Some are called to lead from the front; many lead from the middle. There, whatever our titular authority, we report to multiple constituencies each of whom wields significant power to shape our norms. It is no longer enough – if it ever was – to lead by the codes of ethics that physicians or attorneys or other professionals embrace. The same applies to the common man. Remember that standard, “common decency”? Never has a norm been more problematized.

Borrowing from the Oscar Best Picture of 2023, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, I submit that, in our troubled times, experience invites us to practice an “ethic of everything.” Like Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn and the other characters in that film, we lead – if lead we must – by norms born of a chaos that we live, accept, and undertake to moderate.

I use the term “moderate” not in the conventional sense of damping or muting the disruptions that many of us encounter today. Much of my time both at MIT Sloan and outside Cambridge is spent creating seminars or courses designed to bring people together around current and demonstrably perennial challenges in leadership and ethics. The seminars usually take the form of moderated discussion: those present gather on the premise that they will take what they have learned from the experience and apply it to the work they do, the goals they embrace, and the values in which they believe; they will share their insights with those around them and, in doing so, become ethical leaders or affirm their status, already established, as such.

Moderation here means facilitation-plus. Ideally, leaders enhance and invigorate us, rather than depressing the spirit or blurring the focus of those who will fulfill our shared mission. In the spirit of Marshall McLuhan, the medium is still – and perhaps more than ever – the message: we moderate our way to ethical leadership, bridging gaps among participants created by different agendas, backgrounds, and inclinations. We find the language that everyone understands by inviting them to speak and encouraging them to hear one another. We mediate between our direction and theirs, recognizing that, even as we aspire to set the playing field, players will sometimes go out of bounds or propose boldly to go to a different field.

Against this backdrop, here are eight principles that seem to me essential to ethical leadership:

1. Listen for the inner voice: it’s always there, though perhaps not in terms you would casually recognize. You have an obligation to bring that out, to everyone’s benefit. See Mary Gentile, “Starting Assumptions,” from Giving Voice to Values (2010).
2. Mind the ecosystem: remember that we are individually, and as part of the human family, minor players on a stage the scope of which we do not begin to grasp. See Benjamin Bratton, “Planetary Sapience” (2021)
3. Embrace care: for both individual and institutional success, showing up matters. An explicit commitment to presence can be hard, per #5-6 below, but caring for others begins with being there. See Nel Noddings, Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (2002)
4. Anticipate the paradigm of no paradigms: systems atrophy but people needn’t. Short of chaos, some systems thinkers dream of transcending paradigms altogether. See Donella Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” (1999)
5. Accept that we are in constant flux: nations may stop whole populations at the border, but we are nevertheless all in constant motion. Now and always, that is our quantum reality. See Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017).
6. Do not claim or ascribe ownership: like humanity, culture flows. Celebrate rather than appropriate the differences, and shared abundance will follow. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (2018).
7. W/ thanks to generative AI, define a self: our technologies challenge us to define the intelligence we are by revealing the strengths and weaknesses in the intelligences we create. See Ashish Vaswani et al., “Attention Is All You Need” (2017).
8. Tell true stories: you will need to address #1-7 in some combination to fulfill this principle. How many stories does it take to find a truth by which we can lead? See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009)

We must see both the whole and its individual features to exercise a judgment that qualifies as ethical leadership. After a decision, doubts linger; missed better choices surface; questions and criticism do not cease. Knowing who we are, accurately gauging our limitations and our virtues, speaking for what we believe, recognizing what we owe our communities, allowing one another the curiosity to approach the truth – these norms emerge fully only in conversation with others; that is the inescapable core of ethical leadership. The moderated moment shows us we must routinely live it to lead ourselves and others. An ethic of everything seems to me our best hope of individual and systemic success in complex times.

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