Thirty leaders. Twelve dilemmas. By four o’clock, not one of them had agreed on all twelve, and every single one of them believed they were the ethical person in the room. That, in one sentence, is why I ran a full day of ethical decision-making training at Exotic Group this week. On Tuesday, thirty leaders from one of Mauritius’s best-known fashion, retail and lifestyle groups gave me eight hours of their time to answer a single question: how do you decide well when the right answer is not obvious, and no one is watching?
We argued, we voted, we laughed, and at moments the room went completely quiet. This is my report from inside that room, and what it taught me about ethics in business.
Why a retail group chose ethics
When a company grows past a thousand people, something quietly changes: most decisions are no longer made at the top. They are made on shop floors, at supplier meetings, in back offices, by people who will never appear in a boardroom minute. Each of those decisions is small. Together, they are the brand.
That is why I have come to believe ethical decision-making training is not a compliance exercise. It is brand protection at the deepest level, and credit belongs to Exotic Group’s leadership for seeing it that way. They did not ask me for a lecture on right and wrong. They asked for a day that would make thirty people better at deciding.
Starting at the top of the world
We began, strangely enough, on Mount Everest. The year before his historic 1953 summit, Edmund Hillary attempted the mountain and failed. On his way down, he reportedly turned and shouted that he would return and conquer it, because the mountain could not grow, but he could.
I opened with that story because it holds the day’s first truth: in every difficult situation, the situation is the mountain. It will not change. You are the variable. Everything that followed, the clay models of leadership built in silence, the debates on whether leaders are born or made, rested on that foundation.
Twelve dilemmas and the grey zone
The heart of the day was twelve real workplace dilemmas: an unattended pay slip, a colleague’s idea credited to you, a verbal agreement undercut by a cheaper offer, an expensive pen found in an airport lounge, a supplier’s generous gift. For each, the room voted first, hands up, before anyone spoke. Then we argued.
The splits were where the learning lived. The hardest choices, as the ethicist Rushworth Kidder taught, are not right versus wrong. They are right versus right: truth against loyalty, the individual against the team, justice against mercy. Both sides are right, which is exactly why it hurts, and exactly where leaders earn their salary.
One moment stays with me, and I share it as a composite, blended from several voices, because what is said in my training rooms stays there. During the dilemma of the found pen, a participant said, roughly: “If I keep it, nobody loses anything. Except me.” The room went quiet for a moment. Nobody had mentioned the last two words before.
Thirty leaders disagreed all day, and every one of them believed they were the ethical one in the room. That is exactly why ethics needs tools, not opinions.
The neuroscience in the room
Midway through the morning we looked at the machinery behind all of this. As Daniel Kahneman showed in Thinking, Fast and Slow, the brain runs at two speeds: a fast, automatic, emotional system that grabs shortcuts under stress, and a slow, rational system that is accurate but lazy. Ethics rarely fails because people are bad. It fails because brains are rushed.
Which is why I told the room that everything I teach in this space is really one thing: a way of becoming a three-second leader. The three-second leader has trained themselves to buy their brain three seconds between impulse and decision, because that narrow gap is where character actually operates. Miss the gap, and the shortcut decides for you. We also examined how good people drift: a small compromise becomes a habit, a habit becomes “how we do things here”, and sociologists call the result the normalisation of deviance. Nobody plans to cross a line. People drift towards it. Leadership is noticing the first step.
Before you read on, sit with three questions. When did you last make a decision you would be uncomfortable explaining aloud? Which small compromise in your workplace has quietly become normal? And what would change if you gave yourself three extra seconds before your next difficult call?
Five lenses and three ten-second tests
The afternoon gave the room its toolkit: the five classic ethical lenses, utilitarian, rights, justice and fairness, common good, and virtue, each with its own blind spot, because a leader should know the limits of every instrument they use. We added two pocket questions from Kant and Gandhi: what if everyone did the same thing, and can my conscience carry this?
And for the days when there is no time to philosophise, three ten-second tests. The sleep test: will I sleep in peace tonight? The mirror test: can I respect the person I see tomorrow morning? The front-page test: would I be comfortable reading about this decision in tomorrow’s newspaper? Fail any one, and the slow brain deserves a proper meeting before you act.
The quietest fifteen minutes of the day
We closed with the exercise I consider the most important of any programme I run. Fifteen minutes, in silence, each leader writing one page in their own hand: the leader I choose to be. Three values they will not trade under pressure. One behaviour they will change from the next morning. One sentence they want their team to say about them a year from now.
After eight loud, argumentative, energetic hours, the silence was the loudest part of the day. Every participant left with an MQA-approved certificate, a written code in their pocket, and, I hope, a slightly longer pause before their next difficult decision. My sincere thanks to Exotic Group’s leadership and HR team for trusting me with their people, and to thirty leaders who argued honestly, disagreed respectfully, and wrote bravely.
If you are considering ethical decision-making training for your own leadership team, or wondering what a day like this could surface in your organisation, I offer a free fifteen-minute consultation and we will take it from there. You may also enjoy my thoughts on corporate training in Mauritius and on leading with emotional intelligence.
