The Integrity Talks

Leaders themselves are most often the cause of an unsafe working environment. Trade union FNV received 370 reports in just a few weeks on an unsafe working atmosphere in the media and culture industry in the Netherlands. The FNV hotline was launched in early December 2022, which was a first. The union found out that…

The Dutch read less in their own language, including e-books. The Dutch publications do not benefit from the growing popularity of books. 3 percent fewer books were sold in Dutch. In 2022, 0.4 percent more books were sold, and with 43 million copies even more than in the past 10 years. One in five books…

New South Wales arrests 648 offenders of domestic violence, just within four days. See, that is what I love about Australia: no half measures are being taken. New South Wales had grave concerns for the victims, so the authorities acted on it. The four-day operation resulted in those 648 arrests, with more than a thousand charges…

Children’s rights in Northern Ireland have regressed, according to three reports produced by the Children’s Law Center, and submitted to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. A wide range of NGOs, and over 1000 children, were consulted in the process. There are significant gaps in children’s rights. The best solution is the…

Canada pays indigenous communities for cultural genocide. Those communities will receive almost three billion Canadian dollars, which is approximately two billion euros. The compensation follows the children that have been abused and neglected in boarding schools for nearly a century. Thousands of those children died because of these crimes. In the past two years, the…

Long before a part of my story appeared in the book Exodus from the lighthouse, I attended talks by Naema Tahir. I read her works, and listened carefully to her words, which back then soothed some pain in me because of the recognition. I was in my early twenties, and had rebellious blonde locks. I…

Systems Innovation published an excellent image on why it is so difficult to change systems, see below. All those structures of different industries that are completely outdated deal with those aspects as shown on this illustration.

Oh, my. Follow The Money (FTM) criticizes the world of integrity. As the owner of The Integrity Talks, and as someone who knows this domain, I have the enormous urge to respond to the content of Matthijs Kaaks, lawyer, and author of the piece. Although Kaaks definitely brings across a couple of justified points, though…

Jacki and Lyle started a new podcast adventure, called ‘The rest is…’ I jointed them to talk about integrity. It turned out to be a truly marvelous conversation. Worth it if you want to spend time with your international industry family, and if you love the crazy and creative ones. Listen and judge for yourself. We talked about:…

In 2021, 58 percent of the Dutch population aged 15 or older did not consider themselves to belong to a religious denomination or philosophical group. A year earlier that was 55 percent, and in 2010, it was 45 percent. In particular, the proportion of Catholics has shrunk significantly. The decline among the Protestant churches and…

The Netherlands talks about a phased introduction of the mandatory confidential adviser act, so the legislative amendment, to support smaller organizations in having more time to prepare their ecosystem for this next step. The urgency of making a confidential adviser mandatory has increased, since we have spoken out on unacceptable behavior in the public debate.…

There have been more reports on unacceptable behavior in the past year, than ever before, especially on managers. Recently, confidential advisers have received many reports on unacceptable behavior. Two thirds of those complaints came from employees, and slightly less than half of the cases concerned managers. That is massive if you think of what managers…

Last year, I observed what was happening in the public debate around all possible forms of unacceptable behavior. My attention was mainly focused on the world of media and publishing; a domain known to me. Although each individual is ten thousand percent responsible for his or her behavior – so far this has mainly been…

Happy 2023. We start the year with disruption because the company Open AI managed to achieve major international, textual, and technical successes with their invention ChatGPT. Google is terrified of losing their ranking with their search engine and with Chrome. The company has put entire teams to work, to come up with new products in…

A new year, which means new rounds and new opportunities. A good time to rethink our moral values. What exactly are moral values? Does it make us better human beings? Do ideals have a significant impact on our well-being and happiness, indeed?   Moral values are basic principles or norms of behavior that guide our…

At the end of 2022, there are a couple of interesting developments around the governmental bodies in the Benelux and integrity. Let’s start with Belgium. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Civil Service Petra De Sutter wants to strengthen the integrity policy for the 65,000 federal civil servants, by appointing a coordinator / Chief Integrity…

Within an organization, we all want to gain insights on how people are put together, how they can become motivated, how to lead better and how to cooperate. The two methodologies for supporting this and for personal growth that we all know are DISC and Enneagram. Recently, another model has become increasingly popular, namely Life…

