The “Fusion” Road
The low road of compliance does not care that most people want to make good decisions but only that most people meet minimum standards of conduct. Integrity’s high road rejects administrative realities that stem from accountability. Both mistakenly re- duce the world to two distinct categories—ethical and unethical—whereas managers actually cope in the gray areas of legitimate-but-competing values, principles, and responsibilities. Neither approach alone accomplishes the purpose of spurring ethical practice and practitioners in public service.
This purpose calls for fusing the two standard approaches and moving on both fronts at once—a bipartisan conclusion reached long ago, often repeated but rarely implemented. So we know what we should do. Now all that’s left is to follow through. To the extent that public service has moved on both fronts, it results more from default than strategy and is more a hodgepodge than a blending.
Public service and public employees would both be well served by management’s merging the best from the compliance and integrity roads. Such a merger fuses forces together to meet energetically the public service purpose stipulated at the start of this introduction. We use a modernistic term on purpose here: fusion. But it implies no explosion. Its futuristic orientation has roots deep in Western (and other) culture, reaching back to Aristotle’s golden mean, which defines virtue as the mean of excess and shortfall. In the familiar context of a balanced budget (less familiar, of course, in the federal context than others), the good outcome falls between surplus and deficit; any other outcome signals trouble.
