime Creative Learning Experiences may not fit your expectations for a typical ethics presentation--and and we are totally cool with that. There are plenty of fantastic speakers who provide substantive content--identifying the relevant rules in a given industry, providing updates on how they might be changing, and exploring whether specific conduct is permissible under a state’s rules of professional conduct or a company code of conduct.
But from our inception, we have taken a different tack, focusing not so much on where the ethical lines are drawn, but grappling with the reality that well-meaning, ordinary people a lot like us still sometimes cross them. Somehow, decent, hard-working folks can become blinded to the wrongness of their own actions, or oblivious to the devastating consequences that they risk causing their organizations, colleagues, fellow employees, and even friends and family.
We began, then, with the conviction that ethical decision-making must be a matter of more than merely having the right information, or knowing right from wrong. And as it turns out, researchers in the field of behavioral ethics have been documenting that a myriad of emotional, psychological, or organizational and situational factors may be at work when a person is making choices with a moral or ethical dimension.
If that’s true, then we knew that our ethics and compliance programs would need to not only provide guidance for the participant's rational mind, but also do something to strike a chord with his or her “heart,” if you will. That’s why you won’t hear a lot of lecturing or long-winded expositions of rules and regulations when we facilitate an ethics or compliance workshop. You will instead hear enthusiastic engagement with our original movie clips depicting realistic ethical challenges, honest discussions about similar dilemmas faced by the participants in their own lives and workplaces, more than a bit of genuine laughter, and a lot of collective practical problem-solving. It’s a formula that works because it educates learners as whole persons, and gives them a memorable experience that they can call to mind long after they have left.