CHAPTER 9
An Oath of Ethics for Learning and Development Professionals
Written fragments of the Hippocratic Oath date to 275 AD, and the concept was circulating in society for hundreds of years before that. The modern version, only 341 words long, continues to shape the medical profession we know today. It is used during medical graduation ceremonies, referenced in television shows and pop culture, and has been written into medical laws and regulations around the world. As a collection of simple principles to guide a profession, it has proven both enduring and useful.
As learning and development professionals, we need an oath of our own. Too often, our profession is misunderstood, misaligned, and misused by our organizations. This has been allowed because of a void that we have left open for too long at the center of our work. We have highly skilled wizards in our community today, colleagues capable of creating polished deliverables for virtually any subject you can imagine. But those are only our means. We have to decide, together, to what ends those means should be applied.
IN THIS CHAPTER:
Explain why we need an oath of ethics as L&D professionals
Describe how to spread and reinforce a consistent oath of ethics in the L&D community
Apply five key principles from the oath of ethics to your daily work
What does it mean to be a good learning and development professional? If it’s defined only as someone who takes content and makes it looks pretty or facilitates killer discussion sessions or efficiently manages learning programs and curriculums, we are never going to reach the transformative potential of our craft. This chapter will explore a potential oath of ethics for our profession, along with practical applications of the oath in realistic learning and development scenarios.
A Proposed Oath of Ethics
We have the skills and position to help today’s world change for the better, but to reach those lofty aims, we need to be more than simply what we do. We need articulated values to unite us as a profession and drive us forward through the hard conversations and inevitable dilemmas to come. We need an L&D Oath of Ethics.
A PROPOSED OATH OF ETHICS:
• I will only use learning and development to pursue real and meaningful improvements, while consuming the fewest resources possible.
• I will treat my audience members how I would want to be treated.
• I will use every project as an opportunity to reduce inequity and promote inclusive growth.
• I will remove unnecessary barriers to learning and strive for universal accessibility.
• I will lead by example in my organization and community.
Let’s examine situations that all TD professionals experience and how the oath of ethics would come into play for each.
SCENARIO 1
You have been assigned to develop your company’s approach to required sexual harassment training. The law requires that the course last at least two hours, and you will need to deploy the course as a self-paced online tutorial to reach the full required audience by the legally required deadline. What would you do?
In these externally mandated situations, it may be tempting to focus on finding content and filling time. But it would be falling short of the oath to only pursue real and meaningful improvements. Instead, you should work with your SMEs and your community to identify real behavioral needs for your audience members. You might uncover a desire for bystander intervention training, for example. Or you might discover that your organization really needs an improved reporting mechanism to escalate concerns, or that your leaders need to be better prepared to respond to those reports. Instead of filling a course with obvious definitions and scenarios, we have to take time to understand our audience and identify what they really need from us. Then we can create training that makes a real difference.
Principle 1
I will only use learning and development to pursue real and meaningful improvements, while consuming the fewest resources possible.
Utilitarianism was first used as a formal term in the early 19th century by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It was later advanced and refined by John Stuart Mill (2015), but it’s a very old idea in the study of ethics. Simply put, an action is “good” if it is useful. Doesn’t that sound like a good rule of thumb for learning and development?
Bentham and Mill were hedonists, so they defined usefulness in terms of pleasure and pain. An act was good if it maximized pleasure and minimized pain. More technically, an act was good if its net utility (the pleasure it would create, minus any pain it would create) was greater than the net utility of any other choices available to the actor at the time.
For our modern professional purposes, we will take a return on investment approach to usefulness. Our goal must be to maximize the behavioral benefits of each L&D initiative, while minimizing the cost of each project in time, money, and resources.
To put it in old ethical terms, we must ensure our end justifies our means.
How to Maximize Benefit
When we put out a long course that makes a subject matter expert happy but does no real good for our organization or our audience members, we are falling short. When asked to tackle a new project, we should all feel empowered and obliged to ask our stakeholders: “How does this make our world (or our organization) better?”
