Why Doing the Right Thing Is So Hard
Issue 220, July 10, 2025
Imagine that you live and work in a surveillance state—a place where things just happen with no explanation, people show up and disappear, everyone is being watched, everything is being reported, and no one can be trusted. Surveillance disintegrates trust, making people anxious, paranoid, and mistrustful. It creates a climate where fear overrides integrity and self-preservation stifles action. In Hamlet, Denmark was such a surveillance state, and no one was doing what was right.
While this may seem like an extreme example, many modern workplaces share troubling similarities with surveillance cultures with opaque decision-making from leadership, inconsistent policy enforcement, performance systems that reward results over process, and a lack of psychological safety to question unethical actions.
The result is a workplace where whistleblowing feels dangerous, asking questions feels risky, and doing the right thing feels like a lonely vigil. When this happens, the entire organization suffers. Innovation slows as employees play it safe, reputation risk increases due to unchallenged unethical behavior, engagement drops because employees can’t align personal values with professional expectations, and turnover spikes, especially among high performers and values-driven talent.
This type of workplace affects our behavior in several negative ways and an organizational infrastructure is eroded.
Self-Doubt. Constant monitoring—whether through digital tools, performance metrics, or managerial oversight—creates hypervisibility. People start doubting themselves, not just from fear of being caught doing wrong, but of being misunderstood while trying to do right.
Loss of Trust. In environments where everyone is watching and reporting on everyone else, trust dissolves. Employees withhold concerns, collaboration suffers, and ethical decision-making gives way to strategic silence. Surveillance makes everyone a watcher while being watched, ultimately forcing people to turn inward and second-guess everything, including themselves.
Decision Fatigue. The modern workplace demands thousands of micro-decisions daily. When the moral high ground is constantly in question—or conflicts with organizational incentives—ethical fatigue sets in. Eventually, people choose the easiest path rather than the one aligned with their values.
Social Pressure and Conformity. When biased behavior becomes normalized—whether through favoritism, exclusion, or misinformation—it spreads. People conform to avoid being the outsider, even when they know it’s wrong. The desire to fit in overrides moral judgment.
The Psychology of Not Doing the Right Thing
Our behavior is led by powerful psychological impulses. We often know what’s right. Somewhere in our minds—maybe a glimmer, maybe a true gut feeling—we recognize the ethical path forward. For example, we may be natural problem solvers, constantly assessing situations and assembling pieces to plan the right course of action. Yet despite this strategic awareness, we can find ourselves paralyzed or choose the path of least resistance that may not be the right path. Why is that? What makes us ignore our ethical compass? What is the psychology that causes ethical paralysis?
Comfort and Predictability. Doing the right thing can run counter to our deep-seated desire to maintain a steady state and avoid uncomfortable situations. Predictability feels good. When we go with the flow, anxiety and frustration are reduced or become nonexistent. But flow has a downside: Comfort can lull us into inaction and make us resistant to critical thinking, a key tool to doing the right thing. The “Don’t rock the boat” syndrome sets in, and making the effort to change a situation often seems daunting and not worth the risk. Typically, doing the right thing takes energy and can make us uncomfortable.
Craving for the Past. We often long for what was, particularly during times of great change. Sentimentality and nostalgia seep in when we’re faced with difficult change. We’re more likely to crave a happy place, forgetting the difficult journey it took to get there, defaulting to “the end justifies the means” school of thought. Trying to repeat an irrelevant past can set us up for failure, especially when considering that doing the right thing might be too high-risk.
Calculating Power and Influence. At our core, we seek to strengthen our influence and power to effect change. Yet, if we’re only one voice among hundreds, thousands, or millions, we feel powerless. We might feel capable of influence in a smaller church group, local club, or neighborhood association, but as one employee among thousands or one citizen among millions, we may assess that we simply don’t have the power to make a difference. And if we feel we don’t have the power to make a difference, doing the right thing is a nonstarter.
The Gratification Trap. Consider how we doom-scroll through social feeds, binge-watch entire streaming seasons in a weekend, or abandon New Year’s fitness goals within weeks. Our desire for immediate gratification is deeply ingrained. When we achieve short-term goals, we get a mental boost of accomplishment—we feel good. Doing the right thing, however, often isn’t short-term, particularly in an organization or society. It takes time, commitment, and considerable energy, and the rewards are in the future. Why would we put off gratification when there are so many ways to get it right now?
Survival Overrides Principles. Human beings have evolved with basic survival instincts: fight or flight. When pushed into a corner, we’ll often do whatever it takes to regain control. Although not physical survival risks, consider these examples: sales leaders making overly optimistic projections when at risk of missing numbers; organizations abandoning DEI and ESG policies under institutional pressure; and tech leaders pandering to elected officials for tax exemptions. Politically motivated actions tend to obscure or obliterate doing what we know is right.
The Transformation Challenge
Understanding why doing the right thing is hard is only the first step. The greater challenge lies in transforming an organization to overcome these deeply embedded psychological and cultural barriers. Organizational transformation—particularly ethical transformation—requires confronting the very human tendencies that make change so difficult.
Organizations face a fundamental paradox: the same psychological forces that make doing the right thing difficult also make changing organizational culture nearly impossible. Leaders must simultaneously battle employees’ natural resistance to change while asking them to embrace more challenging ethical standards. This creates a double burden that explains why so many transformation efforts fail. The key insight is that ethical transformation cannot be imposed from above—it must be cultivated from within by addressing the root psychological needs that drive resistance to both change and ethical behavior.
