Society and business is getting more and more complicated, and more unpredictable. As a result more ethical conflicts are arising in business. The main challenge for businesses has to do with gray area decision making, not to do with the legality itself, but with ethical choices made in the course of business.

Many businesses do not have a safeguard process to mitigate or eliminate any errors in ethical decision making. As a result businesses are caught out by the public, customers, government regulators or key partners about these questionable choices made by them. There are many business dilemmas being confronted by decision makers, with very complex issues at stake, such as: Integrity, fraud, cover-ups, security, privacy, promise keeping, business blackmail, manipulation or environmental responsibility. And these are just some that are affecting businesses today.

Many of the business conflicts, dilemmas, or issues are of ethical origin. And unfortunately, most decision makers are taking the wrong ethical approach. The problem stems in two folds.

One is that the people who need to be regulatory compliant in ethics in certain professions, by taking a course every three years, are not being serviced in a practical way by these course providers. Their courses are the same from year to year. Their content is more theoretical based, rather than practical based. These courses are generic in nature. Not specific to any industry, to any contemporary issues, dilemmas, or cases. At the end of these ethical courses, the professional receives his or her certification that they are up to date with ethics. And that is the main reason why these professionals take these courses in the first place. To satisfy the compliance of the industry or the association, no more.

The other problem stemming is that when the non-vocational courses are tailor made by consultants or companies, they are based on values, and not necessarily based on competence in ethical decision making. These generic values taught, such as: Fairness, Responsibility, Honesty, Respect, Countibility, etc are great for employee conflict resolution and harmony in the workplace, but do little with complex decision making, dilemmas or issues confronted by businesses. The reason is that these abstract qualities mean different things to different people, to customers, cultures, ethic groups, nationalities, and even with the different generation types.