Do scare tactics work in Ethics & Compliance? When I was brought into preventative E&C work as a reforming investigator (circa 2011), I’d see the same presentation endlessly. You know, the slide with FCPA fines and an ominous sub-message about “possible jail terms”. In other countries, we’d use a variation – in Japan, for example, we’d cite a stat I’m ashamed to say I never interrogated that went something like, “There are currently 23 Japanese executives in US jails on antitrust charges.”
Has trying (and failing) to scare boards into compliance worked? I don’t know. I don’t think so. The most fleeting glance at whatever passes for news would suggest otherwise.
Bitter cherries
Yesterday I had a great discussion with our soon-to-be 12-year-old. The first few hits on Google are gospel for many – ground truth. We discussed how little interrogation of the data there is; indeed, few bother going to the source. I’m not criticising; I’m guilty too. It’s a time and laziness thing.
What prompted the discussion? Cherries. She’d seen a TikTok claiming that three cherry pips can kill you. That sounded like bullshit. Together, we Googled and used the auto-populated text Google had helpfully led us to “will eating three cherry seeds kill you”. Sure enough, in the first few hits was a post titled “11 Delicious But Deadly Foods That Could Kill You”. The author wrote, “As a cherry pit contains around 0.17 grams of cyanide, ingesting just one or two crushed stones could kill you.”
Okay, let’s examine that statement. In a paper titled “Cyanide Toxicity”, hosted on the National Library of Medicine site, the authors (Jeremy Graham and Jeremy Traylor) we learn that:
- “According to the Toxic Exposure Surveillance System, there were 3165 human exposures to cyanide from 1993 to 2002. Of that number, only 2.5% were fatal.”
- “Intravenous and inhalation of cyanide produce a more rapid onset of signs and symptoms than exposure via the oral or transdermal route.”
- Paraphrasing, inhaled cyanide presents a greater risk than ingested cyanide. The onset of symptoms if inhaled are (generally) immediate, but if ingested, they may take a few hours (or even days, at lower doses).
- In terms of amounts, Graham & Taylor suggest that 50mg of ingested cyanide will kill a 160 pound (72.5kg) adult. A study by the University of Leeds indicates a figure ranging from 30–240mg of cyanide for a person who weighs 150 pounds (68kg).
How much cyanide is in the average cherry pip? The Leeds study gives us more nuanced data. It depends on the type of cherry. For example, 2.7mg per gram in black cherries versus a whopping 65mg per gram in Morello cherries. So, eating 3 to 4 pips of a Morello cherry could lead to toxicity (not death yet) versus 7-9 pips for black or red cherries.
It is not just about swallowing pips (which you might get away with). Hydrogen cyanide is produced when the cherry’s enzymes come into contact with the amygdalin INSIDE the pit.
Cherry picking
We also looked into how these scientific publications might have informed a TikTok. That seemed doubtful. More plausible might be this report from 2017 on the BBC, where Matthew Crème, from Lancashire, admitted curiosity got the better of him when he decided to crack three cherry seeds and eat them.
The article notes, “He was admitted to hospital after a 111 operator told him three pips could be fatal but has since fully recovered.” The report continued to note that Mr Crème had called for warnings to be put on fruit packets, saying: “If something was that severe you’d think it’d be on the packaging.”
Right. That’s the solution, more printing ink and packaging to prevent would-be Darwin Awards candidates (👉) from rising into our collective consciousness, like Crème on a cherry pie.
Sour cherries
This Sunday afternoon dismantling of a TikTok video may seem irrelevant and a waste of time. It probably was. But it reminded us of all the other endlessly trotted-out “stats” that we either don’t interrogate or ignore flippantly.
Back to E&C, the FCPA fines slide (or its equivalent in other realms – environmental scandals, workplace abuses, saying the wrong thing on Zoom, etc.) may have their place if your goal is similar to the articles and TikTok above – clickbait. Get people’s attention.
But you may look like a muppet quite quickly without solid data to back it up. If you think that is harsh, maybe you can do some research:
- Of all organisations involved in corrupt activities, what percentage of them suffered significantly (let’s say a 10% revenue dip)?
- How many of their board members went to jail?
- Extending it beyond corruption, how many architects of calamitous economic folly (like the CDOs leading up to 2008’s crisis) went to jail?
Most of these folks swallow the pip (a “cost of business” fine); they don’t chew the seed.
Cherry pie
What might we use instead of scare tactics about low-incidence events? Well, that’s a massive book alone about the benefits of ethics (and avoiding all those regulatory calamities). Chapters might include (but not be limited to):
- Ethics as a (genuine) value
- Reputation matters more than regulation
- The business case for ethics (attracting clients, talent, charging more, etc.)
- Innovation and creativity benefit from light (not toxicity)
- Just f’in because!
The last chapter may seem provocative, but I’m tired of this debate. We only get one fleeting, soon-to-be-forgotten shuffle on this beautiful spinning rock. We can spend that time chewing cherry pips and blaming others for not warning us adequately that it’s a bad idea. Or we could plunder and pillage. Or we could try and be generally nice.
Which of those chapters resonates with you most, and why? What would you add?