Swift, Deliberate Change
Responsible Tech: The Next Evolution of an Industry
The term Responsible Technology broadly addresses the evolution of how we should be building and using technology. Move fast and break things has been the mantra of the tech sector for far too long. The era of operating without regard to consequences has to end. We need a new guiding principle. One that recognizes the pace we’re moving yet defines the outcomes we want. We don’t want to break things. We do however want things to be different. What we need is swift, deliberate change.
We as technologists must develop a greater awareness for how and under what circumstances technology is built and applied. If we want our accomplishments to last, we must start asking ourselves critical questions. Does what we’re doing meet our principles of quality? Do they represent how we want the world to perceive us and our work? Are we creating a legacy our children would be proud of? Or will we continue doing what’s expedient without regard for consequences down the road?
We couldn’t have held a discussion like this a few years ago. Numerous initiatives focused on AI and ethics have sprung up around the world. The focus on climate and the availability of green tech is accelerating. People are thinking about Public Interest Technology and the extent that bias permeates data and algorithms has become widely recognized. More broadly, business is begging to address how to take all stakeholders into consideration.
Simply put, technology has been woven into the fabric of society at every level - from banking, to healthcare, to social services - everything we do is impacted by and in many ways shaped by technology. Our collective experiences this past year served as a catalyst for a sea change in how we view many of the amazing innovations appearing all around us. Now we need to move swiftly to break from the errors of the past. To be more deliberate in how we build and apply what gets built. We want to change the historic and systemic inequalities that have been embedded into much of our technology infrastructure. We need to be more responsible.
Momentum is growing. It’s happening in all corners of the tech ecosystem. Investors, Academics, tech workers, policy makers are all grappling with ethics, principles, and purpose. They’re searching for what Responsible Technology even means. What should the new norms be? The tech sector is like a teenager approaching adulthood. It’s realizing it has bills to pay and there are consequences for its actions.
This new awareness didn’t happen overnight or even as a result of the pandemic. It’s been growing over the past several years. People like Larry Fink at Blackrock, one of the world’s largest asset managers, has been outspoken about the move towards stakeholder value - away from an exclusive focus on shareholders. The World Economic Forum and the Business Roundtable have also published statements along the same lines.
We are collectively beginning to explore not just if and what technology should be built but in what context it should be used. How does it benefit society? Facial recognition is a prime example of a broken technology - the people who built it lacked an awareness and trained it badly, so it failed to recognize significant portions of the population. But, aside from how badly it was trained, society is also discussing under what conditions it should or shouldn’t be utilized. Tech workers in some of the largest companies are standing up to have more say over how their work is sold and used. We’re at an inflection point that is shaping how society builds, adopts, and deploys new technology - hopefully more responsibly.
The emphasis on responsibility, ethics, principles and purpose necessitates a focus on organizational culture. As we’ve written in these posts previously, every organization has a culture. Most just evolve organically. Culture and Organizational Resolve (COR) is a methodology intended to provide organizational leaders tools for navigating the inevitable ethical challenges. We’ve all seen the headlines about companies with toxic cultures, inequitable compensation practices, poor quality products, and a lack of alignment with external partners on things like privacy and security. COR provides a framework for considering how principles once defined, propagate out to all aspects of the organization; from governance, to HR/People policies, to Product/Service development practices, and alignment with external entities - customers and partners up and down the supply chain etc.
We want to help operationalize the principled pursuit of purpose. Larry Fink and the others have help define the business imperative for delivering on broad stakeholder value, now people need help with implementation. We think of COR as the third leg of the management stool. The Lean methodology is for validating problems and business models while Agile and Human Centered Design help build products and services in support of those models. COR provides a framework for developing for intentionally defining the organizational culture that wraps around the business model and product development practices guiding the pursuit of purpose. This combination is in essence the quality of the organization. It’s an intangible characteristic of how the organization operates.
With the growing collection of people engaged bringing a new era of Responsible Technology into reality, the era of Swift, Deliberate Change has begun.
