For years, I worked with survivors of sexual trauma in Los Angeles. Later, I founded a nonprofit that worked further upstream, teaching young people and adults in the community medically accurate sex education, emotional intelligence, healthy relationships, and consent. I have also brought versions of these conversations into organizations and small teams, teaching sexual harassment prevention, workplace boundaries, consent, power dynamics, and appropriate conduct.
The settings were different, but the fundamental questions were not. How do we understand power? What do we owe another human being when they are vulnerable? What responsibility belongs to the people who witness a boundary being crossed? What do we do when something is clearly wrong, but stopping it is inconvenient, socially costly, or technically somebody else's responsibility?
I stopped doing the nonprofit work in 2021. I never stopped noticing the culture that made the work necessary.
That is why I have been unable to stop thinking about the allegations emerging from Cornell University. A former Cornell student has filed a civil lawsuit alleging that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by seven fraternity members over several hours at the Chi Phi house in October 2024. The allegations are contested and have not been adjudicated. According to the complaint, during the alleged assault one of the men sent a message to a Snapchat group of 57 male fraternity members, announcing that there was “free pussy” upstairs and effectively inviting others to join him. The filing includes responses from members of the group chat and alleges that additional fraternity members subsequently entered the room.
What stays with me is not only who reportedly entered that room. It is the larger circle around it: the people who allegedly saw and responded to the message, the people who entered the room, and the people who understood enough to know something was wrong and did nothing.
What was described in the complaint is horrifying. But I keep returning to the expanding circle around it: the people who may have seen or known something, the university processes that followed, the police investigation, and a prosecutorial system that initially brought no criminal charges.
The Tompkins County District Attorney has now reopened the criminal investigation and says the case will be presented to a grand jury. District Attorney Matthew Van Houten says the woman's original statement to police differed significantly from the allegations in the civil complaint and did not provide a basis for criminal charges at the time. Her attorney disputes his characterization and argues that authorities failed to conduct an adequate follow-up investigation. Van Houten has acknowledged that his office relied on Cornell University Police and did not independently investigate the allegations. He also says his office did not receive group-chat evidence that the woman's attorney says was provided to authorities in 2024.
Cornell says it conducted a separate, months-long Title IX investigation involving hearings before trained faculty and staff, resulting in sanctions that included suspensions and expulsions. It disputes suggestions that essays were the sole punishment for any of the students involved. The fraternity chapter remains barred from campus.
Those distinctions matter. Criminal prosecution carries evidentiary requirements that university disciplinary proceedings do not. Due process matters. We should not determine criminal culpability through outrage or social media.
But there is another question we do not need a jury to ask: Where does responsibility begin when the rules are no longer enough?
I have spent enough time teaching consent and sexual harassment prevention to know how much we rely on rules. In workplaces, we have built an extensive legal and compliance architecture around misconduct. Title VII prohibits unlawful sex discrimination, including sexual harassment, for covered employers. Federal law also protects employees from retaliation for certain forms of reporting, opposing discrimination, participating in investigations, and even intervening to protect others in circumstances covered by equal-employment law. Employers add codes of conduct, reporting procedures, investigation protocols, manager responsibilities, ethics policies, hotlines, and harassment-prevention training. The EEOC encourages employers to prevent harassment, establish effective complaint processes, train employees and managers, and act appropriately when problems arise.
All of that matters. I have taught it. I believe in it. But compliance establishes a floor. It does not create integrity.
A policy can tell an employee what constitutes prohibited harassment. A training can explain retaliation. A handbook can tell a manager where a complaint should go. The law can establish when conduct becomes legally actionable. What none of these can fully prescribe is what a person should do in the thousands of human moments before misconduct becomes a case.
What happens when the joke changes the room? When someone with more power begins testing someone's boundaries? When a colleague is clearly uncomfortable but has not complained? When a friend is behaving in a way you know is wrong? When the group chat crosses a line? When everyone knows something is happening but nobody wants to become the person responsible for stopping it?
Eventually, the handbook runs out of pages and a human being has to decide what kind of human being they are going to be.
This is where sexual violence, organizational culture, leadership, and Decision Architecture™ intersect.
Decision Architecture™ begins with a simple premise: decisions do not happen in a vacuum. The environments we create shape what people notice, what they believe they are responsible for, what feels safe to challenge, and ultimately what they choose to do. Every system, intentionally or not, answers questions about responsibility. Who is expected to notice? Who has authority to act? Who bears the social or professional cost of speaking? What happens when responsibility passes from one person or department to another? Is intervention easy or difficult? Is speaking rewarded, tolerated, or quietly punished?
We tend to imagine bad outcomes as the product of bad individual decisions. Sometimes they are. But systems also influence which decisions become easier to make. When a system repeatedly makes silence easier than intervention, silence should not surprise us.
This is one reason organizations are particularly vulnerable to failures of responsibility. We are exceptionally good at dividing work. HR owns one piece. Legal owns another. Compliance has a procedure. A manager has a reporting responsibility. An investigator determines whether conduct crosses a particular threshold. Executives receive a report. The board may receive another one.