If it doesn’t make the organization better, or if the benefit is too minor or theoretical to warrant real investment, we should say no. That might mean working harder to find new objectives that make a real difference and satisfy your stakeholders, but that extra work is worth the effort. In my book, Fully Compliant: Compliance Training to Change Behavior, I call this opportunistic analysis (Waugh 2019). It’s the key to moving a project from a “check the box” exercise to a meaningful, ethical L&D experience.
How to Minimize Cost
If we are judging ourselves on the net good we create, we have to focus just as much on reducing the cost of our programs as we do on maximizing our benefits. If you can accomplish a worthy objective in 15 minutes, it would be a waste of time to tackle the same objective in an hour. That isn’t just inefficient—by the proposed oath, it would be unethical.
Everything we do in life has an associated cost. Driving to work, for example, pollutes the environment, wastes our time, and burns through our money. And yet, for most of us, the good of keeping a job and connecting with our colleagues outweighs those costs. If you live close enough to walk to the office, on the other hand, you could begin to form an ethical argument that driving to work is “wrong.” You would achieve the same benefits by walking to work (plus additional health benefits), with fewer overall costs. The net good of walking to the office would be higher, making it the best available action. To a good utilitarian, walking to work would be the right thing to do.
As we apply this principle to our daily work, it’s important that we don’t define costs too narrowly. There are many direct and indirect costs associated with modern talent development programs, which means we have many opportunities to cut costs and maximize our net good (Table 9-1).
Table 9-1. Sources of Direct and Indirect Costs for L&D
Audience Time | This is the most precious commodity we manage. Our organizations are busy; we owe it to our colleagues to keep every L&D experience as brief as possible. |
L&D and SME Time | We should be careful which projects we take on and manage our workload efficiently to get the largest possible net gain from our finite resources. |
Financial Costs | L&D budgets usually aren’t the largest in an organization, but they are still worth managing carefully. In pursuit of our goals, we have an ethical responsibility to spend no more money than necessary. |
Environmental Harm | Printing user guides is an obvious example of environmental harm. We’ve all seen old, unused guides gathering dust on our office shelves. If we can accomplish the same objectives while producing less waste (e.g., using electronic user guides), we are obliged to conserve those resources. |
SCENARIO 2
A stakeholder tells you he has a $60,000 budget and wants an online refresher tutorial for his team. In your analysis, you notice that there are fewer than 100 colleagues involved, and they only need about 25 minutes of content. Because of changing systems and processes, all the content will have to be redesigned next year. What would you do?
Instead of investing $60,000 in an online course this year and spending the same amount next year to rebuild it, a lower-cost approach would be facilitating live virtual sessions for this relatively small audience. The stakeholder may have asked for a tutorial, but it’s worth discussing a live alternative if you have capacity to host it. Spending $60,000 on a tutorial would violate the oath if a free virtual session would achieve the same results.
Principle 2
I will treat my audience members how I would want to be treated.
The often referenced “Golden Rule” appears in the Christian Bible as, “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). However, the idea is not unique to Christianity, and in fact predates the Book of Matthew by at least 600 years. Similar concepts can be found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and in the work of Confucius in the sixth century BC. Obviously, the idea has staying power, but it also has some limitations.
For example, if you are an avid military historian, you might get quite excited about an eight-hour symposium on an obscure battle from World War I. But that does not mean you are justified in requiring all of your colleagues to endure the same symposium. Just because you’d want it done unto you, there is no reason to believe they’d all want it done unto them.
Unfortunately, misapplication of the golden rule is a daily reality in our profession. “Of course, they can learn this way,” a SME might argue for a bad, content-heavy program. “It’s how I learned.” Other stakeholders may argue for more and more courses on the grounds that they find the details interesting and important, implying that nonexperts should see value in it too.
Later philosophers, most notably Immanuel Kant, tried to tweak the golden rule to make it more resilient to such misuse. Kant called his version the Supreme Categorical Imperative: Never act for any reason that you wouldn’t wish to become a universal law (Kant et al. 2020).
Taking this example back to learning and development, we should think of each project as a precedent for others to follow. If we launch a boring, four-hour lecture on a topic we deem to be worthy and important, we are endorsing the universal law that anyone should feel justified in mandating long, boring courses provided they think their content is worthy and important. Under that universal law, you and your colleagues would be subjected to a lot of bad L&D experiences.
