In our last lesson, we learned about the five principles of ethical intelligence and these principles suit us well for making everyday decisions. But sometimes the decisions we have in front of us are complex and require time, thought and analysis to reach the optimal ethical decision. In this lesson, you're going to learn about an eight step process for evaluating any ethical decision. Our prescriptive approach is more of a process oriented approach that a principles driven approach. Let's say we were making a decision about the type of mind we wanted to open up in a remote community. The choices under consideration include a strip mine, an underground mine that uses a lot of local labor, or an automated underground mind.

Each of these options differ in terms of the amount of local labor content, the capital costs, the impact on the environment, the return to the shareholders, and the risk of health and safety. Given the complexity of this decision, we're going to walk through a more formalize decision making process. Step one is to gather the facts. And these would include all of the pertinent facts for making a decision, including the ethical considerations if they're evident. Step two is to define the ethical issues. And this is often the hardest part, just identifying that there are ethical issues can be a challenge, as many of us do not think about ethics on a daily basis.

There could be environmental issues, labor content and pay issues, health and safety issues, there could be a number of issues to consider in a significant decision like this one that have ethical considerations. Thirdly, identify the affected parties. And when we have a decision that has multiple stakeholders, including those that are directly and indirectly affected, often we'll find that ethics have a role to play. And so in this situation, there are obviously the managers and the shareholders. But there's also the local community, the wildlife authority, the landowners. All of those people have ethical stake in the mind that's being developed.

Step number four is to identify the consequences of the decision. What impact will our decision have on each one of those affected parties that we identified in the third step, each alternative will favorably or unfavorably impact each stakeholder identified fifthly identify the obligations. obligations may be established by law regulations, accounting rules, but often, we also need to consider social contracts and basic human rights as well when we go about making decisions. Step number six is to consider your character and integrity. We need to think individually and collectively about the level of integrity that we want to protect. reputational risk is one of the most significant risks facing most organizations.

Today, and it's a risk that was less important before we had a world of social media. Despite this mind being in a remote community where few are likely to ever visit, how do we want this mind perceived ethics is doing the right thing, even when no one is looking. Step number seven is to think creatively about all the potential actions and decisions that we could make to get as many potential solutions on the table as possible. If your decision is to accept or not accept, that's a rather limiting perspective of the options available and more likely to have adverse consequences on one or more of the affected parties. So some ideas for creating options include temporarily eliminating the ideal solution to force analysis of other options. Or perhaps you might send up a sounding board to evaluate all the things that could go wrong by making a decision.

In other words, the devil's advocate Perhaps you even try consciously identifying the opportunity cost of making the decision. In other words, by making this decision, what are we having to risk or give up? The eighth and final step in the prescriptive approach is to check your gut. For many of us the gut is the most common method we use to identify we have an ethical issue and to make a decision. However, in doing so, we often tend to skip the previous seven steps. And in fact, this should be the last step of the process.

Because here's where emotional intelligence is equally important to where ethical intelligence, because we want to empathetically anticipate how the decision will be received by the various affected parties. In our next lesson, we're going to demonstrate the two ethical decision making approaches in practice. See you there.