The Erosion Sequence™ – The Five Statges to Ethical Drift

The five-stage mechanism behind how ethical lines actually get crossed — not a character failure, a sequence.

Most ethics training operates on the assumption that professionals fail because they don’t know the rules. The data doesn’t support that. Attorneys who appear before disciplinary panels are not, in general, bad people or people who didn’t know the rules.

They are people who stopped applying them — one decision at a time, in a sequence with five identifiable stages.

The Erosion Sequence™ maps that sequence. Each stage has a warning sign. Each stage has an exit. The cost of the exit rises with every stage — and the exit itself changes, because by the time you reach the later stages, you can no longer hear the questions that would have stopped it earlier.

1. First Accommodation — a single decision, filed away as a special case.

2. Normalization Window — the same decision, repeated, until it stops registering as a decision at all.

3. Identity Drift — professional identity reorganizes around the pattern, with no felt entry point.

4. Locked Position — reversing the decision would mean admitting what it was.

5. Collapse Event — the outside world learns what the inside world has known for years.

The disciplinary proceeding does not create the problem. It dates it.

This is the framework behind every CLE program, keynote, and advisory engagement.

The companion instrument, The Erosion Profile™, identifies which of six patterns is driving your version of the sequence.

[View CLE & Speaking Programs] [Take the Erosion Profile™]

The Erosion Sequence™ is a trademark of PARC Productions Corp, USPTO Application Serial No. 99926135.