Living Your Values: Making the Right Decisions for Your Crowd
#YourCrowd is an initiative dedicated to the study of crowd behaviors and experiences, created and moderated by the strategy team at BaAM.
Like many of you, I have been giving a lot of thought to what is currently going on in health care in this COVID-19 world. Enter Heather Fitzgerald, clinical ethicist at Children’s Hospital in Denver, CO. She began her career as a nurse in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) and then decided to get lots of degrees (she’s currently a PhD candidate in bioethics) and focus first on clinical ethics and now in her current position, organizational ethics.
I asked Fitzgerald, how her ethics practice might be applied to the challenges facing organizations in our industry – leagues, teams, venue operators and event producers.
According to Fitzgerald:
“Clinical Ethics is about discerning the right thing to do for a patient when there is conflict, disagreement or uncertainty about clinically-indicated options. The first ethical commitment in medicine, of course, is to do no harm. Generally speaking, benefit or harm is determined by the adult patient with capacity for decision making.
This process of decision making also incorporates:
- Stakeholders’ interests – parents, team, child if old enough to be consulted
- Their values
- Benefit/burden/risk calculus of available, recommended options
Now the focus of my work is on Organizational Ethics, which is about how to cultivate an ethical climate based on an organization’s core values and recognizing that those values can sometimes be in tension with each other. It’s true that an organization’s core values serve as its moral compass. It’s also true that in some situations, one core value must eclipse another to best serve the organization’s mission. Organizational ethics provides frameworks to navigate those tensions and promote transparency in the process.”
So, how might ethics training be applied to help organizations like ours that host large groups of people and hope to get back to some kind of normal?
Heather Fitzgerald, RN, MS is the Director of Resilience, Ethics and Wellness at Children’s Hospital in Denver, CO. She is a doctoral candidate in organizational ethics at Loyola University Chicago. A lover of music and the outdoors, Heather is especially looking forward to the return of the Denver Botanic Gardens Concert Series in 2021!
Lucy Strong is thrilled to be a member of BaAM's Strategy team and looks forward to meeting all of you live and in person – when all of this is over.
We know significant research efforts focus on fans and followers as individuals, but with #YourCrowd, we are tapping the brightest minds and broadening the dialogue to better understand factors at play when engaging larger audiences in real life or in digital life.