So, here’s a version of the supreme categorical imperative: Treat your audience how you would want to be treated if you had no special interest or expertise in the subject.
Be honest here. If you had no special interest or expertise, you would want every course to be as short and relevant as possible. You would want it to be not too difficult, but not insultingly easy either. You would want it to be honest and transparent in its design, with clear expectations. You would want the program’s outcomes for success or failure to be fair, and not too severe. And you would probably want a choice of how to participate, or whether to participate at all.
These are the kinds of universal laws we would want other talent development professionals to follow for us. Thus, we should commit to follow them ourselves.
SCENARIO 3
You are working on a cybersecurity project, and one of your stakeholders would like to do a fake phishing campaign to identify vulnerable colleagues for added training. Another stakeholder is afraid that could be seen as manipulative and might offend colleagues who feel deceived by the exercise. What would you do?
The dubious colleague is right to have concerns, but it could also be a useful learning tool if executed with empathy. Think of what you would want if such a program were targeted at you:
• Simple, transparent expectations for how the campaign will work and what you are supposed to do when you receive a suspicious email
• A chance to practice before the campaign
• Clear and respectful feedback
• The opportunity to try again if you fail
All these things will help ensure the campaign is received as an interesting opportunity to practice and improve, not as a sneaky means to entrap and chastise our peers. We should treat the audience with the same respect we would want shown to ourselves.
Principle 3
I will use every project as an opportunity to reduce inequity and promote inclusive growth.
As L&D professionals, our job is to take the resources our organization has today and turn them into the resources our organization will want and need tomorrow. If we hope to succeed in that endeavor, we need the broadest possible pool of talent. We must ensure that every single colleague is given a fair, equitable chance to learn, grow, and succeed. Anything less would fail our organization’s long-term needs and contradict the oath.
Sadly, equitable growth is not a given. Our organizations reflect our broader societies, and we still have serious issues to work through regarding our approach to race, gender, sexual orientation, and other dimensions of traditional oppression. Whether we work in the corporate world, government, or higher education, the people who get ahead tend to act like the people who have gotten ahead in the past. They tend to talk and look like them too.
In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that “out of the chief executives running America’s top 500 companies, just 1 percent, or four, are Black” (Chen 2020). A similar review by the New York Times in 2015 of America’s top 1,500 companies found that there were more CEOs named John than there were women CEOs of any name (Wolfers 2015). And gender and race are just two of many ways our colleagues can be held back from their potential by discriminatory or harmful policies and practice.
That’s not just unfair—it’s bad for business. The narrower our net of potential high performers, the fewer opportunities we have to find and develop the missing pieces we need. Instead of trying to train a small percentage of people to do everything, inclusivity gives us a chance to support and grow the innate skills and abilities that exist across our diverse communities, leveling up individual careers and evolving our business in the process.
But achieving real inclusive growth will take more than a single diversity and inclusion course. In a global environment in which inequity is still rife, every project we take on is either fighting inequity or allowing it to continue.
Whatever the subject, whoever the audience, we must ask ourselves: How will this project confront existing inequity and promote inclusive growth?
THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS TO EQUITY
If we hope to have a real impact, we must listen to a broader set of stakeholders and be continuously willing to adapt. We need more diversity in our leadership teams, within the learning and development function, and in every stage of our projects, but real equity is more than numbers in a column. If our teams aren’t willing to listen, change, and grow, any efforts to increase diversity are, at best, meaningless. At worst, they could promote assimilation and perpetuate harmful policy. Instead, we must remain humble and focus on how we can change what we have done in the past to work better for everyone. We aren’t doing anyone a favor when we promote a diverse colleague or add a diversity component to a development program; we are simply giving our organization the opportunity it needs to evolve and survive.
To this end, L&D professionals should take principle 3 one step further and implement a holistic approach to our work: We must use every course and project as an opportunity to fight inequity, in all its forms.
