Decisions - especially ones made in rapidly changing, uncertain business environments - demand a balance of intuition and logic. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink referred to it as thin slicing... the art and science of thinking without thinking.
In also demands a level of attunement and trust in your inner voice that calls for a pretty high level of self-awareness. Without that the signals come and go and you are left standing still.
Why bother? It is too easy for soft skills to be dismissed as too much woo-woo. Judgment of that nature indicates that the dots just are just not being connected.
In decision-making and in ethics, self-awareness is the foundation for seeing the context with the widest and clearest lens possible, the underlying forces impacting direction, the web of people who are affected, and the dynamic in its entirety. For someone with a high level of awareness, the map is before them at all times.
Areas of power and turf overlaps are clear and recognized along with what is driving the division. Reality has a sharper and clearer focus. The invisible forces that drive temptation no longer escape detection. You know when you are leading yourself into temptation and you know there are alternatives to choose from. You are not immune to making mistakes; you know why you made them. This is learning that can be applied and it is much less painful than repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
Ethical breaches demonstrated by Enron, WorldCom are bigger, more complex examples of the same kind of behaviour seen when CEO's or executives deceive boards on uncomfortable truths. In The Five Temptations of a CEO Patrick Lencioni named "the desire to protect the status of career, the desire to be popular, the need to achieve certainty - make correct decisions, the desire for harmony and the desire for invulnerability" as the pit traps for executive success. You will note that every single one of them is also a pit trap for ethical breaches.
Clearly there is more to resolving the situation than just becoming more aware. Systems, procedures and totally outmoded business models hold a part of the responsibility. Obviously these can not be addressed until they are seen, noticed and the connection to results has been made.
Personally and professionally, it starts with awareness. Awareness is the information-gathering stage, and it typically begins when you notice something is seriously wrong with the picture-either within you or in the environment. Once you notice, you simultaneously open a window to question and understand. Questions reveal understanding and understanding brings clarity. Clarity is looking through the window defogged by assumption, desire, or need.
In gray zones, the advantage of being aware is even more magnified. Shades of gray can often have ethical and moral implications that you really want to know about. Not knowing about them can put you in the headlines or in jail. Without awareness, without being able to see what put you close to the delicate line, you cannot see the line; much less know when you are standing on it.
So what gets in the way of this clear-seeing awareness? The following:
Ego: The need to feel separate from others. Your entire self-identity is based on who you are in relation to others.
Misuse of Power: The desire to use the power of your position to serve yourself.
Righteousness: The need to be right all the time; rigidity.
Judgment: Too much judgment makes learning a risk-taking venture, and vulnerability a personal-safety issue rather than a springboard for strength.
Unconsciousness: Walking around in a fog, being unaware of what is going on around you.
Closed-mindedness: Not being receptive to information that informs who you are in that moment-and not wanting to know. Dr. Charles Ehin in an article in Baseline named seven indicators signalling when an executive is out of touch. All of them source back to self-awareness. The indicators include being clear on the personal lenses and filters used to navigate life, reliance on tried and true principles that ignore the current reality, the degree to which you rely on doing what has worked before without noticing it is not anymore, and the inability to be aware of when change has happened. You can not change what you can not see.
Most of the indicators named, refer to the personal and professional need for validation from outside of themselves, rather than an intrinsic sense of security, identity and emotional self-knowledge.
Simple steps help shift self-awareness to higher levels. Asking yourself or noticing:
Where do I need to have control? Why?
What situations bring out an unexpected reaction from me? What is at the source of that reaction?
Did I say that out loud? Where did that come from? As you gain clarity, you will see when the cultural or social context is driving your personal integrity or whether you are holding the wheel.