There are four practical steps to empowering ethical transformation:
Create psychological safety. Before any meaningful change can occur, people need to feel safe to speak up, make mistakes, and challenge existing practices. This means temporarily accepting that although some unethical behaviors will continue, the greater goal is to build a foundation for change. Leaders must resist the urge to punish or shame, focusing instead on understanding why these behaviors exist.
Make the invisible visible. Many unethical behaviors persist because they’ve become normalized and invisible. Transformation requires helping people see their own behavior patterns and organizational dynamics clearly. This often means uncomfortable conversations about bias, power dynamics, and the gap between stated values and actual practices.
Redesign systems and incentives. Individual behavior change is unsustainable without systemic change. This stage involves identifying and redesigning the organizational systems, processes, and incentives that currently reward unethical behavior or make ethical behavior difficult. It’s not enough to ask people to “do better”—you must make doing better easier than doing worse.
Develop new habits and rituals. Lasting change requires new habits to replace old ones. This means creating new rituals, practices, and decision-making processes that reinforce ethical behavior. These need to be simple, repeatable, and integrated into daily work, not additional burdens that people will abandon under pressure.
Facing Resistance
Change management is typically faced with resistance. Effective transformation leaders must model tolerance for the ambiguity and discomfort that change creates. This includes acknowledging that transformation is difficult and will create temporary confusion; being transparent about trade-offs and difficult decisions; and admitting mistakes and course corrections publicly. It also means maintaining consistent focus on long-term vision while adapting short-term tactics and protecting people who take ethical risks during the transition period. The goal isn’t to eliminate discomfort—it’s to help people become comfortable with discomfort in the service of something meaningful. Building a workplace culture that supports ethical behavior demands intentional leadership and an environment strengthened by permission to question, suggest, and contribute. It requires management to have a strong appetite for constructive criticism from eager workers—that’s the price of authentic shared purpose.
Rather than treating ethics as a separate initiative, integrate ethical decision-making into existing workflows. Start team meetings with brief ethical check-ins, include values-based criteria in project evaluations, and create templates that prompt ethical consideration. Make it easier to do the right thing than to skip the conversation.
Redesign recognition and reward systems to audit current incentive structures to identify where they inadvertently reward unethical behavior. Create new recognition programs that celebrate ethical courage—people who speak up, ask hard questions, or choose long-term integrity over short-term gains. Make these stories central to organizational folklore.
Transform technology from surveillance to support by reimagining digital tools as enablers rather than monitors. Use technology to surface ethical dilemmas, provide decision-making frameworks, and connect people with resources when they face moral challenges. Create dashboards that track ethical health, not just compliance metrics.
Create safe environments for people to practice ethical decision-making. Use case studies, role-playing, and simulation exercises that mirror real workplace dilemmas. Help people develop the skills and confidence to act ethically when stakes are low, so they’re prepared when stakes are high. Remove barriers to ethical action by creating multiple, protected channels for raising concerns. This includes ombudsperson roles, ethics hotlines, peer consultation networks, and skip-level access to leadership. People need to know exactly what to do when they encounter ethical challenges.
Measure what matters by tracking leading indicators of ethical health: psychological safety scores, frequency of ethical discussions, speed of problem resolution, and retention of values-driven employees. Create feedback loops that help leaders understand how transformation efforts are progressing and where adjustments are needed.
Empowering the Right Thing
Doing the right thing shouldn’t feel subversive, yet in many workplaces, it does. The combination of our psychological programming for comfort and immediate gratification, along with organizational cultures that mirror surveillance states, creates powerful barriers to ethical behavior.
Understanding these barriers is just the beginning. True organizational transformation requires leaders who can navigate the complex psychology of change while systematically redesigning the systems and incentives that shape daily behavior. This isn’t a quick fix—it’s a fundamental reimagining of how organizations operate.
The transformation process itself must account for human nature rather than fight against it. This means creating short-term wins while pursuing long-term goals, leveraging social dynamics rather than relying solely on individual willpower, and building new habits rather than simply demanding new behaviors. Leaders must understand that ethical transformation is ultimately about making the right choice the easy choice. When organizations successfully align their systems, incentives, and culture with their stated values, doing the right thing stops feeling like an act of rebellion and starts feeling like the natural way of doing business.
The organizations that master this transformation won’t just avoid ethical pitfalls—they’ll gain sustainable competitive advantages through increased innovation, employee engagement, customer trust, and resilience. When doing the right thing becomes easy, exceptional results naturally follow.
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The Truth About Transformation: Why Most Change Initiatives Fail (And How Yours Can Succeed)
Why do 70% of organizational transformations fail?
The brutal truth: It’s not about strategy, technology, or resources. Organizations fail because they fundamentally misunderstand what drives change—the human factor.
While leaders obsess over digital tools, process improvements, and operational efficiency, they’re missing the most critical element: the psychological, behavioral, and cultural dynamics that actually determine whether transformation takes hold or crashes and burns.
The 2040 Framework reveals what really works:
Why your workforce unconsciously sabotages change (and how to prevent it)
The hidden biases that derail even the best-laid transformation plans
How to build psychological safety that accelerates rather than impedes progress
The difference between performative change and transformative change that sticks
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