Change Strategies for Tech, Data and AI Ethics Officers

I was recently asked to speak at a workshop for government officials and data scientists by the Head of Data Ethics for the UK Government Digital Service. The workshop was about what kind of skills those who are put in charge of organisational data ethics might need to succeed, and caused me to reflect on my own professional experiences and the many conversations I’ve had with people in tech who are trying to make ethics meaningful on the ground.

As co-founder of Consequential, we believe it’s important to offer whatever insights we have to people in ethics and responsible tech roles so they can make a difference. So we’re offering our view, and would love to know if we’re hitting the mark — does this reflect your experiences?

In our view, as table stakes for a data ethics officer of any kind, you will need some technical knowledge of data systems and processes, and a background that allows you to understand the implications of those systems. But beyond that, this role is about being a changemaker. The skills, strategies and qualities you need to successfully embed ethical decision-making in the heart of an organisation is where this article will focus (our views on specific skills, backgrounds, and whether or not there should even be ‘ethics officers’ is another post entirely).

Many ethics roles are new to organisations — they often have cross-cutting portfolios and a need to work across teams and layers to prove value. And while ethics might be new, that type of role is not. In fact, I’ve held this type of role before as part of a senior business team for technology in a bank. My role was newly created and had never existed within the organisation before. It contained all kinds of vague portfolios like ‘organisational culture’, and was tied to the overall success of the organisation and its products — very similar to ethics.

I believe there are some universal challenges for these types of roles, and some corresponding strategies that can be used to bring ethics into the DNA of an organisation.

Firstly, let me outline some of these universal challenges. They tend to take on two forms, which on the surface may seem conflicting but can actually be true at the same time.

The first form of challenges are about the role being seen as a hero — with the belief that now that they exist ‘ethics’ is solved and nothing else needs to be done. Often in this there is a poorly defined job description, with vaguely titled responsibilities like ‘ethics’. What this actually means in practice and what is relevant to a job or not isn’t understood by anyone in the organisation, and so people place onto the role whatever dreams they may have. The role can quickly become a catch-all bucket for anything that comes up.

The second form of challenge is when the role is not seen as core to the business — it’s seen as ‘a nice to have’. The role is then treated as something warm and fuzzy that can hang out to the side while the real business gets done. This might mean people don’t come to you for core business decisions. That can make it very hard to position yourself somewhere that affects change and hard to stay relevant. The other reality of this is that the position is unproven and no one is going to hire a huge team, which leaves a very limited capacity. Your limiting factor is time (and possibly the want to have a life).

The last biggest challenge in this space is that more often than not, you probably don’t have any formal power in terms of controlling a product budget or having product teams reporting directly to you. That means you can’t direct money as you see fit, you can’t evaluate performance against ethical standards, and you can’t set the expectations that come with that power.

Those are the challenges. Some strategies people can use in order to fight these challenges and embed ethics at the heart of the organisation are:

1. Knowing the organisation inside and out, and operating in familiar ways right at its heart
2. Having strong sponsorship and building relationships
3. Defining the boundaries of the role
4. Communicating impact and proving value

Let’s look at this in a bit more depth:

Strategy: Knowing the organisation.

A big part of the job will be listening. What matters to who, what gets talked about, how is success defined, who has influence, what are the layers of the organisation and who does each layer listen to? What are the norms and behaviours of the organisation? Create a map of the organisation and find out its strengths and what it values — what language is effective and what motivates change? You will need to take all of this and build it into your overall approach. Then data ethics officers will need to divide the attention of the role between the organisation’s vision and its core. You have to be strategic in knowing when to stay high level and support the future direction of the overall business and its leaders, and when to do a deep dive into a specific project or product to produce a case study of the change and value ethics can create. Prioritise proving value right away so you can build capital that will allow you to do the rest longer term.

Strategy: Finding Strong Sponsorship & Building Relationships.

Ensure you have strong sponsors within the leadership who see the value of what you do and ask for your voice. This can be a longer-term campaign, where you do anything and everything you can to provide value to the people that will cc you into threads, ask you at meetings what your thoughts are, and ensure your recommendations are being implemented. At the end of the day, an organisation is about people and relationships. The more you can relentlessly build relationships across the organisation and put them to good use, the more effective you will be. The other core part of managing your capacity is building an infrastructure that allows you to scale what you’re doing. Finding and identifying champions and ways to outline what should happen when you can’t be in the room is critical.

Strategy: Define Boundaries.

If you don’t define the boundaries of the role yourself, others will do it for you. What is it you do, and what is it you don’t do? Have a story to tell about these boundaries — how do they contribute to the success of the organisation? Be visible in reinforcing those boundaries — people need to know what to come to you for, and what to solve on their own.

Strategy: Communicating Impact.

All of that is important, but means nothing if you aren’t able to communicate your impact. Alongside doing the work, you need to tell the story. What have you done, what happened as a result, and how did it support the objectives of the organisation. Who else knows about it and can tell the story on your behalf? Alongside the people map of the organisation, you need a communications channel map — how do people get information, and how can you use those channels for yourself? Look at both formal and informal communication methods, like all hands calls and recognition awards, coffee chats with executives, and newsletters.

Taken together, all of these strategies and the corresponding skills needed to pull them off are integral to the success of any Ethics Officers inside an organisation.

A final note — there is not much room for ego in these roles. Inherent in the role of an ethics officer is that you can’t (and shouldn’t) own ethics for the entire organisation. You are there to support whatever you have defined ‘ethics’ to mean across the business, and this means you need to share the glory. You need to put the spotlight on the efforts of others, you need to be generous with ideas, and you need to prove the value of your portfolio — not of yourself. There needs to be genuine passion for the role, and genuine passion for the business and what it creates.

Because data ethics need to sit at the heart of the organisation and make a material impact on what it puts out into the world.

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We are Consequential. We do both big ‘I’ innovation, and little ‘i’ innovation to change the existing business landscape. This means we focus on both large-scale systems change within business and tech, and strategy and innovation within individual organisations to build their businesses and products in more responsible ways.

We critically challenge the norm — disruption, but for the common good.