Responsible Tech: Empowering your team to make the right decisions

“How might we enable our whole organisation to make the right decisions where that’s possible, and positively manage dilemmas where it’s not?”

It’s a simple, powerful question. Enabling your team to diagnose the choices and dilemmas of responsible-use and come to an intentional, informed decisions is the key to adoption. Without the tools, support, empowerment, capability and confidence to rapidly and repeatedly navigate decisions – from simple choices through to wicked problems – your organisation won’t shift from theory to practice.

So if your ethics principles have remained unused and your governance is gathering dust on the shelf, if your ethics board is barely scratching the surface and your project teams are confused, focus on enabling for decisions and dilemmas.

But what does good look like? Here are a few pointers to consider:

Scalable: Your organisation needs to be able to scale and handle the volume of decisions necessary to address your developing technology strategy. For example, an ethics board might start with promise, but on their own will rapidly be overwhelmed by growth in technology adoption.

Proportionate and realistic: Seniority of involved parties should be appropriate for a decision's risk, opportunity and cost. Triage must be swift and simple; escalation and delegation clear; with the ability to address internal projects, external development and 3rd party services/platforms. Familiarity will decrease load, but efficient and effective approaches massively increase the chance of adoption over those that are burdensome and over-engineered.

Inclusive: More than a few well-intentioned people sitting round a table. Grow the breadth of voices heard, look inside and outside the organisation. Invite alternative opinions. Leverage your capabilities to solicit input. Avoid tech-solutionism and missing fat-tail/high-impact groups by thinking outside a purely statistics-driven risk approach.

Outcome-driven: Discussions turn into talking-shops too easily. The team needs to be focused on gaining resolution and agreement. Tooling should recognise the stages of decision making and drive these, team members should be empowered to make accountable calls and supported in doing so.

Flexible: There’s no slowing the pace of technology innovation. Just around the corner are a hoard of new technologies with impact ?– AI, Metaverse/XR,Web3, neurotech, quantum. These require ongoing steer of your technology strategy, and of the opportunities, risks and potential human costs involved. Position your organisation to tackle a changing mix of technology decisions and not be restricted to a single technology type.

By focusing on enabling and empowering for decisions and dilemmas, the actions required to succeed are surfaced. Governance, guidelines, frameworks, education and tools fill a visible gap with clear dimensions for design and measures for success.

If you’d like to hear how?TechInnocens?can help your organisation become a leader in making inclusive, informed decisions on responsible-use without sacrificing innovation, get in touch at?techinnocens.com?or mail us at [email protected]

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