Division of responsibility is necessary for complex organizations to function. Diffusion of responsibility is something else entirely.
Everyone can own a piece while nobody feels responsible for the whole.
That distinction should matter enormously to leaders.
Organizations spend extraordinary amounts of money developing leadership. We teach strategy, communication, executive presence, accountability, decision-making, difficult conversations, and psychological safety. Then something consequential happens and we discover what the culture has actually taught people.
Do people intervene when intervention carries a social cost? Do they ask another question when the first answer does not make sense? Do they escalate something even when another department technically owns it? Can someone challenge a high performer, powerful executive, rainmaker, professor, star employee, or beloved colleague? Can people tell the truth when telling the truth threatens their membership in the group?
Those are leadership questions.
Leadership is easy to admire when authority, policy, incentives, and social approval all point in the same direction. Character becomes visible when doing the right thing costs something: status in the group, friendship, opportunity, promotion, reputation, convenience, certainty, or simply the comfort of remaining uninvolved.
This is also why teaching consent has never been enough. Consent establishes an essential boundary. Integrity asks what happens around that boundary.
You can teach someone the definition of consent without teaching them what to do when a friend is degrading a woman. You can teach an employee what constitutes sexual harassment without developing their willingness to challenge a powerful colleague. You can give employees an ethics hotline without creating a culture in which they believe using it is safe. You can put values on every wall in the building while people quietly learn which values become negotiable when practicing them becomes expensive.
Culture is not simply what an organization tells people to do. Culture is what people learn they can watch happen and walk past.
Most organizations will never confront circumstances remotely comparable to the allegations at Cornell. But the underlying human mechanisms appear every day in less extreme forms. A junior employee is humiliated in a meeting. A high performer repeatedly crosses boundaries. An executive behaves differently when senior leadership is absent. Someone manipulates numbers just enough to improve the quarter. A manager subtly retaliates against someone who challenged him. Someone makes the comment. Someone receives the message. Someone sees what is happening.
Then comes one of the most consequential sentences in human groups: I wasn't the one who did it.
Maybe not. But responsibility has never been limited to what we personally caused.
Sometimes leadership is what we refuse to normalize. It is asking the question everyone else would prefer not to ask. It is walking into the room. It is walking someone out of it. It is saying, "This isn't right." It is refusing to allow responsibility to disappear into the spaces between departments, policies, hierarchies, friendships, and people.
This is where Decision Architecture™ becomes a practical leadership responsibility. If leaders want ethical behavior, they cannot merely announce the desired behavior. They have to examine the conditions surrounding the decision. Who has permission to intervene? Who knows where to go? What happens to the person who raises a concern? Does a manager know that ownership continues until there is a responsible handoff? Are people rewarded for surfacing uncomfortable information, or do they learn that the messenger becomes the problem?
The question is not simply whether an organization has a reporting system. The question is what the organization has made easier to choose.
Compliance matters enormously here. Strong policies, competent investigations, due process, reporting structures, anti-retaliation protections, training, and accountability are not bureaucratic decorations. They create important protections, and under federal harassment law, an employer's knowledge of misconduct and response to it can become legally significant.
But systems cannot substitute for character, and character should not be used as an excuse for badly designed systems. We need both.
Good people inside systems that punish intervention may eventually learn silence. Good systems occupied by people unwilling to exercise judgment will eventually encounter something the procedure did not anticipate. Ethical organizations therefore have two responsibilities: develop people capable of acting with integrity and build environments that make integrity easier to practice.
If I were building those programs again today, I would teach everything I taught then: medically accurate sex education, consent, boundaries, communication, and emotional intelligence. But I would spend even more time on what surrounds all of them: courage, discernment, bystander responsibility, and the difference between protecting someone you care about and protecting them from accountability.
I would tell young people that belonging to a group does not relieve them of their individual conscience. That another person's vulnerability creates responsibility, not opportunity. I would ask them to think about who they intend to be when their friends are watching and doing the right thing might cost them their place among those friends.
And I would teach leaders the same thing.
Somewhere along the way, we created separate vocabularies for character and leadership when they were never separate. The employee who speaks when everyone else stays silent and the young person who intervenes when something feels wrong are exercising the same human capacity. So is the executive who refuses to hide behind procedure when procedure has clearly failed to capture the whole of what is happening.
They are answering the same question: Who am I when doing the right thing becomes inconvenient?
We cannot write enough policies to answer that question for people. We cannot compliance-train our way out of it. We cannot put enough values on enough walls. Nor can we simply tell people to "have integrity" while designing environments in which speaking carries enormous personal cost and silence carries none.
Eventually, someone has to decide that another human being matters more than comfort, status, belonging, convenience, or plausible deniability. And leaders have to build cultures in which that decision is supported rather than punished.
That is the work of integrity. It is also the work of leadership.
The greatest threat to a culture is not simply the presence of people willing to cause harm. It is the presence of too many people who have learned how to stand close to harm without believing it belongs to them to interrupt it.
