Roger Steare

Why organisations work with Roger Steare

• His ethicability RIGHT framework was adopted by BP into its 2011 Code of Conduct after Deepwater Horizon, and the programme was later recognised by the US Department of Justice in BP’s US$20.8 billion Consent Agreement. Few decision frameworks have been stress-tested at that scale.
• The MoralDNA psychometric, co-designed with psychologist Pavlos Stamboulides, has profiled more than 180,000 people across 200 countries. It gives boards a measurable language for ethical culture rather than a values poster.
• He has built ethical leadership programmes for BP, Citigroup, HSBC, PwC, the Financial Services Authority and the Serious Fraud Office. His client list is the regulator and the regulated, which is rare.
• He writes for the Financial Times as a columnist and reports for the Chartered Management Institute on the link between moral character and organisational performance. The argument is empirical, not aspirational.
• He brings the same ethical reasoning to AI governance that he applied to banking and energy. Boards confronting AI deployment get a method, not a moral panic.

Biography highlights

• Honorary Visiting Professor of Organisational Ethics, Cass Business School (now Bayes), City, University of London
• Visiting Professor of European Studies, College of Europe, Bruges
• Co-designer of MoralDNA, used by more than 180,000 people in over 200 countries
• Author of Ethicability (5th edition) and Thinking Outside the Inbox; author of The MoralDNA of Performance for the Chartered Management Institute
• Designer of BP’s global ethical leadership programme for 4,000 leaders following Deepwater Horizon; framework cited in BP’s US Department of Justice Consent Agreement
• Financial Times columnist; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

Biography

Most ethics work in large organisations is theatre. Codes of conduct sit on intranets, e-learning modules are completed quickly, and the actual decisions get made the same way they always were. The MoralDNA work, built with psychologist Pavlos Stamboulides and now profiling over 180,000 people across 200 countries, was designed to interrupt that pattern. It measures how people actually reason about right and wrong, not what they say they value.

The ethicability RIGHT framework took the same logic into operational decision-making. After Deepwater Horizon, BP incorporated it into the 2011 Code of Conduct and rolled an associated programme out to 4,000 leaders. In 2016 the US Department of Justice cited that programme as part of BP’s US$20.8 billion Consent Agreement. It is one of very few ethical decision tools stress-tested under genuine regulatory and reputational fire.

The broader client list spans Citigroup, HSBC, PwC, Nationwide, Openreach, the Financial Services Authority and the Serious Fraud Office. As Honorary Visiting Professor at Cass Business School (now Bayes) he taught the same material to Executive MBA cohorts, and as Visiting Professor at the College of Europe he extended the work into European public policy. His Financial Times column and his Chartered Management Institute report, The MoralDNA of Performance, argue that moral character is correlated with measurable organisational outcomes.

That argument now extends to AI. The questions a board faces about model deployment, accountability and bias are not new ethical questions, they are old ones in faster machinery. The work he brings to AI governance is the same reasoning he brought to banking after 2008 and to oil after 2010: a tested method for deciding what is right when commercial, legal and moral answers diverge.

Key speaking topics

• Values-based leadership and ethical decision-making
• AI ethics and responsible technology governance
• Organisational culture and integrity
• Trust and the social contract of business
• Moral reasoning at board level
• Ethics in financial services and regulated industries

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees facing ethical or reputational exposure
• Chief Risk Officers, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officers shaping culture beyond compliance
• Senior leaders in regulated sectors: financial services, energy, healthcare, defence
• Heads of AI, Chief Data Officers and technology leaders setting deployment standards

Audience outcomes

• A tested method (ethicability RIGHT) for making decisions when commercial, legal and ethical pressures conflict
• A common language for ethical culture grounded in the MoralDNA evidence base
• A clearer account of why values-based leadership is correlated with organisational performance
• A practical framing for AI governance questions that boards can act on