Building Ethical Behavior through the Power of Narrative
Interview by Susan Frank Divers
In an effort to connect the idea of “narrative” from the battlefield to the boardroom, Susan Frank Divers, AECOM’s Assistant General Counsel for Ethics & Compliance and Senior Corporate Vice President, recently interviewed her son, Alexander James Frank, a former Army Infantry Captain, about his experiences in Afghanistan. The resulting insights offer valuable lessons for companies everywhere that can help them build more robust and effective ethics programs.
How does narrative help develop an effective ethics program? A company’s ethics program should reflect its broader values, work, and commitment to its communities. In turn, this inspires everyone and helps them understand why we are asking employees to do the right thing. Otherwise, ethics and compliance can easily become a “check-the-box” program.
“AECOM’s stated mission is to create, enhance, and sustain the world’s built, natural, and social environments in places where we live and serve. So for us, acting with integrity directly relates to that mission,” said Divers, AECOM’s Assistant General Counsel for Ethics & Compliance, and Senior Corporate Vice President.
“If we insist on and practice integrity in all of our dealings, our communities gain dependable infrastructure, the environment is sustained, our partners and suppliers are selected based on merit, and our employees work in an atmosphere of trust and honesty. They can be proud of what they are doing. That’s easier for people of many different cultures to understand than a set of abstract legal rules.”
Building civil infrastructure in Afghanistan while fighting the Taliban would seem to have nothing in common with the work of a Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer who oversees an award-winning ethics and compliance program at a Fortune 500 company. But after Divers’ son, Alexander James Frank, returned from Kandahar province in Afghanistan (serving from 2010 to 2011) as a US Army Infantry Captain, they discussed how the power of narrative fosters ethical behavior.
Drawing on Alex’s experiences in Afghanistan, bolstered by Susan’s extensive knowledge of global compliance, they discussed how a shared narrative can work across cultures, institutions, and companies to establish a culture of ethics and accountability that benefits everyone:
SFD: While in the middle of a war zone, how did you figure out that ‘the story’ was a key factor in peacekeeping and institution building?
AJF: Not long after I arrived in Kandahar, an Afghan elder and I were discussing the most effective local Taliban leader, a man named Echlas. Years before I arrived in Afghanistan, Echlas was a farmer in the Western Kandahar province. One day, he was driving his motorcycle when the Afghan National Police (ANP) stopped him and demanded a bribe. In Afghanistan, unfortunately, bribes are a fact of life, and Afghans are faced with making morally impaired decisions in order to gain immediate access to government services, healthcare, and other basic necessities. Echlas, on the other hand, was different. He was a proud Afghan and refused, prompting the ANP to beat him on the street. The next day, he and his family moved to a Taliban-controlled area.
As a member of the Taliban in the district in which I served as a platoon leader, Echlas demonstrated leadership and astuteness. By the time I arrived, he was the youngest senior Taliban leader in my unit’s district. During our first firefight, he laid a well-thought-out ambush for me and my men. Had it not been for our extra security measures, we might have been in real trouble. The experience of bullets snapping near our heads is one none of us will ever forget.
‘To you, he was a bad man. But to many others he was a hero,’ an Afghan elder later told me after the battle. He was right. There was a story behind Echlas that we needed to understand, in order to deal with him and what he represented.
SFD: I can certainly understand why you would consider him a ‘bad man.’ What led you to try to understand his story?
AJF: It was because of clashing political narratives that he almost killed me and my men that day. We were each representing political forces that were in such conflict that we had no choice but to fight one another. Given the situation, our only choice was to be reactive.
Moreover, because local politics reigned supreme in Afghanistan, these kinds of small-scale stories mattered. Stability at the national level was impossible without addressing local issues—i.e., stories that lay behind the conflict, which help identify the issue at hand.
SFD: How did you address those stories?
AJF: This insight became my guiding principle. Soon after the ambush, I took on the role of Governance and Development Officer for our area of operations in addition to my Platoon Leader duties. I had no formal training for the position, but had done extensive research into the sources of instability and how political narrative affected them. Through conversations with Afghans from all walks of life, I tried to strengthen our narrative of what we were doing and why.
SFD: So, you proposed a counter-narrative?
AJF: My unit identified local informal justice and dispute-resolution mechanisms, supported them, and tied them to the central government. We developed leverage with local Afghan government officials and used it to keep them honest and reduce corruption. We used our development money to allow the Afghan government—not us—to take credit for development projects. We worked with the district government to have public trials of detainees, thus bringing transparency into the process. Most importantly, we worked with our local contacts to identify the reasons why people like Echlas joined the Taliban, and tried to address them.
SFD: How did that fit into your mission of peacekeeping and civil institution building?
AJF: We learned that effective governance in Afghanistan consisted of a dependable set of rules from which the population could derive a sense of security and compliance. A shared narrative was the key component that allowed the elders, locals, government officials, and everyone else to understand what we were doing. Thus, everything we did was tied to a consistent ‘story.’
That story varied depending on shifting political tides, but we ensured the population knew why we were there, and how it fit with their lives and interests. In the end, the goal was to tie the population to the rule of law, creating a political structure that ensured stability. If we had approached this abstractly or in a legalistic manner, no one would have understood what we were doing and why.
SFD: Did it work?
AJF: This was not an easy or straightforward process. It took dedication, building relationships, time, conversations, respect for local culture, and an understanding of the forces at work, plus careful and clear communication of the narrative. All of us on the team—military, civilian aid—had to help tell the story. But in the end, these efforts paid off. Law and order improved dramatically in our area. Participation in Afghan government activities such as shuras (political gatherings) and development projects skyrocketed. This was an engaging and impactful experience and, to this day, I still Skype with some of the village elders in broken Pashtu even though I’ve left the Army.
