Organizing Principles

To understand what a corporate conscience might look like, it will be worth exploring first the opposite: What mades good people do evil things. The book The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo, explores just this thing.

The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is an often cited example about how context influences behavior more than we realize. Our blindness to the power of context on peoples’ actions has come to be known as the Fundamental Attribution Error. 

The interesting point is that we tend to recognize the power of context on our own behavior, but deny others the same deference. 

In organizations one of the main contextual forces we are subject to is the power of groups. How can we take steps to ensure that this power is a positive one? And how does this power relate to the notion of a corporate conscience?

Howard Zehr, a leader in the field of Restorative Justice, summarizes for us 10 points from the Lucifer Effect about how to resist unwanted influence. 

If there are powers in groups that can cause us to do evil, are there also powers that will cause us to do good?