Over the past year, I have found myself reflecting a great deal on the ethical failures we see around us, and particularly on their consequences.
Corruption that operates like a hidden tax on ordinary people. Resources taken from the next generation before they have had any say in the matter. Institutions struggling to retain public trust. Workplaces where silence can feel safer than speaking. Communities becoming accustomed to what should trouble us. Young people watching closely to see whether the values we proclaim bear any resemblance to the way the world actually works.
These realities have surfaced repeatedly in my Let’s Talk Ethics reflections. Increasingly, though, I have come to think of them as things we encounter downstream.
Imagine living beside a polluted river. By the time the contaminated water reaches you, the consequences are real and immediate. People may already be sick. The water has to be treated, the damage contained, and those responsible identified and held accountable. Nobody would seriously suggest otherwise.
But if contaminants continue entering the river upstream, we have not solved the problem. We have simply become better at dealing with its consequences.
I have increasingly come to think about ethics in the same way.
We need accountability. We need functioning institutions, investigation and prosecution when laws are broken, and consequences for wrongdoing. We desperately need environments in which people can raise concerns without sacrificing their livelihoods, reputations or safety.
But if we want to change what keeps arriving downstream, we also have to be willing to travel up the river.
And that takes us somewhere less visible: to what is being formed long before the crisis arrives.
What are we building upstream?
When something matters, we generally understand that capability has to be built.
We educate, train, practise, coach, correct and repeat. We understand that competence develops over time. Yet when it comes to integrity, courage, ethical judgement and the responsible use of power, we can behave as though these capacities should simply be present when the moment demands them.
We expect the employee to speak up, the leader to resist pressure, the public servant to protect the public interest, the citizen to reject corruption and the young person to choose character over the shortcuts they see succeeding around them.
Those are reasonable expectations. But there is another question underneath them: what has been forming that person before the moment of choice arrives?
Most of us know the language of ethics. Be honest. Be fair. Don’t steal. Keep your word. Speak up when something is wrong.
Knowing is rarely the difficult part. The difficult part is holding onto those things when honesty costs you something; when fairness requires you to surrender an advantage; when speaking up places you outside the group; or when everyone around you has found a perfectly reasonable explanation for why, just this once, the line can move.
That is where ethics stops being something we agree with and becomes something we practise.
I have written before that integrity is not an emotion; it is a pattern. Patterns do not suddenly appear at the mouth of the river. They have been gathering upstream, one choice feeding the next.
The first compromise may feel uncomfortable. The fifth usually feels less so. Eventually, something that once required justification can simply become how things are done. Fortunately, the reverse is also true. Courage practised becomes easier to summon. Honesty repeated becomes something others learn they can rely on. Responsibility exercised consistently begins to influence what the people around us expect.
The small things were never really small. They are how we teach ourselves — and one another — what we are prepared to become.
Culture is taking notes
Formation does not happen only through formal teaching. Culture is being communicated all the time, often far more powerfully through what happens than through what is said.
We learn from what succeeds, what is rewarded, what is tolerated, what carries consequences and what does not. Children notice when adults say one thing and do another. People notice when rules bend for those with influence. Communities notice when dishonesty appears to pay. Employees notice what happens to the colleague who raises an uncomfortable concern.
But we notice the opposite too: the person who refuses the shortcut, the leader who admits a mistake, the parent who keeps a promise when it is inconvenient, the colleague who speaks when everyone else has chosen the safety of silence.
Culture is taking notes, even when leadership isn’t.
Over time, those signals accumulate. They begin to tell us what is normal here — in a family, a school, a workplace, a community, an institution or a country. The small decisions are not separate from culture. They are how culture is built.
Which is why waiting for the ethical test before worrying about ethical formation is waiting too long.
A crisis does not create character. Very often, it reveals what has been built — or what hasn’t.
The crisis may be dramatic. The building usually wasn’t. It happened through ordinary decisions on ordinary days, when nobody imagined those choices were preparing them for anything.
Until they were.
Looking in both directions
This question feels particularly relevant as South Africa approaches local government elections.
An election asks us to look in both directions along the river. We look downstream at what leadership has produced — at delivery and failure, the use of public resources, accountability and trust. We should. Holding those entrusted with public power accountable is part of the responsibility of citizenship.
But a vote also faces upstream.
It is one of the building blocks through which we say something about what should come next: what kind of leadership we are prepared to entrust with power, what conduct we are willing to reward, what standards we expect of public service and what kind of communities we hope to build.
There is an ethical responsibility inside that act. Not because any political party, candidate or government can build an ethical society for us. They cannot. But every time we entrust someone with power, we participate in what gets built.
And responsibility cannot simply be outsourced once the vote is cast.
We are entitled to demand integrity from public servants, courage from whistleblowers, character from our leaders and accountability from our institutions. But those legitimate demands do not remove the question that belongs to each of us:
What are we building?
Our part is exercised in the ordinary spaces in which we have influence: in our homes and workplaces, in what we model to young people, in what we challenge and what we let pass, in how we use whatever authority we have, and in the choices we make when nobody is likely to know the difference.
That is where my reflections over the past year have brought me.
We must keep dealing with what reaches us downstream. South Africa needs stronger accountability, not less of it. But accountability alone cannot build the alternative.
If we genuinely want different outcomes, we have to become as serious about formation as we are about failure; as interested in what makes courage possible as we are in celebrating it afterwards; and as deliberate about what we are building upstream as we are about responding to the damage downstream.
Because what we fail to build upstream, we eventually pay for downstream.
Ethics starts with me. It has to. But it grows when we stand together — when enough of us, in enough places, make enough of the right choices for integrity to stop feeling exceptional and begin to shape what we expect of one another again.
We will always need people willing to fight the fires.
But perhaps we can also build a world in which fewer fires need to be fought.
Because ethics is not born.
It is built.
Building what we hope to see
At Unashamedly Ethical, we believe a more ethical world requires more than calling out what has gone wrong. It requires deliberately investing in what can go right.
That is why our movement works through three pathways of impact. TRIBE invests in character while it is being formed in young people. Transformational Leadership On Demand (TLOD) develops leaders whose character and influence shape the people and cultures around them. Ethics in Action helps organisations deliberately build ethics into leadership, culture, decision-making and practice.
Around these pathways stands the wider Unashamedly Ethical movement — a lighthouse calling individuals and organisations towards integrity, courage and personal responsibility, and reminding us that none of us builds a more ethical world alone.
Join the movement. Sign the Ethical Commitment. Support the work. Help us build what we hope to see in the world.
Learn more, join the movement and support Unashamedly Ethical