As regular and long-time readers here know, Ethics Alarms is fond of useful analogies and metaphors from popular culture that illustrate regularly occurring ethics breaches, self-defeating irresponsible conduct, or the proper remedies or reactions to them, in society at large or various segments of it. Hence we have the Barn Door Fallacy, the Julie Principle, the Popeye, the Nelson (“Ha-ha!”), the Ripley, the Costanza, and quite a few others.
I was, just this morning, in a discussion with a bar ethics counsel regarding a serious problem in the legal world. It is a corrupt system that neither the legal profession nor the incompetent news media has let the public know about, one that amounts to a multi-level scandal that hurts everyone except the unscrupulous, greedy lawyers who participate in it. At one point she said to me, “You know, we have had the means available to address this all along, and it never occurred to us even when the solution was not only obvious, but right in our hands.”
And I thought of that moment above from “Jumanji.” At least the kid in the movie had an excuse, since he had been turned into a monkey….
Do you have some current candidates for an Ethics Alarms “Jumanji Axe”? Let me know about them in the comments.
Ethics Alarms 
I wonder if this fits the Jumanji Axe. I’m not sure it is quite the situation you seem to be describing – I can’t wait to hear the details on this scandal you’re working on, and what the solution is – but the first thing that came to mind is software.
In the industrial world, the push for software solutions to help control processes, track data, produce metrics, visualize the overall state of the company, etc is enormous, and vendors abound who attempt to develop and market those solutions. In my experience, when a company purchases a software package, it tends to under-utilize it, since often a software package has many capabilities and it is purchased to address one particular need. Later, another need arises, and too often a new software package is purchased to address that need (half the time because the vendors make a great sales pitch to the CEO and other higher-ups and make sure the boots on the ground don’t know whats going on until after the sale), when an already-purchased package has the capability to address the problem.
I would think a Jumanji-like situation really occurs when a company focuses so hard on getting the new software set up that they fail to realize that the very software tools they are using to gather data for the new suite could have done the job of the new suite, had they realized it up front.
Is this close, or am I missing the main thrust?
Yes, good example.
Here’s one that just happened to me today. I’m preparing a CLE program for the DC bar on Clarence Darrow’s ethics, and I can use a Bible for the section on the Scopes Trial. Since my wife died on Leap Year, 2024, I have been in chaos, and my bookshelves in particular, plus most of my library is in my son’s apartment a floor down, and he’s been moving stuff around. I know we have several Bibles, but I can’t find any of them, and I was looking for more than an hour, getting frustrated, and…remembered that I live next door to a church, and have for more than half my life. So I walked over, asked the first person I saw if I might borrow a Bible for a few days, and was told, “Of course! Here, keep this one.”