Social Solution Design for the Ethical Use of Technology: Because Principles and Dialogue are Not Enough
We must do more than talk about it- we must be about it.
Our world is in a crisis — we are increasingly divided. Whether it’s another school shooting, bad behavior going viral through a hashtag, controversial immigration policies, or people calling the police on black people for simply existing, our society is facing increasing division. That division is impacting our homes, our neighborhoods, our workplaces and our world. At the center of this increasing division is technology that has shifted the balance of power in our society and ushered in a new industrial revolution, the fourth industrial revolution. In order to bridge this divide and reunite our society, we must start with the organizations who created the technology that powers this fourth industrial revolution. Some call for new principles to ethically guide tech companies, while others demand decisive action like canceling contracts of organizations with partisan controversy like the NRA and Planned Parenthood. One thing I know for sure is that we won’t get through this era by publishing principles and talking. We must do more than talk about it- we must be about it. We must create an ethical decision-making framework for the use of technology that is held accountable through compliance and is inclusively determined by our stakeholders and society.
The Making of a Fourth Industrial Revolution Crisis
The fourth industrial revolution represents the most powerful transformation we’ve seen in our world driven by human innovation. Like industrial revolutions of the past that were driven by steam, electricity, and computing, the fourth industrial revolution is again reshaping our world, but this time it’s being driven by the power of data and intelligence.
The innovations of the fourth industrial revolution include powerful technologies like artificial intelligence, 3d printing, biotechnology, robotics, autonomous vehicles, nanotechnologies, quantum computing and IoT. These technologies come with incredible benefits, and introduce new challenges as well. The great benefits such as increased efficiency also create labor market disruption where people will face job loss and reduced work opportunities. New products and services come with new privacy concerns where unprecedented data and intelligence is being used to manipulate perception, elections and public policy. And with the rise of global incomes, we expect to see rising inequality, more instances of homelessness, unequal access to education and other concerns. And as we see improvements in quality of life, rising social tensions for partisan issues such as sexual identity, gun control, and immigration are increasingly revealed.
20% of U.S. respondents trust businesses to maintain their data’s safety — IBM Survey
Corporate responsibility initiatives alone will not carry us through the fourth industrial revolution. Two-thirds of consumers responded that it was either “Somewhat Important” or “Very Important” for brands to take a stand on social/political issues. And according to the Public Affairs Council’s 2016 survey, eighty-six percent of large companies (making over $15B in annual revenue) expect pressure to engage in social issues to increase over the next three years. Unfortunately, there is no barometer for safe brand engagement with these increasingly partisan issues.
The trust brands gain for taking a stand in environmental protection, ending discrimination, and protecting human rights abroad can quickly be lost in this new highly politicized territory. As evidenced by Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, high growth companies are still discovering the challenges that new technology introduces such as data privacy issues. A point in time design flaw in an API can be hacked into a political campaign controversy that leads to new regulation policy that leads to a record breaking $120b single day loss. Perhaps that’s why a recent IBM survey revealed that only 20% of U.S. respondents trust businesses to maintain their data’s safety . Customers aren’t the only ones with concerns around trust, employees are voicing their concerns as well. Major tech giants such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft among others have seen petitions from employees requesting the cancelation of contracts with the U.S government and the creation of policies that uphold an ethical responsibility for the use of the technology they build and license to others.
We also must cultivate new spaces of engagement, transparency, and influence for employees…
All of these companies and others are experiencing a social crisis. The fourth industrial revolution has created a social divide so large that it’s stretched a gap between companies and their stakeholders. A gap that is full of highly charged and partisan issues. Consider that forty-four percent of people in the top two political parties in the US can only agree on one thing, and it’s that they “almost never agree”. There is no wonder why these partisan challenges are increasingly difficult to respond to. Marketing campaigns are not enough to protect brands from the conflicts surrounding organizations like the NRA, U.S. Customs & Border Patrol, Planned Parenthood and Occupy ICE.
Technology Needs a Framework for Ethical Use of Technology
In order to address these challenges we must bridge the social divide, uniting our communities, stakeholders and finding common ground. It is only on common ground where we can begin dialog and collaboration that enables us to take action together, united, to improve the state of the world. To find this common ground we must cultivate new spaces of engagement, transparency, and influence for employees and stakeholders of companies who make these technologies that are changing our world.
Introducing: Social Solution Design
To achieve this I created a methodology for stakeholder collaboration and action called Social Solution Design. Social Solution Design (SSD) is an ethical decision-making framework to guide the use of technology. In practice, it is a social simulation think tank for inclusive groups of corporate stakeholders (customers, employees, non-profits, policy advisors, members of the community and executives) powered by collaboration, design and data tools. SSD methodology enables organizations to reveal a deeper level of awareness of the challenges and bias our society is struggling with. With increased awareness gained from SSD, we can create win/win solutions, partnerships and customer success that shape our society in good ways so that our brands end up on the right side of history. With a data driven approach to identifying awareness and validating solutions, we can create impact predictions for corporations and their most controversial customers and prospects. Impact predictions can better guide us in judging the ways our technology is likely to impact our society in the future. With those predictions in hand, leaders who run companies and nations can make the best decisions about what technology we build, who we allow to use it, and why.
