What’s the most effective way to communicate rules and influence humans to comply with them? On the face of it, just telling people what to do seems like a sensible approach. But what about when those rules have a qualitative component, where people need to do things to a particular standard — for example, behave in an ethical manner — or where it’s not possible to monitor what they’re doing?

In those cases, just telling people what to do is far less likely to work as we risk only finding out once it’s too late. We need an alternative approach.

My guest on this episode is Dr Bettina Palazzo. She’s a business ethics consultant who helps companies to improve their integrity culture and bring a fresh perspective to compliance and ethics. Or, to put it another way, she helps people who are responsible for mitigating human risk to engage their audiences.

In our discussion, Bettina emphasizes the need for companies to prioritize ethics in all aspects of business, as well as the importance of creating individualized codes of conduct and focusing on the client experience and employee journey of compliance.

Bettina also tells me about "ethics scripting" for employees to have a clear response in difficult ethical situations and the need for clear policies in grey areas of decision-making.

She also introduces her Compliance Influencer program: https://compliance-influencer.com/

To learn more about Bettina: https://bettinapalazzo.com/en/home/

In our discussion, I mention a ‘readability’ measure in Microsoft Word: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-your-document-s-readability-and-level-statistics-85b4969e-e80a-4777-8dd3-f7fc3c8b3fd2

For more on my book ‘Humanizing Rules’: https://www.human-risk.com/humanizing-rules-book