Captain Sullenberger's experience and reflections sum up how it works when we face those life-defining, career-defining, and organization-defining ethical dilemmas. Everything we do until those critical decision points is the preparation. Captain Sullenberger described his preparation, which included training, simulations, handbooks, participation in NTSB crash investigations, observations, and reading and studying about flights, crashes, engines, and all things related to air travel. Captain Sullenberger's methods of preparation translate across to the preparation for those defining ethical moments in organizations.

Over the course of his career, Captain Sullenberger had participated with NTSB in investigations and studies of crashes so that he could learn of other pilots' mistakes. So it is with ethics. Unless and until we study the situations in which people make mistakes, we continue along the cheery path of believing that nothing could possibly go wrong in our organization, because we have the formal ethical infrastructure of training and a good code. For example, Sully knew that his first priority was getting the nose of the aircraft down, because so many previous crashes resulted from attempted landings with the noses of the aircraft up. That knowledge was critical to the safe water landing.
The same is true for ethics and compliance. Unless employees understand what it feels and looks like for ethics to go south, they will not make good decisions in averting an ethical crisis. There are common factors that precede ethical crises. For example, in Enron, HealthSouth, Madoff, Finova, Fannie Mae, and other companies, unprecedented performance preceded the ethical collapse. Volkswagen's ethical and legal issue of the installation of software to shut off emissions controls except during emissions testing is historical precedent for ethical issues. Years prior to the revelation of the falsified emissions, many were raising questions about how Volkswagen was achieving such low emissions with diesel engines. In fact, California regulators raised questions about the phenomenal emissions performance of the cars two years before Volkswagen made its announcement of the deception. Studying what crashes look and feel like and the precursor warnings helps employees to spot the signs and raise questions or take actions to avert damage.......................

Discussion Questions 1. Explain how Captain Sully prepared 2. Explain how we translate that to ethical preparation for ourselves.
3. Why is the same preparation effective for unexpected events?