‘I think we may have collided with a fishing boat, but I have just checked from the bridge wing, and the boat seems upright so I think we should be OK to resume our voyage.’
This was a call from a ship captain to his manager in the middle of the night.
The manager did not know how to respond to the captain, so he called his boss to consult what to do next.
The boss was in deep sleep when he received this call. Half asleep, he murmured, ‘Please ask the captain to turn the ship around and check if everyone on the boat is OK.’
Notice what he says and more importantly, what he didn’t. He didn’t say inspect the ship for any damage or make a logbook entry to confirm no loss of life.
When I first heard this story, the first thought that came to my mind was how most of us would respond to such situations. Here’s a pattern of reactions and the underlying (moral) meaning behind those reactions I have observed over the years.
𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 / 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴:
☑️ Who is responsible? Meaning – discipline and punish.
☑️ Can someone explain why this has happened? Meaning – Logical and rational explanation. 5 Whys.
☑️ Was there a lookout on the bridge? Was the officer properly rested? Meaning – verifying a hypothesis against evidence.
☑️ What should we do now? What is the solution? Meaning – Outcome matters. The end justifies the means.
☑️ Why didn’t they follow the rules. Meaning – there is a universal truth (a process or a rule) that can determine what is right and wrong.
☑️ Do the right thing. Meaning – there is such a thing as right or wrong regardless of the cultural and social context.
☑️ Incompetent people, send them back to the school. Meaning – the brain needs rewiring so that people can make better decisions.
What is common across all these responses is an urge to reduce human beings into problems to be controlled and hazards to be managed. So ingrained is this ethos in many of us that we cannot imagine an alternative reality.
Now let’s come back to observe the first question from this boss in the middle of the night who asked, ‘Is everyone on the boat OK?’
His first concern was not recording, measuring, explaining, analysing, retraining, firing, or seeking an explanation of the event. His first concern was to check if everyone on the fishing boat was alive and safe.
And what is most interesting. That first question came automatically after being woken up from deep sleep. It was an unconscious reaction.
It was his ethos.
Your first (unconscious) reaction says everything about your ethos because that is where you get your moral meaning.
