Next, the Contributors have their chance to provide any additional relevant information at the prodding of the Driver. If necessary, some in-person debate between the Contributors can happen at this point. Then, with all the data and opinions at their disposal, the Approver makes the call, and the Informed are told the verdict. After a decision is made, each participant must commit support out loud. It takes coordination, but it’s important to pull together all the consultants that have been involved in the decision.

• Ethical processes can help to improve accountability and it is hoped that, to the extent that it is possible for ethical processes to produce ethical outcomes, the substantive ethical quality of decisions will be enhanced.
• Using case studies to illustrate real-world situations, we’ve designed the online ethics course and live webinars to help you apply this framework with confidence.
• It takes coordination, but it’s important to pull together all the consultants that have been involved in the decision.
• However, efforts should be made to put them into action to the fullest extent possible under the circumstances and in our experience this is only possible with the support of senior administrators.
• After all, there is no tool or framework that will substitute acquired experience.
• They are also conscious in that they make the performing subject present to him/herself, not as an object, but as a subject.
• Formal mechanisms for reviewing decisions are needed in order to capture feedback from stakeholders on key decisions, and to resolve disputes and challenges.

A community will prosper when human beings espouse virtues to be attentive, be intelligent, and be reasonable and responsible without coercion. Envisioning business organizations as communities of persons engaging in cooperation is “more appropriate than seeing them as an aggregate of individuals united exclusively by contracts or [vested] interests” (Melé, 2012, p. 98). Lonergan himself would be the first to admit that none of this is easy. It takes perseverance, critical reflection and practice for us to become sensitive to the dynamics operating in our consciousness. Moreover, the personal challenge of sustaining intellectual and moral development and the seductive lure of competing ideologies present additional barriers to self-transcendence.

The Journey from Project-Centric to Product-Centric

With this more nuanced input, the person or group can tally up the responses and make the final decision, weighting each opinion appropriately. This process moves beyond an up/downvote and lets you sense what kind of ongoing support a choice will really have if it’s selected. As teams and companies grow, silos form, and different groups start doing things their own way.

Good pandemic planning requires reflection on values because science alone cannot tell us how to prepare for a public health crisis. The values identified in our ethical framework were based initially on previous research findings on ethics and SARS at the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics (JCB). This work was funded by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research grant in 2004 through 2006 and has led to several key publications on the ethical dimensions of SARS [14, 36–39]. Al., in their seminal British Medical Journal article begin to identify key ethical values that were of relevance during the SARS epidemic in Toronto. These values were then further articulated by our working group and adapted for the pandemic influenza planning context. Nevertheless, this is not to say that that a procedural engagement about the overall goals of a pandemic response would not benefit from using the ethical framework to guide and shape debate.

DACI Decision-Making

According to the Open Decision Framework, open decision making is transparent, inclusive, and customer-centric. This team sorted pros and cons into weighted categories to ultimately select Option 1. Answer any outstanding questions and assign action items and due dates to owners before ending the meeting. This is the one person who has the final say in approving the decision. Drivers, like Program Managers or other team members, ensure a decision is made but don’t necessarily influence the decision. This product team uses the DACI Decision Making Framework Play and Confluence to decide how to finalize requirements.

Transparency is a key ingredient to good decision-making at startups. When good decisions are executed, but lack top-down transparency, it can spark conflict and erode trust. Sometimes through the conversation you end up adding a Column C or D because new options or ideas emerge with different or fewer risks. As COO of Stripe, Claire Hughes Johnson law firm bookkeeping has developed a decision-making framework that has become a sort of shared decision-making compass for all members of the team, new and old. According to Johnson, you need to document concrete core tenets describing the way you work. The group then needs to either argue to convince the ones against it or be persuaded into changing options.

Optimizing team resources

Ethical processes can help to improve accountability and it is hoped that, to the extent that it is possible for ethical processes to produce ethical outcomes, the substantive ethical quality of decisions will be enhanced. Recognising, however, that ethical processes do not guarantee ethical outcomes, we have identified ten key ethical values to guide decision-making that address the substantive ethical dimensions of decision-making in this context. Not surprisingly, the literature on clinical ethics has little to say about disaster preparedness and how to make decisions about such things as triage under extraordinary circumstances. The ethics literature on bioterrorism and battle-field triage informed our thinking and called our attention to important issues such as the duty to care, reciprocity, equity and good stewardship [20–25]. Care ethics is rooted in relationships and in the need to listen and respond to individuals in their specific circumstances, rather than merely following rules or calculating utility.

It is important to distinguish between different types of ethical analyses in order to explain the approach that was taken to the development of the ethical framework discussed herein. Callahan and Jennings draw a useful distinction between applied ethics and critical ethics [7]. Whether or not an ethical framework is used to inform decision-making in a health care institution depends to a large extent on people in senior positions of an organisation seeing its relevance to the decision-making process. In part, this is dependant on how robust the framework is, but it also requires the willingness to frame (at least some) pandemic planning issues as normative in nature. The framework is divided into two distinct parts, and begins with the premise that planning decisions for a pandemic influenza outbreak ought to be 1) guided by ethical decision-making processes and 2) informed by ethical values.