Ethical Culture

We sometimes hear colleagues making excuses for the decision they want to take. They try to dismiss the ethical side of the decision, preferring instead to emphasise how everyone else is doing it, or that no one will be worse off. These are called rationalisations and they need to be challenged.…

Insurance people have a lot on their radars nowadays. The wide range of rating factors and the increased variety of products are behind much of this. Not surprisingly, we start to apply filters to all this information. That however opens the door to an ethical problem called the self-serving bias.…

Hindsight is a complex thing when it comes to ethics. You may look back at something you’ve done and ask yourself: “what did I think I was doing?” Others may simply never see the ethical question hanging over what they were doing. In this toolkit, we explore what is called ethical fading.…

Ethical culture is influenced by patterns of behaviour. One pattern that firms want to support is optimism – it helps drive teams forward. At the same time, it also needs to be managed. If left unchecked, over-optimism can introduce ethical risk.…

Ethical culture is influenced by patterns of behaviour. One of the most powerful patterns found in business settings is ‘conformity’. In this toolkit, we look at what it is and how an insurer can address it.…