One email, one lie

A man changes careers and joins financial services. He is struggling, but working hard. A difficult client emails: “I need to speak to you urgently. Give me a call.”

He means to ring back. He keeps finding easier things to do. The client complains to his boss, who asks: “Did you get that email?”

He says no, then deletes it. IT checks. He is fired.

He was not a fraudster. He was an ordinary employee who made a bad call under pressure. His story appears in The Fault Lines of Finance, and it sums up the book’s argument.

A good person problem

Philippa Hann became chief executive of Paradigm Norton Financial Planning, a B Corp and employee-owned firm, in April 2025. Before that, she spent 20 years as a litigator suing financial advisers, wealth managers and banks.

She met a few psychopaths along the way. Most people across the table were nothing of the kind.

“They didn’t have horns and big teeth.”

Her conclusion became the thesis of the book, co-written with neuropsychologist Dr Moira Somers: “this isn’t a bad person problem. This is a good person problem.”

They know. They do it anyway.

A recent Ethico article, recapping a panel featuring behavioural economist Dan Ariely, argues that most misconduct comes from well-meaning people rationalising small steps. It says they do not believe they are doing anything wrong.

Philippa disagrees with that last point. “We do. It’s just that we clock that and we justify and we rationalise.”

The driver, she says, is discomfort. People see themselves as good professionals. They also want to pay the mortgage and please the boss. When those pull in different directions, the mind finds a way to make it feel acceptable.

“Ethical boundaries don’t snap with a bang,” she says. “They gently fade away as you rationalise.”

Most ethics training, she argues, only tests whether people can spot a dilemma and know the right answer. In a classroom, nearly everyone can. The harder test comes later: acting on it when the boss says “that’s not how we do things around here”.

What Paradigm Norton does differently

Every Thursday, staff spend 15 minutes on training, often stories of what went right or wrong. They talk about how decisions feel: the stomach lurch, the heat rising. “You feel before you think,” she says.

Every person gets 30 minutes a week with their line manager. Managers are trained not to speak first. An anonymous staff survey asks:

“Do you see people getting away with things?”

Her COO once asked whether her strategy was to create “an emotionally healthy firm”. She accepts the description. She says the firm has just had its best organic growth year ever.

The boss is a risk

Every employee, she says, asks two questions.

“What does good look like around here? And can I trust what you say?”

She rejects the idea that culture grows from the bottom up. “It’s not. It’s top down.” Her reason is simple. “I control people’s wages and whether they keep their job.”

That creates a tension she cannot fully design away.

The safeguards depend on staff telling the most powerful person in the firm what she may not want to hear.

Even in informal sessions, she has to remind colleagues that bad news is allowed.

She calls the firm an experiment. “Am I right? Are there flaws in that thinking?” So far, she says, the results are good. For now, the evidence is the firm’s own.

What the body already knows

Asked for one change to the commercial world, Philippa chooses emotional awareness.

“Your emotions are neither good nor bad, but they are telling you something.”

The man who deleted the email probably felt it coming. Nobody had taught him what to do with that feeling.