In a recent my blogpost I have mentioned that I am a physicist by education. My favorite physicist was the Nobel-prize winner Richard P. Feynman. His book „Surely you‘re joking, Mr. Feynman“ was the reason I actually decided to study physics. Feynman‘s maybe greatest talent, one of which he was acutely aware of and prided himself on, was that he could explain the most complex ideas in the simplest terms. This earned him the nickname the „Great Explainer“.

It is this example of Feynman that is inspiring me to look for analogies and simple terms and images to explain and visualize concepts of integrity and compliance, risk and control to other people to make them better understand them. So here‘s another try.

Having recently written about the Integrity of Turkish Coffee, and reflecting on other analogies and metaphors to explain the nature of integrity, I had the following thought:

Integrity is an expression of being one, of being whole. All required elements, constituents are present, nothing essential is missing. If you take even one of the essential constituents away, the property of integrity is violated, broken, gone.

We often use analogies to light in the language of compliance: „black and white“, „grey areas“, „sunshine Act“ … This language is drawn from the idea that we can see very well in bright light, whereas sinister things can be hidden in the shadows.

But there is more to build upon from the light analogy: What is the color of Integrity? It is White. Because white is the aspect of the integrity of light. It is the presence of all colors of the visible spectrum added together. So the color White has the notion of wholeness, of being one integrated, complete unbroken entity that makes up the idea of Integrity.