Leadership Development
Inclusion skills should not be tacked on to leadership development programs as an extra lesson. They should be woven through every objective as a key part of what it means to be a leader. It’s also important to ensure the participant selection process is equitable to build a diverse pool of future leaders.
Agile Project Management
Often, our organizations fail to benefit from diverse perspectives because they can’t adapt quickly to feedback that challenges the status quo. If you have a course on Agile project management, add a project involving a case study based on fixing an internal process in response to feedback from a diversity and inclusion survey. Participants can practice their new skills and learn to think of inclusion as something concrete, like any other business deliverable.
Communications Training
There are well-documented gaps in how different races and genders are perceived in the workplace. Training on communication and personality styles too often reinforces this problem, placing emphasis on adjusting the speaker’s style to better fit the expectations of the listener. Instead, focus at least as much time on training listeners to recognize and avoid potential bias in their perception.
SCENARIO 4
You work for a large social media company that has just invested in a brand-new suite of AI-powered software development tools. You’ve been asked to create an AI development curriculum to ensure all your coders can make the most of the new tools. What would you do?
This is a perfect opportunity to broaden a traditional skills program with a strong focus on equity. Prejudice and bias in machine learning algorithms are well documented (Buranyi 2018). Adding that thread to your curriculum can create interesting scenarios that engage your audience, while also building real skills that acknowledge the limitations of AI and its potential blind spots. Such training could have a more long-lasting impact than a traditional IT skills course, decreasing inequities in your corporate culture and in the applications your company launches to the world.
Principle 4
I will remove unnecessary barriers to learning and strive for universal accessibility.
When we design learning tools and development programs, we have an ethical obligation to ensure those resources are available to everyone.
That might mean translating content for audience members who are more capable of learning in their native languages. It may mean making some online training and tools available as in-person learning for those who are too often ignored or neglected by the digital divide. It also means planning to ensure that individuals with disabilities can access and fully benefit from the experiences we create.
Captioning online videos is a good first step, but true universal accessibility requires us to rethink the fundamental ways we design and deliver content. For example, instead of an online multimedia course with accessibility features that were added during publishing, some individuals with disabilities may prefer an alternative method of delivery, such as a plain text document or an MP3 podcast. By designing those resources with the intended audience in mind from the start, you can create a much more engaging and effective experience.
As an added benefit, the alternative delivery formats we create offer more freedom for anyone to choose how they want to learn. It may also allow you to extend the reach of your content into new communication channels, like video boards in lobbies that play without sound.
Universal accessibility investment doesn’t only benefit a few; it makes everything we offer more useful to everyone.
SCENARIO 5
Imagine you routinely host a four-hour onboarding session for new hires. One day, a participant arrives who is deaf. What would you do?
If you aren’t prepared for this situation in advance, it may be almost impossible to welcome this colleague effectively. That’s why it is so important to bake universal accessibility into every project from the start. If we consider all potential needs, we can plan the tools and resources necessary for equitable access.
For example, you could make sure you know how to turn closed captioning on for your PowerPoint deck and have a sign language interpreter on call if needed. You could also create some components for the session that are less dependent on speaking and listening, which could add welcome variety to the experience and benefit other members of your audience too.
Principle 5
I will lead by example in my organization and community.
NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, amid frequent criticisms of his off-court behavior in the 1990s, famously proclaimed, “I am not a role model.” As learning and development professionals, we can’t afford to use the same excuse.
Regardless of our position in the organization, we must accept that learning and development is always a leadership role. We took on that responsibility when we joined a field that purports to help others improve. People expect us to have already improved ourselves.
The behaviors we model in our daily work are at least as important to our organizations as the content we write and the programs we develop. At a minimum, we should know and follow all applicable policies, processes, and legal requirements. We should also be honest and transparent, and own our mistakes when they happen. Finally, we should model the ancient ethical concept that Aristotle called the “Golden Mean.”
Aristotle held that the right course of action is usually the moderate course of action between two extremes (Aristotle and Beresford 2020). In our profession, that balance is extremely important: We must be positive, solution-focused, and customer-service-oriented to succeed in our work. However, we must also be willing to point out flaws in an organization and stand up for our audience when a project isn’t right.