Bring together inclusive stakeholders in a way that could enable them to combine the best of all their ideas, and solutions, because no one person or group has the full answer…
Ultimately we are creating a more inclusive world by creating smarter and more ethical companies. By leveraging technology to enable our stakeholders with interactive, data-driven, real-time, collaborative experiences we can ensure that our companies can better predict the impact of our technology on the future. We can enable our stakeholders to ask, listen, share, understand and support one another, for the sake of a healthier society. And we can enable customer innovators to build win/win solutions that make them and their customers successful, and keeps us operating with our values, culture and integrity intact. With this methodology in place executives can make decisions about what business we’re in, who we do business with and why.
The Secret to Ethics through Social Solution Design: Old Strategies + New Strategies
The secret behind Social Solution Design is the marriage of the relatively new simplicity of design thinking, the tried and true strategic method of scenario planning from the 1950s, and the recently improved applications of AI-powered machine learning predictions.
Each Social Solution Design experiment is rooted in a crisis scenario with a single customer and multiple scenarios of technology use by a specific vendor who needs to make a decision on the ethical use of their technology. I learned the basics of scenario planning from Peter Schwartz who has been kind enough to share his experiences, stories and connections with me over the past 4 years. Those brief revelations led to what has felt like light years of personal growth for me and my career.
In addition to scenario planning we’ve introduced design thinking to make it easier to engage a group of diverse and inclusive stakeholders, to drive interaction with the scenarios and capture real-time insights through surveys. Those surveys are then combined into a machine learning prediction model to predict the likelihood of positive and negative impact on the world. The survey insights and predictions are then made available to executives who have difficult decisions to make. Executives ultimately own the decision of approving or denying product use by crisis clients. Leaders benefit greatly by enabling all stakeholders to have a say in matters of ethical use of technology, by uniting the business and closing the loop on sensitive issues. The SSD process would be repeated at contract renewal to ensure continued alignment with corporate values and ethics policies.
The Inspiration Behind Social Solution Design
In 2015 the loss of my brother in a mass shooting drove me to an even deeper commitment to use technology for social good, expanding my personal mission to end violence in America. Attempting to heal from my grief the following year I turned my commitment to ending violence into a campaign called Think Don’t Squeeze (#ThinkDontSqueeze) and built a methodology around it to leverage collaboration, design, and data to enable communities to come together and form deeper understanding and solutions to these complex social issues.
Participants in Think Don’t Squeeze events were enabled to drive divergent ideation for new and better solutions to the violent social problems which have persisted and increased in pervasiveness over the years. Attendees at our events were empowered to go beyond mere ideas. They learned to collaboratively prototype and validate their ideas as solutions using the #ThinkDontSqueeze toolkit for collaboration, design, and data.
The mission of #ThinkDontSqueeze, inspired by my brother, was to bring together inclusive stakeholder in a way that could enable them to combine the best of all their ideas, and solutions. No single person, organization or group has the full answer to a problem as complex as violence. Through effective collaboration, design and data, everyone with a piece of the solution (inspired by their real life and unique experiences) can contribute to the larger, more strategic plan to end violence. My hope coming from a community where “snitches get stiches”, was if we could make it easier for victims of violence to cooperate with emergency response workers, non-profits, public policy, private corporations and activists then we could finally disrupt the cycle of violence, and solve these critical social problems for good. Ethical use of technology is an extension of the mission of Think Don’t Squeeze because if war mongers and hate groups gain access to your powerful technology, it can further their capability of inciting more widespread violence and destruction of our society.
In an era where it feels like every other weekend employees are writing petitions to protest crisis customers, individuals go viral with hashtags over bbq and lemonade and CEOs are issuing statements to defend their corporate values, I saw a larger opportunity to help companies include stakeholders similar to what we were able to accomplish with #ThinkDontSqueeze. I created Social Solution Design to deliver a vision where all stakeholders have a say in how we ethically do business and how the technology we build will shape our world. With Social Solution Design we can finally predict our impact and make decisions in the fourth industrial revolution to build smarter and more ethical companies. If you agree with this then like, comment and share to make this more than a dialogue. Ask your organization to take action and implement Social Solution Design and join the revolution for the ethical use of technology!
Think Don’t Squeeze is a non-profit program that advocates for the use of design thinking and data science to disrupt the cycle of violence that has gripped our society. Join the movement and download the #ThinkDontSqueeze Toolkit to discover the tools you can use to bring radical change to the development of solutions for violence and other social issues at. www.thinkdontsqueeze.com
