Look at the following list.  How many of these things do you do?

• make promises and commitments you do not keep
• show up late and/or not prepared for meetings, or don’t show up at all
• surreptitiously read documents, answer emails, work on other matters while in meetings
• fail to return telephone calls when promised
• lie to others including your spouse, children, partners, friends, organisations (including not being straight when it is merely uncomfortable to do so)
• steal (eg, keep the excess change mistakenly given at the checkout counter, or pad expense reports)
• fail to return found items even when the identity of the owner is clear
• use the internet for personal reasons while working, including shopping online. (1)

If you’re anything like me, you probably do most of them.  And regularly.

All of these appear tiny and insignificant in the grand scheme of things, right?  Like, what does it matter if I put off returning a phone call till tomorrow, even though I said I would call today?  What does it matter if I don’t attend that meeting because they never discuss things relevant to my area anyway?  And besides, even though I know I’m expected they didn’t send me an invite on Outlook.  So there!

Yet all of these actions, and thousands of others like them, are breaches of integrity.  And according to Landmark Education they are costing us enormously.  They are costing us in two major ways.  They:

• leave us not knowing ourselves as persons of integrity (ie, as whole and complete)
• shrink the “performance set” available to us: as individuals, groups, organisations and societies.

What’s worse is that we don’t even know they’re costing us because of an effect called the “veil of invisibility”.

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These points, and many other concepts — all wonderfully juicy and bracing – are set out in a paper on integrity introduced to me by “subhash” when I was discussing a new book on integrity by New York writer, Anna Bernasek.

The paper is called “Integrity: A Positive Model that incorporates the normative phenomena of Morality, Ethics and Legality.”

It was written by Werner H Erhard, the founder of est (the forerunner of Landmark Education), Michael C Jensen (Professor Emeritus of Harvard Business School) and Steve Zaffron (CEO, Vanto Group) in 2005-2009.  In characteristic Landmark fashion, it’s all worked out with beautiful rigour, and you can dip in and out of it and get something from each section.

To read the paper, go to the link at the end of the post and download a copy.  I’m also going to highlight a few points from it in this post and future posts.

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Honouring your word vs Keeping your word

Erhard et al distinguish integrity in a way that’s quite different from our common or garden conception.  They distinguish integrity as honouring one’s word.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  Yet one of the first things to get is that honouring one’s word is not the same as keeping one’s word, even though they’re often conflated.  Honouring your word means:

1. Keeping your word

AND, whenever you will not be keeping your word:

2. Just as soon as you become aware that you will not be keeping your word saying to everyone impacted:

• that you will be keeping your word, and
• that you will keep that word in the future, and by when, or that you won’t be keeping that word at all, and
• what you will do to deal with the impact on others of the failure to keep your word.

Distinguishing integrity as honouring your word, rather than keeping your word, has one huge advantage.  It makes available the possibility of 100% integrity.  That is, it is always possible to honour your word; it is not always possible to keep your word.  In fact, Erhard et al note that

a person who always keeps their word is almost certainly living a life that is too small.

Honouring one’s word is actually a whole other currency to keeping one’s word [my gloss], and this shows up for example in the paradoxical effect noted throughout the paper and the many studies referred to: ie, that honouring one’s word can create trust more quickly than keeping one’s word.

See for example, the discussion of the study by Bitner, Booms and Tetreault (1990) on page 28, and the case study of the famous Tylenol extortion crisis faced by Johnson & Johnson in 1982 on page 97.

Includes others’ expectations of us, but not ours of them

Integrity in the paper is defined as honouring one’s word, or, more precisely, one’s word, period. Thus,

integrity for a person is a matter of that person’s word.

Now, one’s word is also something we’re not used to thinking about closely.  Erhard et al distinguish six aspects of one’s word:

1. what you said
2. what you know
3. what is expected
4. what you say is so
5. what you say you stand for
6. moral, ethical and legal standards.

The aspects I want to concentrate on today are aspects 2 and 3.  Erhard et al posit that one’s word includes doing what you know there is to do (or not do), and what you are expected to do (or not do), even when this has not been explicitly expressed.

This means we are accountable as persons of integrity, as persons of our word, for the expectations that others have of us.  There is only one exception: where we have explicitly declined those expectations or made a counter-proposal.

And, as Erhard et al note, this is the case even though the reverse does not apply.  That is,

your word includes the unexpressed expectations of others unless you formally decline them; yet your unexpressed expectations are not the word of others.

In short, “you cannot hold others accountable for fulfilling your unexpressed expectations.”

Yes, there is a fundamental asymmetry here, and yes, as Erhard et al acknowledge, many people will baulk at “being obligated by expectations that have not been expressed explicitly, and certainly those about which one is unaware”; nevertheless, it is what’s required to be whole and complete as a person.

How do you like them apples?

More anon …

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To download a copy of the Erhard et al paper on integrity, click here.

Note

1. Erhard et al, p71