We must be both kind and courageous, flexible and consistent, responsive and strategic. We must be willing to say yes, and able to say no.
The oath of ethics should help us strike that balance more confidently and consistently. If we all agree on the rules that govern our profession, we can all take strength from that commitment. It gives us a framework for knowing when to say no, and a shared vocabulary to explain why. It allows us to debate our concerns on shared terms and reach better solutions together. It helps us lead by example, every time.
“I took an oath of ethics,” we can explain to our stakeholders during difficult conversations. “I have to do what I know is right.”
How Should We Use an Oath of Ethics?
The more often we use the oath, the more powerful it will become. Adapt the oath as needed to fit your context, and then consider using it during:
• Graduation or orientation ceremonies for degree programs in talent development, corporate development, or instructional design
• Interviews for talent management roles—share the oath in advance and ask each candidate to tell you about a time in their career when they applied one or more of the principles to deliver an ethical result
• Team meetings and one-on-ones to help prioritize work, troubleshoot stakeholder requests, and build internal consensus
• Lessons-learned meetings to spot and explain opportunities for improvement
If we want the oath to help brand our profession and expand our potential, we have to share it often and follow it always.
You can find a copy of the proposed Oath of Ethics for TD Professionals on this handbook’s website at ATDHandbook3.org. How would you change it? What would you add?
Final Thoughts
This oath draws on weighty and complex themes—including equity, inclusion, and accessibility—that warrant far more discussion than possible in a single chapter. I don’t have all the answers on these subjects. Often, I don’t even know the right questions. However, I did not want to exclude an important subject only for the sake of my own insecurity. Instead, I offer this oath as a humble draft.
You might wonder who am I to write an oath of ethics for our profession? That’s a very fair question. My aim is to spark discussion and allow individuals with more expertise and intelligence than me to refine, expand, and improve the approach with time.
The Hippocratic Oath has changed often in response to shifts in society, technology, and individual expectations; I hope the learning and development community will change this oath too. It should be yours, not mine.
About the Author
Travis Waugh is the author of Fully Compliant: Compliance Training to Change Behavior (ATD Press). He studied English and philosophy at Ohio State University before earning a master’s degree in instructional technology from Georgia State University. He has nearly 15 years of experience working in talent development, including positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University, and American Electric Power. He now works for Tech Data, one of the world’s largest technology distributors, as their global manager for ethics and compliance policy, training, and communication. He is a frequent conference speaker on subjects including behavioral learning design, instructional technology, and behavior-driven compliance training. He lives with his family in York, England.
References
Aristotle, and A. Beresford. 2020. The Nicomachean Ethics. New York: Penguin Classics.
Buranyi, S. 2018. “Rise of the Racist Robots—How AI Is Learning All Our Worst Impulses.” Guardian, February 14. theguardian.com/inequality/2017/aug/08/rise-of-the-racist-robots-how-ai-is-learning-all-our-worst-impulses.
Chen, T. 2020. “Why Are There Still So Few Black CEOs?” Wall Street Journal, September 28. wsj.com/articles/why-are-there-still-so-few-black-ceos-11601302601.
Kant, I., R. Stern, C. Bennett, and J. Saunders. 2020. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Oxford World’s Classics). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mill, J.S., M. Philp, and F. Rosen. 2015. On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays (Oxford World’s Classics), 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Waugh, T. 2019. Fully Compliant: Compliance Training to Change Behavior. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.
Wolfers, J. 2015. “Fewer Women Run Big Companies Than Men Named John.” New York Times, March 2. nytimes.com/2015/03/03/upshot/fewer-women-run-big-companies-than-men-named-john.html.
Recommended Resources
Cathcart, T., and D. Klein. 2008. Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes. New York: Penguin Books.
Kahneman, D. 2013. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kendi, I.X. 2019. How To Be an Antiracist. New York: One World.
Shafik, M. 2021. What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Watnik, R.-L. 2021. “Operationalize a Code of Ethics.” TD at Work. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.
Waugh, T. 2019. Fully Compliant: Compliance Training to Change Behavior. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.