La fin d’une histoire…de radio dan, naar het heerlijke nummer van Marc Lavoine en Zoe Madimmi: Ja, de wortels van mijn Franse en Noord-Afrikaanse origine blijven in sommige aspecten zichtbaar. Alleen wanneer het me uitkomt. 😉 Het einde van een radioverhaal genaamd Zwarte Prietpraat op NPO Radio 1, met Prem Radhakishun. Vannacht volgt de laatste uitzending. Hoewel Zwarte…

In recent years, my work has been focused on breaking free from Orthodoxy in a social context and not so much on the mild secularization processes that people can also experience. As a whistleblower and activist, I’ve researched some pretty extreme currents that are antithetical to human rights today – especially children’s and women’s rights.…

Cartoons are a powerful tool for reflection on ethics in the workplace. This e-book contains 151 cartoons on ethics and work, see below. Each cartoon highlights a view on ethics (an ethicism) and its risk. The cartoons can be used to address ethical issues at work in a visual and humoristic manner. Ethics is the…

Flevoland deals with the most aggression against politicians. Likewise, the Dutch province has the highest percentage of politicians who have seen colleagues not comply with the rules. These conclusions appear on the back of the figures in twelve fact sheets per province. The sheets provide an overview of the current state of affairs when it…

UNICEF Greece finds out (on the back of a recent poll) that eight out of ten (!) children have seen other children’s rights violated. In other words, 82% of the youth say that they have witnessed a violation of another child’s rights. Most of the children lack information on their rights as stated in the…

Integrity is an indispensable quality for public organizations. To uphold integrity, public organizations are encouraged to implement specific integrity policies. Yet, integrity violations still occur within the public sector despite these measures, sometimes even daily. Therefore, it is important to expand the knowledge and understanding of public integrity management. Various themes are relevant when it…

The year 2022 has shown that conservative, religious and primitive movements can reappear in no-time: There is one simple message in all of this, and that is that we need to protect humanity with all that we have. Because those movements of constraints and oppression can be back in full force and can destroy our…

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and mid-sized companies are the backbone of the global economy. They create close to 70% of jobs and GDP worldwide. But, amid warnings of a global recession, research from the World Economic Forum and the National University of Singapore Business School indicates that 67% of executives from SMEs cite survival…

This one is for the history books people. Sexism and age discrimination towards prime minister Sanna Marin and Jacinda Ardern. “A lot of people will be wondering: are you two meeting just because you’re similar in age and have got a lot of common stuff there – when you got into politics and stuff –…

Travel is a human right. Since the start of Dina-Perla Lodges in 2016, thus my shared home hospitality concept, I have experienced this idea more than ever. The way that people interact during travel, how they can truly see each other within their full humanity and how they can learn about each other’s culture and…

Merriam-Webster names ‘gaslighting’ the word of the year 2022. 2022 saw a 1740% increase in lookups for the word ‘gaslighting’, with high interest throughout the year. In an age of misinformation, thus fake news, conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls and deepfakes, the word ‘gaslighting’ is rightly chosen. To me, ‘gaslighting’ is the winner of the year, due…

Integrity requires a broader approach than just legal. The Dutch Raad van State, thus the Advisory Division of the Council of State, advocates to define integrity in a much broader sense. The Council argues that integrity issues are often handled too legally, while not all integrity issues – such as attitudes, manners and (private) behavior…

Following up my piece on unacceptable behavior, quiet quitting and moral burn-outs, let’s discuss moral burn-outs as being an epidemic. No, I don’t have stats. Nor have I conducted any researches. I am certain that others have done this for me. Likewise, I am a bit lazy when typing this on a Monday morning, so…

New York as a new law, namely The Adult Survivors Act. This law now makes it possible for survivors of sexual assault to file a lawsuit regardless of when the abuse occurred. Within the coming year, people can take legal action against the perpetrators, even if the statute of limitations on the crime has expired.…

The entire country is discussing the unacceptable behavior of Dutch presenter Matthijs van Nieuwkerk. These examples of unacceptable behavior are similar to what I have experienced in my working life – a couple of times in different settings. In fact, this is why I did not pursue Dutch journalism in the traditional sense long-term, even…

New Zealand wants to lower the voting age to 16. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced an amendment to the law to make this happen. The change comes after the Supreme Court ruled that a voting age of 18 is discriminatory and violates the human rights of young people, The Guardian reports. A group of…

