Let’s say you’re a system administrator, and the CEO comes to you and says he wants you to try to hack into a competitor’s email system. Let’s also say you don’t particularly want to go to prison, nor do you want the CEO to fire you. What do you do?…
By Don Tennant
ITBusinessEdge
(2015/09/01)
Read the full articleI recently had the opportunity to discuss that scenario during a fascinating conversation about “intelligent disobedience” with Ira Chaleff, a consultant in the field of “followership” studies and author of Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told To Do Is Wrong.
To kick off the discussion, Chaleff explained the term this way:
Intelligent disobedience is when you are getting instructions or orders from your chain of command, and you know that the order, if executed the way you’re being asked to, will have a harmful result
As for the hacking scenario I presented to Chaleff, he stressed that in the moment, the pressures on the individual are tremendous…
But his advice for handling the situation seems sound: “The first thing they have to do is deal with their own internal mindset… and balance the short-term risk with the long-term risk, and stabilize themselves in that moment…”
That’s when you need to be able to say, ‘No,’ and if possible, say, ‘Here’s an alternate way of doing this that can get you close to where you want to go, without the risk you’re going to encounter by doing it the way you’re asking me to do it.’
Chaleff then turned to the analogy of training guide dogs for the blind —the analogy that inspired his book…
Chaleff went on to point out that the nature of the IT profession is such that “educating upward” becomes a critical skill in this context… and explained that at its core, the issue is one of risk management…
… and wrapped up the conversation by providing a sobering example of why that’s particularly important in the IT profession…
… if there’s a culture that dissuades individuals from speaking up and dissenting when necessary, you are at risk, and your company is at risk…
We have to understand that we really do need to make the locus of accountability ourselves. We can never say: I just did what I was told to do.“
Why IT Pros Need to Accept the Premise of ‘Intelligent Disobedience’
2015 © Ira Chaleff Publications
