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Dilemmas and Choices Faced by Project Managers
Published in Mel Bost, Project Management Lessons Learned, 2018
Dilemmas arise from internal or external conflicts between goals, values, perspectives, and points of view. In this chapter, let’s examine some elements of the conflicts that give rise to dilemmas for project managers. As you will see, dilemmas provide learning and growth opportunities for project managers to review and choose a course of action. John C. Maxwell, who is known as a present-day guru of leadership, has often been quoted as saying that “leaders have choices and when they make those choices, the choices in turn make them.” As leaders, project managers are often faced with those same choices in the form of dilemmas.
Profiling ethics orientation through play
Published in Behaviour & Information Technology, 2018
Carlos Pereira Santos, Vassilis-Javed Khan, Panos Markopoulos
Moral judgment is the thinking process that determines if an idea, entity or action is right or wrong; but also how it fares in terms of other related concepts such as good, bad, unconventional, bizarre, ethical or irrational, to name a few. The process an individual takes to determine ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is directly dependent upon the individual’s cultural setting, context and the perceived consequences an action might have (McDevitt, Giapponi, and Tromley 2007). People often find themselves in a situation where a difficult choice has to be made between two or more undesirable alternatives, otherwise known as a dilemma. People face ethical dilemmas in their professional capacity, e.g. end of life judgments for medical doctors (Lloyd 2004), in major choices pertaining to family and social life, but even in mundane daily activities where people break social norms or laws; e.g. cutting in line to make it for lunch, or speeding while driving to catch a flight.
RRI as the inheritor of deliberative democracy and the precautionary principle
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2018
Secondly, elements that are situated at different levels of knowledge are grouped together with the unknown, which is slightly problematic. For instance, ignorance is not the same as a dilemma. Dilemmas contain different positions (often moral), where the difficulty is to know how to choose between them. Dilemmas are not pure and broad ignorance. Incidentally, real ethical dilemmas are rare. When moral philosophers and psychologists have to build dilemmas for their experiments, they make up curious, if not cruel, thought experiments with the famous trolley cases running in direction of workers on a line when the tested participants have to choose between throwing a fat guy to stop it and saving them, or to let the trolley hitting them. Most of the so-called moral values conflicts are solvable. They are more tensions of values. For instance, most of the democratic countries take into account solidarity and individual freedom. More often, the so-called dilemmas are merely oppositions where no discussion to identify the lines of opposition or how to reinterpret the situation to reach agreement has taken place (Reber 2011b). We cannot ask ‘questions’ about that which we do not know.
Introducing the dilemma of societal alignment for inclusive and responsible research and innovation
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2018
Barbara Ribeiro, Lars Bengtsson, Paul Benneworth, Susanne Bührer, Elena Castro-Martínez, Meiken Hansen, Katharina Jarmai, Ralf Lindner, Julia Olmos-Peñuela, Cordula Ott, Philip Shapira
The dilemma of ‘societal alignment’ emerges therefore not just from technical or temporal challenges in divining pathways for emerging technological designs – as once highlighted by Collingridge and picked up by recent RRI literature, e.g. Genus and Stirling (2018) – but also from the difficulties in democratising science, technology and innovation, addressing divergent stakeholder perspectives, and ensuring a closer correspondence between their benefits and the needs of diverse publics. Neither Collingridge’s dilemma, nor the dilemma of societal alignment are moral dilemmas sensu stricto. A popular dictionary definition of the term dilemma suggests ‘a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially ones that are equally undesirable’ (Oxford dictionary, first definition).3 While Collingridge’s dilemma is often presented in terms of a choice between early and late interventions, where each suffers from a lack of knowledge or control, respectively, the problems of governance that it has helped bring into view are certainly not as simple as a question of choosing between two alternatives – especially equally undesirable ones. Furthermore, the notions of ignorance, uncertainty and complexity regarding the ongoing development and social embedding of technologies are central to Collingridge’s dilemma. A second dictionary definition of the term dilemma is a generic one that suggests ‘a difficult situation or problem’ (Oxford dictionary). For Collingridge, the problem at hand is our insurmountable lack of capacity to predict the future and to avoid ‘irreversibility’ and technological lock-ins when these are intrinsic features of sociotechnical systems as they develop. This problem is entangled with yet another problem, that of our limited capacity to govern technological change and make decisions amidst ignorance and uncertainty on the future implications of the technologies we are implementing today. Likewise, as will be discussed later, the dilemma of societal alignment is one that also alludes to difficult situations and problems. However, differently to Collingridge’s, it is less concerned with the challenges of foreseeing potential implications of technologies as it is with the challenges of shaping science, technology and innovation to ensure that their development processes are aligned with the values and needs of different publics.