Notes from IEEE IPCC99 Conference
New Orleans, Louisiana, September 7-10, 1999

Ethics in Action: A "No Talk" Workshop

"Damage Control in the Delta," "Some Disassembly Required," "Big Brother is Watching," and Seven Other Opportunities to Translate Values into Communication Products

Lori Allen, Metropolitan State College of Denver
Dan Voss, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Missiles and Fire Control, Orlando, FL

Session Description: This workshop focuses on translating ethical values into action. Teams of technical communicators choose a real-world scenario that calls for them to convert one of ten basic ethical values into a treatment for real communication products.

Handouts: For copies of the workshop materials, including the detailed scenarios, or for an electronic file or hard copy of the accompanying paper that was published in the Proceedings,"Use Your Fog Lights: Ten Values for Technical Communicators," by Allen and Voss, contact Dan Voss.

Ten Values

• True to its name, this "No Talk" workshop started with a handout summarizing ten core values in technical communication, which could be read in about 2 minutes. The ten values* are summarized as follows:
   
1. Honesty: Our duty to tell the truth. Honesty in technical communication means making our best effort to provide honest, clear, and accurate communication. It means neither falsifying, omitting, nor slanting information with the intent to deceive our audience. It means being candid in our intellectual and professional assessments, whether they be personnel evaluations, cost estimates, or research conclusions.
2. Legality: Our duty to obey the law. Legality in technical communication means abiding by our duty to follow the laws and regulations that govern our profession, including meeting all terms and obligations of legal contracts we undertake.
3. Privacy: Our duty to respect the rights of others. Privacy in technical communication means making every attempt to respect the rights of others. It means protecting the rights of both individuals and our employers in gathering and disseminating confidential information.
4. Quality: Our duty to provide quality products and services that will best serve the end user. In technical communication quality means defining and performing to standards that best serve the user's unique communication requirements.
5. Teamwork: Our duty to work together to meet mutual objectives. In technical communication, teamwork refers to the ability to work together effectively with clients, employers, coworkers, and even competitors to develop and produce quality communication products that meet user requirements.
6. Conflict of Interest: Our duty to be loyal and to observe fair play. As technical communicators, we must serve our clients and employers with integrity in a way that excludes considerations of personal advantage and promotes the interests of the company or client, as long as doing so does not violate the public good. We must conduct our professional duties in an equitable and even-handed manner.
7. Cultural Sensitivity: Our duty to reflect the growing diversity of the workplace in our technical communications. In technical communication, the value of cultural sensitivity demands tolerance, understanding, and freedom from prejudice. It means embracing diversity, respecting rather than fearing differences, and reflecting that respect not only in our products but in our personal and professional behavior as well. To do so represents more than a professional value, it is a commitment to defend our birthright as human beings.
8. Social Responsibility: Our duty to preserve and protect the public good. In the context of technical communication, social responsibility is our duty to behave responsibly and ethically in using and disseminating information that affects the welfare of the public. It encompasses both serving our user--meeting their need for quality communication product--and protecting our users. It is also maintaining vigilance and advocating responsible behavior within our places of employment.
9. Professional Growth: Our duty to maintain and develop our skills. As technical communicators, we aggressively pursue our own professional growth through self-development activities that keep pace with the latest advancements in our profession. Such activities include formal education, membership in professional associations, in-house training, on-the-job training, and professional networking. We seek and accept candid evaluations of our professional performance and use such feedback to define activities that will promote our professional development.
10. Advancing the Profession: Our duty to respect and assist our colleagues and enhance the reputation of our profession. As technical communicators, we have an obligation not only to pursue our own professional growth but also to assist our colleagues in their professional development and to work together to enhance the reputation of our profession.

• * Excerpted from Ethics in Technical Communication: Shades of Gray, Allen and Voss, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., copyright © 1997. All rights reserved.

Ten Scenarios

• The next step in the "no talk" workshop was another handout--this one requiring about 5 minutes for participants to read 10 short scenarios involving situations of ethical conflict in real-world technical communication settings. Each scenario called for a small group to develop a treatment plan for a highly specific communication product or products (e.g., a public relations damage control plan after an environmental disaster, a floor plan and equipment list for a high school career day exhibit on technical communication). The ten scenarios*, in brief, were as follows:
   
