Charities are assumed to be good because their mission is to serve the public good.
With that comes another assumption: that their management and internal processes must be good too. This can make ethics management seem less important for a charity than for an organisation with no societal purpose.
There is a second reason ethics management may be deprioritised, and it relates to how closely we identify with the cause. We work for a charity because our values align with its mission, so charities attract like-minded people.
It is a short mental step to think that shared purpose inherently makes people trustworthy, and that there is little need to invest in the ethics management of trustworthy people.
Groupthink hides in good intentions
Consider a charity working for children’s rights, whose staff believe deeply in the good they do. That moral conviction can make it hard to, for example, question fundraising sources or whether reaching more children is the same as helping them.
The person who raises these questions is heard as difficult rather than useful or seen as failing to understand the mission.
When the space for hard questions narrows, groupthink fills it. Groupthink is what happens when a group’s wish to stay in agreement overrides its willingness to think a hard decision through, so that getting along matters more than getting it right.
It happens in any organisation, but charities are especially prone to it, because the shared purpose that holds people together is also what makes disagreement feel less like a difference of view than a challenge to the cause itself.
Groupthink is not abstract. Some of the sector’s ethical failures have come not from bad people but from good ones, whose shared certainty in the mission blinded them to the questions that might have prevented harm.
Dissent is not about being disagreeable
It is important to be clear about what dissent is, because it can easily be mistaken for something it is not. To dissent is simply to disagree. It is not about being disagreeable.
Dissent is a matter of substance, while being disagreeable is a matter of manner. The two are different but easily confused. Someone can object to a decision, an assumption, or a direction as wrong, and do so respectfully, yet still be treated as difficult.
The objection is dismissed not for how it was made but for having been made at all. Dissent then comes to be seen as disagreeableness.
Forms of dissent
Understood this way, dissent is constructive disagreement offered to improve a decision rather than to obstruct it. It can take two forms.
Deliberative dissent is the disagreement that improves a decision before it is made. Protective dissent is speaking up when something is going wrong, which takes moral courage.
A charity needs both – one to make its decisions better, the other to stop harm before it takes hold. Each has to be built in deliberately, because neither happens on its own.
Deliberative dissent should be part of what good governance and ethics management require. Good governance means a board that tests decisions rather than nodding them through. Ethics management means leaders who invite challenge rather than wait for agreement.
The aim is to make questioning a normal part of decision-making, so that disagreement is understood as a contribution to the work rather than a disruption or threat to it. Deliberative dissent brings what people know into the open while there is still time to use it, and building it in can lead to better decisions, because a decision improves when it is tested.
Protective dissent asks for moral courage. This type of dissent rarely happens publicly in a meeting, but in private.
It often falls to an individual who sees that something is wrong, like a colleague abusing their position or harming others, and has to decide whether to speak, knowing the personal discomfort it may cause.
Offering support
But it is unfair and unrealistic to ask people to be morally courageous to speak out without the charity offering support. Support needs to be accessible and trusted.
Accessible means a person knows the route exists and can easily and safely reach it. Trusted means that using it will be taken seriously and will not cost them their relationships or their job.
Without both, a route is only nominal, and so the burden falls on the individual alone. In such cases, most people, understandably, stay silent. It is in that silence where harm takes hold.
Good intentions are where the work starts, not proof that it is being done well. What tells the two apart is a charity’s willingness to make room for deliberative and protective dissent.
Isabel de Bruin Cardoso is director of the Gradel Institute of Charity’s Nonprofit Ethics Lab