Research done by TNO shows some alarming facts on bullies at work in the Netherlands. 8% of all employees have dealt with bullying at work. These employees miss seven days per year more from work than employees who are not victimized. Many of those people deal with serious health issues. At the beginning of my career,…

In the past year, a business relation of mine, not even a closed one for that matter, got attacked publicly by a so-called integrity expert. His reputation got ruined. He was warned against and called a charlatan and snake (amongst other things). Business-wise, I assume that there must have been some ground to point him…

New South Wales, Australia, passes a new law and makes coercive control a stand-alone offense. It is the first Australian state to do this. Yeah! The Netherlands should do the same. I cannot believe how slow the Netherlands is at adopting the right legislation to literally save lives. That is why I support what Mark…

Magic Lane launches a groundbreaking platform in intelligent, compact and privacy-friendly Maps, Location & Navigation services, including software development kits (SDK’s). The company officially enters the European market with this offer. The platform combines the large amount of qualitative map and data sources with smart algorithms. This allows companies, for example in cycling and micro-mobility,…

Be a lady, they said… Since we are talking about the major payment gap between men and women in the Netherlands, let’s talk about the rest as well. A must-watch:

Learning from mistakes is the main reason why my friend Robert Fink, also known as Zoltan, wrote his autobiography. Robert Fink travelled the world and wrote about his experiences in his book called Almost romances while travelling the world, published by Europe Books. Robert Fink had his craziest years during the pandemic, almost as if…

Minister Karien van Gennip of Social Affairs and Employment and Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf of Education, Culture and Science wrote a letter to the parliament about the so-called Multi-Year Plan for Self-Determination 2022-2025 to work on a change of mentality within closed-up communities and to increase the basic financial skills of women in dependency situations. In…

And it goes on and on and on and on… … Eleven former or serving French bishops have been accused of sexual violence, including the former bishop of Bordeaux, who has confessed to assaulting a minor 35 years ago. Jean-Pierre Ricard, a long-standing bishop of Bordeaux who was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2016, has…

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk issued an open letter to Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer at Twitter, urging him to “ensure human rights are central to the management of Twitter”. The letter follows reports of the sacking of Twitter’s entire human rights team and all but two of the ethical AI team…

In the Netherlands, we believe that everyone should be themselves. And that everyone can fully participate in society without infringing one’s right to self-determination. Unfortunately, for many people that is not yet the case. A large group of Dutch people, mainly women, have to deal with coercion when it comes to all kinds of choices…

Integrity procedures have acquired the status of a kind of pseudo-judicial system, but without the guarantees thereof, say Janny Dierx and Rob van Eijbergen in Dutch newspaper NRC. The integrity industry has degenerated into a people-oriented. This opinion piece is very much worth the read. Source: NRC.

Since I started the conversation, I need to follow up on it, I thought after publishing my story about Bessel van der Kolk and Zomergasten. A story that received wonderful responses via email and social media. I wrote: “There are even moments in which I wonder if I have repressed something, or if I don’t…

In the past year, I have been following the developments around the reformed school Gomarus in Gorinchem, the Netherlands. Now, the school is about to compensate two former students financially because they forced the two girls to stay in a room in school against their will in 2016. Moreover, the school forced the girls to…

Jolene Hettinga-Zagers (34) wordt directeur van EmpowerYou, een bureau op het gebied van loopbaanvragen, coaching, outplacement, re-integratie tweede spoor en UVW en training. Het bureau heeft als doel om professionals op de arbeidsmarkt te verbinden en in hun kracht te zetten, zodat ze wendbaar zijn en de snelle veranderingen op de arbeidsmarkt kunnen bijbenen. Hettinga-Zagers…

The Netherlands is fourth in the world ranking for children’s rights, the KidsRights Index 2022. The two biggest problems children in the Netherlands deal with are air pollution and long waiting lists in youth care, the children’s rights organization KidsRights said in the tenth edition of its ranking. KidsRights looks at how countries protect five…

Oliver Yeboah wordt CEO Blueplates, een online platform dat taxichauffeurs zonder eigen wagen koppelt aan auto’s die gedeeld worden. Recentelijk won het bedrijf de Taxi Innovatie Prijs 2022 voor de duurzame, milieuvriendelijke en toekomstbestendige oplossing om auto’s aan chauffeurs te kunnen koppelen. Eerder was Yeboah pastoor. Hij maakte in de afgelopen paar jaar een uitzonderlijke…