1. "Better Late than Never." A proposal manager wants to cover up the company's inability to meet the government's schedule in order to parley technical and cost discriminators into a contract win. The technical communicators must convince her that honesty is a better policy. Assignment is to storyboard the pitch that will convince her.
2. "Some Disassembly Required." An industrial-grade trash compactor has a distressing tendency to blow up in the face of technicians who are disassembling it for routine maintenance. Legality demands a warning be written for the documentation which is sufficiently explicit to serve safety, without destroying the product's marketability.
3. "Big Brother is Watching." Misuse of the company's e-mail system and other electronic resources has prompted management to conduct some electronic eavesdropping, which has sparked an outcry from employees who feel their privacy has been violated. The assignment is to come up with a preliminary draft of a new company policy governing use of electronic media for surveillance.
4. "Champagne Taste, Beer Pocketbook." A local entrepreneur wants the world when it comes to promotion for the grand opening of his new mini-mall, but falls short in the cash department. The trick is how, specifically, to give him maximum quality for his limited budget.
5. "Project Desert Garden." A multinational consortium is proposing to install an irrigation system in a desert country. The host nation wants a sizable portion of the economic benefit to occur within its borders, but its industrial capability is limited. The job is to draft a corporate letter of commitment that provides the requested industrial teamwork but in a manner which is realistic to the project and the country.
6. "Drawing the Line." Following a spate of incidents involving misuse of company time and equipment, a cross-disciplinary committee is assembled with the unenviable responsibility of drafting a new company policy on conflict of interest.
7. "Plan Your Future (in Miami)." A committee of technical communicators must display both project planning and cultural sensitivity in developing specific plans for a high school career day exhibit at an inner-city school in Miami.
8. "Damage Control in the Delta." Following a nasty chemical spill in the Mississippi delta, the Publications team for a large firm scrambles to mount a public relations campaign that will limit the negative impact upon the company's image while also serving its ethical commitment to social responsibility.
9. "S-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g the Training Dollar." A team of writers and graphic specialists must develop an equitable plan for professional development in the face of a 50% cut in the department's training budget.
10. "To Cert or Not to Cert..." Stepping onto controversial turf, a team of technical communicators is asked to help in advancing the profession by outlining a top-level plan on how to certify technical communicators, including the type of certification instrument(s) to be used and a specific plan for how to accommodate the wide range of disciplines supported by technical communicators, as well as the range of specialties within the profession.

• * Copyright © 1998, Lori Allen and Dan Voss. All rights reserved.

Workshop Results

• After a brief flurry of instruction and activity to shepherd participants into groups and guide them in selecting their scenarios, the presenters were pleasantly surprised to find they had little to do for the next 53 minutes. Each of the four groups was soon a beehive of discussion and activity. Participants were busily scribbling out hand-made visuals and word charts on easel notepads. At first, the presenters circulated and hovered, mother-hen-like, anxious to ensure that everybody was "on task." It soon became apparent that the "No Talk" workshop was going to be exactly that -- at least on the part of the presenters. Oddly, it was a little unnerving... but the more products began to emerge at the tables, the more gratifying it became!
   
• The teams selected Scenarios #3, 4, 6, and 8. A capsule summary of their efforts follows:
• Scenario #3: Privacy. The group did a good job of representing the stakeholders who comprised the committee in the scenarisenso, but they remained polarized and did not reach a consensus solution. Management took a hard line, insisting that all 5 surveillance measures listed in the scenario be applied to protect the corporation's interests and the employees' jobs. It did propose to protect personal privacy by contracting an outside security agency to conduct the sampling/searches. On the opposite side of the fence was the employee position, which was adamantly opposed to desk searches, hidden video cameras, and monitoring of phone calls; and reluctantly accepting monitoring of computer activity as long as the consequences of misuse were clearly announced in advance of the surveillance. The charts ran as follows:
   
• Chart #1A. Management Chart: Defining the Problem.
   
• Problems:
   
1. Employees conducting side businesses on company time and equipment
2. Downloading of inappropriate material from the Web
3. Disclosure of company proprietary information
• Analysis: the first 2 practices in effect steal labor and services from the company; the third hurts the company's ability to compete.
• The situation is serious: it threatens the existence of the corporation. No corporation means no jobs.
• This is our problem: both management and employees have a stake in the outcome.
• Chart #1B. Management Chart: Resolving the Problem.
   
