Ethics discussions are often matters of right versus right, says Phillip Gerou, FAIA, in his accompanying article about the national AIA Ethics Council. That might sound as bland as ungravied grits. But his experience shows that, done right, they can add some real spark to a group discussion at your next firm, project-team, or AIA meeting.

I first got involved in the National Ethics Council of the AIA in 1995 while serving as national vice president under Chet Widom, FAIA. He was assigning responsibilities among the three vice presidents when he looked at me and said, "We have some serious concerns about the liability exposure involved in enforcing a code of ethics. We also have some specific recommendations from outside counsel that need to be addressed by the Ethics Council—that's your job." Working with the National Ethics Council in 1995, we began by identifying our "core values" as architects and, using that as a basis, amended the code. The next year, I became a member of the council and have been for six years. This year, serving now as chair, is the last of my term.

In all that time, I've put on and participated in a number of professional-education programs in the U.S. and Canada, including at Grassroots and the national convention. I've also taught the subject at a number of schools of architecture. It was three years ago, at a convention program with Barry Wasserman, FAIA, that I learned firsthand that the most effective way of getting people engaged in the nuances of ethics is through roundtable discussions of specific cases.

It is true, of course, that when you deliver a presentation on ethics to a group, some discussion is generated. But the real meat, the real interest is generated by discussion. In my experience, when you get everyone in a group personally engaged in case studies, the discussion is always lively and sometimes heated.

This past fall, the National Ethics Council helped AIA Seattle put on a discussion-intensive program based on four case studies. (To see those case studies, click here.) These case studies have been developed to reflect the issues presented to the NEC each year in actual cases.

Each case study sets up a scenario involving obligations to colleagues, the client, or the public. Then we ask specific questions: Did the person do the right thing? If you change this element, would you still consider it the right thing to do? What would the other person do?

We've found in working with various components that people everywhere can map a successful program of their own by starting with these four questions and developing them to reflect local conditions or current issues. When adapted, the scenario involves a plausible-sounding project on a particular street in Dallas, for instance. Part of the fun is in localizing the discussion to make it more real and, therefore, more engaging.

Incidentally, another source of case study ideas is the book by Wasserman; Patrick Sullivan, FAIA; and Gregory Palermo, FAIA, Ethics and the Practice of Architecture. There you will also find topics that go beyond the purview of the National Ethics Council's consideration. Because of the well-defined scope of the council's work, there is a whole world of moral questions beyond our scope. When you bring personal morals into the discussion, you can expand to touchy subjects such as whether it's ethical to design an execution chamber or a school with no windows in it. I can imagine the discussion will be just as lively and probably even more heated!

Bring it home to your audience
Conducting an ethics debate is an exercise that a firm of any size could do. As long as you have more than two or three people available to discuss these case studies, you can get some good dialogue going, even over a lunch hour.

The first thing to remember is that it isn't necessary to come up with a final resolution when you're in that kind of format. The more important part is the discussion; the arguments for each side.

Make the situation as real as makes you feel comfortable. For instance, here's a useful set of questions, if the principals are up for some frank feedback: When designers leave a firm, should they be able to get copies of their work? Sure, the firm should retain ownership of the intellectual property, and most likely the original documents, but where is that line drawn? With introduction of electronic documents, the issue becomes even more clouded.

Whereas the National Ethics Council would come down somewhere in the middle of an issue and try to come up with a fair and equitable solution to the whole problem (sometimes satisfying neither side totally) your success will be getting a balance of arguments on all sides. Where we have to make fair decisions, your mission is to provoke different perspectives.

I participated in a program in Seattle that was open to students and architects alike. They set it up so the roundtable discussions were broken down into parts, with each person taking on a role. One person was the ethics council hearing officer, two people played the parties in the disagreement, and others came in to testify. Everybody had a great time discussing, arguing, and taking sides in cases that, sometime, hit very close to home.

At the table I was sitting at, we had people take on roles that were obviously different from their roles in real life—the male architect playing the upset housewife or the interior designer taking on the role of the contractor. We had fun with it. Groups of 6 to 10 people played out their roles and sometimes got into very heated discussions. At the end, when each group was to report back to everyone, some groups had two people reporting, one for each side of the argument. It was all good-natured, but people do get engaged.

Copyright 2001 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved.