FUTURE TALENT November - January 2019/2020 | Page 54

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ON TOPIC
and children?’ Almost all my work is a
combination of getting people to think
things through and make ethical or
moral decisions, to see the world in its
complexity, its richness.”
One way he does this is through
‘MoralDNA’, an online tool he has
developed to help people audit their
ethical stance (see box, p55), available
free in a simple format or as a paid-for
version for corporations. It uses a series
of questions to tease out how much
(or little) we like, or feel able, to do the
right thing both at home and in
the workplace.
For some champions of philosophy
in business, such tools demonstrate
how much philosophy can help
individuals with their in-work self-
development. Olga McSweeney,
director for strategic projects at
accountancy and business-advisory
firm BDO UK, studied philosophy as an
undergraduate but then “sort of forgot
completely about it”. However, during
a period of maternity leave, she
reconnected with the discipline.
“You reach the point where you are
established in your life and career and
‘Slow thinking’ at BDO
Three years ago, BDO UK, an accountancy
and business-advisory firm, decided to
apply a philosophical approach to its
business thinking. As an organisation with
a large matrix structure, where complexity
was a given, it found it needed to create
clarity around it was and why it did what
it did (the firm’s purpose). With this in
mind, managing partner Paul Eagland
introduced Daniel Kahneman’s idea of
“slow thinking” into the firm.
Although Kahneman is both an
economist and a psychologist, in his Nobel
Prize-acceptance speech in 2002, he
revealed that he had originally wanted to
be a philosopher. His work therefore draws
heavily on philosophical thought on
rationality, including the idea of challenging
our “common sense” and assumptions
– which goes as far back as Socrates.
To implement a slow-thinking
approach, BDO announced the
methodology at its leaders’ conference,
54 // Future Talent
giving staff permission to take time to
think things through and consider the
implications of decisions. It then used
slow thinking in workshop sessions that
enabled employees to help uncover, and
identify with, the firm’s core purpose. The
approach is still used today to shape the
firm’s five-year business-growth plans
and has become part of the BDO
vocabulary that all staff recognise.
“Busines leaders face an interesting
philosophical conundrum: how do you
make decisions in a fast-changing,
ambiguous or impatient world, while at
the same time creating a long-term,
sustainably profitable business?” asks
Eagland. “Slow thinking unlocked
something in many people’s minds. They
are now able to reflect rather than feeling
‘up against it’ and we find we can still be
agile and opportunistic when great
moments strike, because we’re thinking
slowly and clearly on the long-term stuff.”
you’ve experienced enough to start
asking the big questions about how
you want to live your life,” she says.
“It helped me make some important
career decisions and come back to
work in a different way.”
McSweeney’s academic focus was
on the idea of power and she found
this invaluable in navigating the
complex relationships of a big firm
such as BDO. “In law and accountancy
firms, you’re often working for a
partner, an individual who manages
everything and who also owns the
business,” she explains.
“I think these environments are
particularly challenging in terms of
being able to influence people to do
the right thing, so I decided to study
what philosophy says about power