So here I sit...struggling with multiple problems which all have deep Ethical dilemmas attached. Nothing can be solved easily with a "cut this" or "add that." And then suddenly - whoops! - it's Friday, and there in lies the rub. So my recognized solution is to go shopping.

Ethical struggles are often introduced as issues in a class. That does little to prepare you for the reality of trying to move forward towards solutions quickly, because in the real world things require action, and discovering a huge ethical dilemma that needs to have some type of solution by Tuesday and here it is Friday already. Oh yes, by the way, on Thursday (after several sleepless nights) you have solved the crisis only to have it revealed to you there was a massive bit of detail left out of the information you were working with making the issue all the more awful. So...now what?

I was reminded the other day of Virgil's fly funeral. He was in danger of losing his home due to the powers that be deciding there was someone else they wanted to give it to. He read the law carefully and discovered that the only way to stop them from taking it was if the grounds had a cemetary on it. So he captured a fly and waited a few days for it to die and staged a massive funeral for it, placing it in a mausoleum on the land. Home saved.

Here is the odd thing about that. The ethics of making someone homeless due to a preferential whim was not the battle he fought and won. Instead, he appealed to a societal value that was held in such high esteem (honoring the dead) that it stopped the law in its tracks. Now, the ethics of manipulating that value for his own purpose is another story and issue to contemplate - but in the business world, particularly healthcare, it provides some guidance. If you can appeal to what is held in much higher value by all then it can stop what may be an unfair ruling in its tracks. That is the nature and intent of advocacy in many ways.

It becomes an issue of not just picking one's battles, but identifying the battles you need to walk around in order to get what is right done. So how did this make shopping the solution to my ethical problem? It didn't. What shopping did was provide me with a visual aide, for myself, to keep hidden in plain sight in the workplace that represented the values that I follow that are not my own but part of what has been more highly valued as a group over ages then all else. I recognize that the ethical issues I encounter every day are too big and awful for myself and my team to solve alone. We, or rather I, in the role of the leader, need a constant reminder that serves to ground me in the values of compassion.

So this I do. And then I start again to find some kind of step we can take forward as a team to keep the motion going without making the ethical issue worse or, abdicating our charge to take care of others.