Most moral failures that reach a board's attention are not produced by people who lack judgement. They are produced by institutional cultures that allow capable people to act without noticing what they are doing.
This is the disturbing terrain of The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary about the perpetrators of Indonesia's 1960s mass killings. The film is difficult viewing, and I do not recommend it lightly. What makes it essential for directors is what it reveals about the mechanisms by which organisational cultures suppress moral awareness in the people who serve them.
The men in the film discuss mass violence with the casual confidence of professionals reflecting on a career. We were like movie stars. We had our own style, says Anwar Congo, one of the central figures, as he reenacts his crimes for the camera in the genres of gangster films and musicals he admired in his youth. The performance is the point. Narrative, peer reinforcement, and institutional legitimacy combine to make the unthinkable feel ordinary, even respectable.
The governance parallel is uncomfortable, and deliberately so.
What the film reveals about institutional culture.
The mechanism the film exposes is moral disengagement, the psychological process by which ethical standards are deactivated in particular contexts while remaining intact elsewhere. The perpetrators are not without conscience. They are without conscience here, in this professional role, surrounded by colleagues who share the same frame.
Three patterns are visible in the film that appear, in less extreme form, in many organisations.
The suppression of dissenting voices, where those who might object are absent, silenced, or have learned not to speak.
The normalisation of stakeholder harm through ideological justification, where the language of duty, necessity or strategy replaces the language of consequence.
The erosion of individual moral agency through institutional pressure, where the question shifts from is this right to is this what we do.
Boards encounter these patterns in subtler registers. A decision that harms a stakeholder group is reframed as a regrettable necessity. A dissenting director is treated as difficult rather than valuable. A practice that would not survive public scrutiny is defended on the grounds that it is industry standard. The film does not suggest that boards are equivalent to the perpetrators it documents. It suggests that the mechanisms by which moral awareness is suppressed are features of institutional life that require explicit countermeasures.
Behind the camera
Director Joshua Oppenheimer's approach of allowing perpetrators to direct their own reenactments creates a window into how culture shapes moral awareness. The men's choice of filmmaking genres reveals how popular narratives can be co-opted to justify behaviour. The film's most powerful moments occur when the theatrical framework breaks down and perpetrators confront the reality of their actions. These breakthroughs illustrate the potential for moral awareness to resurface when justification systems are temporarily suspended.
What this means for boards
The film's most useful lesson for directors is that ethical capability cannot be assumed. It must be built, protected, and tested. Four practices help.
Moral awareness protocols. Explicit processes for surfacing the ethical dimensions of strategic decisions, including systematic stakeholder impact assessment.
Dissent protection systems. Robust protections for directors who raise ethical objections, including anonymous reporting mechanisms and visible appreciation for moral courage.
Ethical reality-testing. Regular ethical audits by independent parties who can identify moral blind spots that internal dynamics tend to obscure.
Moral imagination practices. Structured practices for cultivating the ability to understand and feel the impact of decisions on affected parties.
Intelligent people can become complicit when institutional cultures supply the justification. Effective governance requires that ethical capability is continuously cultivated, in the same way that strategic and financial capability are cultivated. The cost of assuming it is one of the lessons the film makes impossible to ignore.