• All 5 proposed surveillance measures and more must be taken to protect your job:
   
1. Monitor 100% of phone calls and e-mail; open U.S. mail as well
2. Conduct desk searches and computer checks on random sample basis
3. Install hidden video cameras.
• Personal privacy will be maintained: an outside contractor security company will do the sampling, and no personal information found in the process will be revealed.
• Chart #2. The Liberal Solution (Employee Reclama to Management's Proposed Solution):
   
1. Announce consequences of violations: termination, suspension, etc.
2. Threaten scrutiny of computer activity, but do not actually implement it unless the problem persists.
3. No desk searches
4. No hidden video cameras
5. No monitoring of phone calls.
• Note: The feeling amongst employees was that the searches and surveillance would constitute a violation of civil liberties which would bring the ACLU down upon the company. The presenters pointed out that all court decisions to date in the arena of e-mail privacy have found that the company owns the e-mail system and thus has the right to monitor it. The same would presumably hold true about the phone systems, the desks, etc.

• Scenario #4: Quality. The group created a logo for FunWorld featuring a blissful nuclears family which would serve as a motif for all promotional literature. Specific promotional techniques included:
   
• Flyers... "litter" the city with them (to which one wag in the audience drily observed: "In Newark, nobody would even notice.")
• Newspaper ads
• Radio spots on local stations 2 weeks ahead of grand opening, with voice-overs by "Entrepreneur Bob"
• Arrange interviews with local news teams (radio, newspapers, TV) and local politicians stressing Entrepreneur Bob's contribution to urban renewal in several previous inner-city FunWorld projects
and the economic and employment benefits the new amusement area would bring to Newark.
• Get some civic group to name Bob "Entrepreneur of the Year" and then plaster that all over the promotional literature.
• Budget:
   
• Paper ads: $4K
• Radio spots: $2K
• Flyer printing and distribution: $2K
• Posters (black on colored paper): $2K
• Balloons for first 500 kids (featuring the FunWorld family logo, naturally!): $0.5K
• Total: $9.5K*
• * To be taken with a grain of salt; the group freely acknowledged its lack of confidence in its pricing and estimating ability!

• Scenario #6: Conflict of Interest. The group recognized the need to avoid absolutes, but rather to limit the personal use of company resources using common sense and managerial judgment. It also saw the need to oversee employee "moonlighting" to avoid conflict with the company's interests, but also to give employees an avenue of appeal when overtime requirements conflict with personal commitments. The summary chart, entitled "Drawing the Line," established:
   
• Limit personal use of company resources (e.g., e-mail, phone, Web, copier).
• Prohibit visiting or downloading inappropriate Web sites
• Prohibit employees from performing work for another company (including their own outside enterprises) on company time or equipment (e.g., designing a Web page for your consulting company)
• Require management approval before employees can work a concurrent job in the same field (such as with a competitor)
• Provide 48 hours' notice of overtime as well as an avenue of appeal for employees if the OT creates a personal conflict or hardship
• "Any questions or conflicts will be mediated with the review board, which tries to balance the company's needs with those of the employees."

• Note: The groups that worked on Privacy and Conflict of Interest both converged rapidly on the importance of relying on management judgment and providing sufficient flexibility in the guidelines to allow that judgment to be exercised. This is the only viable path by which to navigate the myriad gray zones that pervade these subjects and to adjudicate individual cases with any measure of equity.

• Scenario #8: Social Responsibility. The "Damage Control in the Delta" Swat Team presented visuals outlining its plan of attack:
   
• Problem: Minimize negative public reaction to the chemical spill
• Audience:
   
• Evacuees
• Other locals
• Regulatory agencies
• Environmentalists
• People downstream
• Company employees
• Objectives
   
• Explain what happened and the immediate effects
• Outline the immediate remediation (containment) efforts
• Describe long-term preventive measures and monitoring to avoid recurrence
• Media
   
• Newspapers (interviews, press releases)
• Radio
• TV
• Flyers at evacuation shelters
• Web site
• Toll-free Hotline
• Specific messages (typical press release):
  
  Last night, an Acme chemical barge broke loose from its moorings, drifted downriver, and crashed into a bridge. The barge broke open, releasing 2,000 gallons of chemicals. There has been no loss of human life, but the immediate area was evacuated as a precaution.
  
  Sufficient quantities of the chemical were released to damage the fragile delta ecosystem, and there has been loss of animal life.
  
  Containment procedures are currently underway to limit the damage, and clean-up efforts are already being planned.
  
  Bottom line: For damage control on negative incidents of this nature, honesty is the best policy.

Editorial Comment

The presenters could not help but observe that not only did the four teams do a bang-up job of handling their ethical dilemmas, they also provided a textbook example of focused teamwork in our profession. It is hard to believe they accomplished as much as they did in just 53 minutes, but the output speaks for itself. To all, a job well done!