Ideas rarely emerge when you do the same thing with the same people every day.

To find ideas, you need to get up from your desk. Over the years, I’ve found that the further away from my desk I am, the better the ideas.

For example, I’ve noticed that the ideas I get from peer companies are often better than the ideas I get from my work colleagues. Similarly, the ideas I get from companies outside of my industry are often better than the ones from peer companies. We can push this further…

Remember how Archimedes figured out how to measure the density of his King’s crown after noticing his bathtub water rising as he entered it? This is a great example of what Steven Johnson calls “the adjacent possible”. To get to the adjacent possible, you can’t stand in the middle of your circle. You have to get impossibly close to its edge. You have to believe that a great idea for your ethics program might appear while you are making your own change at a food truck, or watching people board a plane, or listening to an episode of StoryCorps.

Focus on your problem, and allow answers to come from outside of your focus.

If you reduced one of your corporate policies to a one-pager, and then reduce it further to a single word, would that word match one of your corporate values?

We all tell ourselves stories.

Some stories serve us well, others don’t.

For example, the story for many people is that they must exercise daily for at least 30 minutes. For others (but sometimes for the same people), the story is that they must have 3 or 4 beers every night because they’ve worked so hard during the day.

Our employees come to work with stories too. Some believe in an honest day’s work. Others feel justified to steal office supplies because they consider themselves underpaid.

Even those of us who build E&C programs have stories. One story is that workplace regulations are complicated and our job is to help our employees stay compliant. Another is that preventing risk is more important than innovation. Not all stories enable the business.

What stories do you tell yourself?

I don’t care for basketball.

And I don’t think that college sports should drive up the cost of education in the U.S.

So you can understand why I roll my eyes when I see one coach hit another because of an inopportune timeout.

Really? Who cares?! It’s basketball! A game where you try to throw a ball in a hoop! How can you get upset at this when 2.5 million American children are homeless?!

I’m too harsh, of course. I, too, get upset at silly things that no one cares about (you should hear some of my thoughts at the poker table). We all lose our temper from time to time, and we most often regret it later.

Seeing this coach get upset and physical reminded me of disrespectful behaviors we all see in the workplace. Often times, we can link a specific work pressure to the outburst. The pressure was the trigger. And the trigger needs to be looked at and questioned. Too often, we discipline the employee and move on. The pressure remains, building up for the next outburst.

Many religions have a holy day every week. It’s a way to remind followers of what is truly important, without letting too much time pass since the last reminder.

Is ethics truly important at your company?

How frequent are the reminders?

“I was under time pressure to make this (bad) decision.”

We often hear this reason from employees during an investigation. They say they had no time to think things through, and they made a mistake.

However, in almost every case, an immediate decision was not necessary. They had an hour, or a day – sometimes several days, during which they could have made a quick call to the ethics office.

Remind your employees that the ethics office is a safe harbor. If we can’t give them the advice they need before their deadline, that missed opportunity will be on us, not on them. And if they follow our advice and it turns out to be wrong, they won’t be punished.

There’s (almost) always time to call the ethics office.