In his latest book, Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work, Joseph Badaracco observes, “The soundest guidance for grappling with hard, complex, uncertain practical problems is a set of five questions that men and women have turned to, across many centuries and cultures, when they faced this kind of a problem. Gray areas demand your best judgment, and the five questions are, in essence, extraordinarily valuable tools for judgment.” They are:

o What are the net, net consequences?
o What are my core obligations?
o What will work in the world as it is?
o Who are we?
o What can I live with?

Like almost all other questions, these are easy to ask. However, they are by no means easy to answer. How we respond to them — and ignoring them is one option — has serious implications and, at least potentially, serious consequences.

The next time you must deal with “a highly uncertain, high-stakes problem, one that challenges not only your skills but also your humanity,” honest answers to these five questions can definitely help.

And keep in mind that Dante reserved the last and worst ring in hell — in The Inferno — for those who, in a moral crisis, preserve their neutrality.

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Joseph L. Badaracco is the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School. He has taught courses on business ethics, strategy, and management in the School’s MBA and executive programs. He is a graduate of St. Louis University, Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar, and Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA and a DBA. In recent years, Badaracco served as Chair of the MBA Program and as Housemaster of Currier House in Harvard College. He has also been chairman of the Harvard University Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and has served on the boards of two public companies. He has taught in executive programs in the United States, Japan, and many other countries and has spoken to a wide variety of organizations on issues of leadership, values, and ethics. He is also the faculty chair of the Nomura School of Advanced Management in Tokyo. Managing in the Gray was published by Harvard Business School Press (September 2016).