Ethics and Creativity Promote "Good Work"

Feature, The Jakarta Post, January 28, 2007

Recently, when opening her e-mail account, Dewi's attention was caught by news titled "The Memory Pill" with this short description: "If you have experienced a painful or traumatic event, would you want a pill which could lessen the bad memories of what happened? That option might soon be here because of a drug called propanolol." Intrigued, she clicked the hyperlink, which brought her to a short 60 Minutes segment on the subject.

The coverage discussed propanolol, a drug that blocks adrenaline and makes us forget intense fear and stressful situations that have happened in the past. 60 Minutes also covered opposing views on the subject. Those in favor of the drug said how helpful it would be for people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to overcome their suffering, while those against worried the drug could be used to manipulate people to achieve a fake "happiness".

The issue of ethics and morality in medicine and biomedical engineering has been an ongoing debate in recent years. Should we leave the decisions for individuals to make or should we leave it up to institutions or the government to decide?

There is no easy answer to this question. With an increasingly complex society and the inventions of even more controversial human products and relationships, morality and ethics are increasingly relevant.

The aim of this article is not to discuss specifically the moral and ethical issues surrounding new products; it is more to do with their relationship with creativity.

Should there be limits to creativity? Granted, there are gray areas such as the memory pill case, but we think there are also absolute moral limits to what we usually would refer to as creativity. Most people would not call an act of human destruction, however intricately conceived, such as the 911 terrorist attack, an act of human creativity. As such, we define creativity as an act motivated by the human desire to contribute positively to society.

A research project named "The Good Work Project" launched by prominent psychologists comes to mind. In 1995, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, William Damon professor of education at Stanford University, and Howard Gardner, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of education, investigated the aspects contributing to "good work" in the fields of journalism and medicine.

They have since extended the application of "good work", defined as "work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners" in fields such as arts, business, education, law, medicine, philanthropy, and sports. They also separated "good work" from "compromised work", defined as "work which is legal, but undermines the core values of the profession", and from "poor, substandard work".

The researchers identified four elements that condition "good work": personal standards -- values, religious faith, self-image; social controls -- reciprocity, trust, community needs, ethics boards; cultural controls -- requirements of job, traditions, professional codes, and outcome controls -- extrinsic benefits, power, prestige. Because of these factors, it is far easier for individuals to perform "good work" in an accountable, open, and democratic society, rather than in a corrupt, untrustworthy, and autocratic society (The Good Work Project, 2006).

In the case of Indonesia, although conducting "good work" is urgent, it is very difficult to pursue because the standards for social and cultural controls are, frankly, rather poor. One of the seemingly innocuous, but potentially damaging aspect of Indonesian culture for the promotion of "good work" in the work context is inarguably the concept of sungkan.

Sungkan is a word that describes a socially acceptable manner in which one can not refuse or say no to another person, for the fear of offending the other person; or a manner in which one can not accept something or say yes to another person's offer because it would be considered as impolite.

Sungkan is when someone says or does things out of obligation, and seemingly agrees to do something being asked by another person, but without actually meaning to do it. Sungkan is when someone tries to do something for other people so he or she is perceived as a nice and helpful person.

Consider this hypothetical example in a work setting. Say you asked one of your coworkers to work on a task. Out of sungkan, he said yes (although he knew ahead of time that he couldn't possibly fit it in his work schedule), and you went away, assuming the task had been taken care of.

Several days passed, and when you asked the person about the progress of the task, he started explaining apologetically that his busy schedule had made it impossible for him to work on it, but he promised it would be done within the next couple of days.

Thinking you still had time before the deadline, you decided to give him the time he needed. But when you asked him again, he apparently still could not find the time. So in the end, you frantically tried to get the job done yourself within the impossible deadline. Some of your other coworkers ended up dropping their jobs to help you meet the deadline, leaving their own deadlines unattended. Many people ended up being in a stressful working condition simply because one person was sungkan.

The reason why sungkan could hinder "good work" is because the quality of work that comes out of sungkan is most likely "compromised". Sungkan is not being honest and truthful to oneself as well as to others. It may not be as equally damaging as being dishonest or even deceitful to others, but sungkan often result in wasting a lot of time and energy because someone could not say no to a request.

Consider another similar hypothetical example. You asked one of your more senior coworkers the possibility of pursuing a new line of task you wanted to propose to your boss. She was very willing to promote the idea and actually fit it in her busy schedule. She asked other people including yourself to help her out to meet the deadline for the next board meeting. So you all worked along, put in extra time as the deadline loomed, getting excited for the time when the proposal is completed.

But when you actually went to meet with your boss at the board meeting, your idea was rejected by your boss because it did not meet some criteria you didn't even know existed in the company. And you realized there and then, in front of your boss, that your senior coworker had found out about the impossibility of the plan, but out of sungkan, she did not tell you about it. And you sat there, feeling completely betrayed by the person you knew had no bad intention towards you, but who chose to avoid being honest with you about your idea. So many man hours and energy was wasted because, again, one person was sungkan.

The last example also highlights another ethical issue of information sharing. Naturally, the more senior staff in a company would know more about how things work within the company. However, whether they share this information with newer or junior staff is often left at their discretion. Information sharing, although often would help make work more productive and effective, is unfortunately often equal to the position of power within a company. How much information is shared is a matter of delicate balance of morality and ethics.

In The World is Flat (2005), Thomas Friedman posited that one of the reasons the poor and developing countries had been dominated by other countries of political leaders was because of inadequate information that could be accessed by many of their citizens. This unequal access to information enabled the developed countries, and authoritarian and corrupt governments, to maintain power and be ahead of the game. But with increasing access to the Internet, the distribution of information has been equalized.

While ethics and morality will remain delicate issues, what we hope to have achieved through this article is the promotion of "good work" in our everyday practices. While social and cultural controls in Indonesia are rather poor, we would like to pose that precisely because of this, we should try to maintain and even increase our personal standards while at the same time making an effort to model good social and cultural behavior because individuals eventually make up the social and cultural controls within a society.

Have a happy and ethically creative year!