Many chief information officers (CIOs) recognize that tech teams with diverse backgrounds and mindsets can support innovation and drive transformational growth by openly sharing perspectives, focusing on user-centric design, and consciously exploring potential outcomes to avoid unintended harmful results. In this report, the fourth in Deloitte’s Diversity and Inclusion in Tech series, we share how CIOs can intentionally build environments that support responsible technological innovation.

Guarding against unintended consequences

A lifesaving innovation in automobile manufacturing—airbags—entered the mainstream in the early 1990s. By October 2001, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that airbags saved more than 7,500 lives. But these early airbags also killed 195 people during this period—mostly children and women under 5’2″.¹ Shorter drivers and children sit lower in the front seat, so they are more likely to absorb the full force of a deploying airbag. Until 2011, the federal government did not require crash testing with female dummies—only large male dummies.² If women and small passengers had been consulted, or even considered, during the design and testing, it’s likely that there would have been significantly fewer airbag-related deaths during these years. Now fast forward to today. While professions such as medicine have a Code of Medical Ethics—“first, do no harm”—technologists tend to lack an overarching, consistently applied code of ethics to guide their innovations, many of which have been developed with a focus on being first-to-market and revenue generation.

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and associate professor of the practice in media arts and sciences at MIT, agrees, “Technology has always been a catalyst for change, but technology has also been capable of harm. It sometimes causes harm even in situations where people are cognizant of its ability to cause harm.”³ Companies can waste vast amounts of time and money creating something that may exclude a customer group or providing a service that customers want but with undesirable side effects that must be fixed after deployment. Perhaps even worse, they may build solutions that undermine customer trust—think of the many problems that have resulted from lax data security and confusing privacy controls.

The good news is that many organizations are starting to recognize that innovation and ethical tech need to be taken into consideration together. The fifth annual MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte study of digital businesses found that companies who innovate more are more likely (76 percent) than companies who innovate less (43 percent) to have adopted policies that support their organization’s ethical standards for their digital initiatives. However, in companies who innovate more, a smaller percentage (57 percent) believe their leaders spend enough time thinking about and communicating the impact the organization’s digital initiatives have on society, while only 16 percent of companies who innovate less agree with this statement (figure 1).

While the need for ethical tech design is not new (see the sidebar, “From our vantage point: Ethical tech”), what is new is the accelerating speed at which companies can churn out technology-based innovations, many with unintended societal and business risks. In addition, artificial intelligence (AI) and descriptive analytics and data mining identify patterns can aid breakthroughs, but they can also perpetuate stereotypes and biases that are hidden in the data.

According to Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, our overall rate of progress is doubling every decade: “We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21^st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress.”⁴ With this exponential growth rate, laws and regulations intended to protect individuals from harm likely cannot keep up. Perhaps the key is to ensure that the needs of all potential customers are considered from the beginning of the design process. But codesigning with customers is easier said than done, especially for large organizations. Instead, Zuckerman encourages CIOs to focus on “ensuring there is a diverse set of voices at the table so that their collective understanding is less naïve and less biased.” He explains that diversity can help design teams detect unexpected problems and develop understanding of others’ sensitivities. “It can be helpful to have people on a team who are trained not just to say, ‘here is a problem I will solve it,’ but also to say, ‘how did that problem come about?’ This is really what it means to think critically about technology.”

* * *

Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Kristi Lamar
Managing director, CIO Program executive leader
Deloitte Consulting LLP
klamar@deloitte.com
+1 303 305 3026