Reducing Ethical Risks
How to understand ethics and take action to reduce ethical risks in product development?
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
Ethics is an abstract and broad topic that has been discussed for thousands of years in the academic field. It has recently been pushed to the forefront of attention due to the rise of AI.
Many digital product creators heard terms like data ethics, ethical AI, responsible design… daunting and exciting as they might sound, very few product people know how to embed product ethics in their daily job.
Ethical risk is one of the five types of risk, as Marty Cagan wrote in his book Inspired, I strive to reduce in a venture development process. I got the opportunity to learn about product ethics and practice making ethical product decisions in my job. I’d like to share my thoughts and approaches to reduce ethical risks in this article. Hopefully, this helps you take steps to communicate and practice ethics in your work as well.
Read on if you are ready.
Create Ethically
Businesses, products, AI, autonomous vehicles… Everything that’s not gifted to us by nature should be created ethically, meaning that it should be created with considerations of its potential impacts on society.
If the creator does not consider the ramifications of the creation in the creating process, the action of creation is unethical, regardless of the ethicality of the creation itself.
While you can’t guarantee something you create is ethical, you can always create it ethically.
Ethical Creation
It’s oversimplified to say that something ethical does good to the world and something unethical does harm. All of us create things that have both good and bad consequences. But good and bad in what way? We can’t conclude whether something is ethical or not without mentioning the value system we apply.
Forming Opinions about Ethics
Our value system is what allows us to evaluate the ethicality of a thing. Educating ourselves to form our own opinions about ethics is the prerequisite of making ethical decisions. Below is a quick summary of what I learned. (Feel free to skip to the next section if you like)
Various ethical theories and frameworks have been created since the 18th century to evaluate ethics. The two most popular ones are the utilitarian approach and the deontological approach. These approaches have sub-branches. Rule utilitarianism and act utilitarianism are two sub-branches of utilitarianism, for example. But how do we apply these approaches in decision-making?
Think about this question: “Is tier pricing an ethical business decision?”
Utilitarians would say yes, as tiered pricing allow different customers to enjoy a service. It maximizes utilities for the largest number of people. However, Deontologists might say no if the intent of using tiered pricing is to make as much profit as possible instead of making fair transactions with individuals.
Consider a different question: “Is approving a drug with a common side effect an ethical decision?”
Depending on how serious the disease is and many patients can be treated, rule utilitarians might say no if the total harm outweighs the total benefits. Yet act utilitarians might say yes as the drug produces the best possible results for desperate patients.
What we believe and how we think about ethics shape our decisions. Same applies to a team, a company, and a community. If you want to make ethical decisions, you need to be clear about the value system you use.
Reducing Ethical Risks
I said reducing ethical risks is part of my responsibilities, but it’s not just my responsibility to do that. Everyone in a product team can and should practice ethics to reduce ethical risks. There are 3 ways to do it:
1. Voice concerns about ethics2. Audit products decisions with codes of ethics 3. Find solutions when ethical risks are identified
# 1: Voicing Concerns
Asking questions is the most effective way to raise the team’s awareness about ethics. I use the ethical stack created by James Lynden to brainstorm questions. It includes 6 components:
1. Affordances: What does your product make possible?2. Duties: What rules must everyone with these affordances follow?3. Values: What values are at stake, given what our product affords?4. Consequences: What are the real-world consequences of the use of our product?5. Stakeholders: Who is affected by your product’s affordances, both directly and indirectly, and what matters to them?6. Contexts: What situations create a new moral context which needs reacting to?
James shared a lot of examples in his original post. The ways I voice my concerns sound like the following:
“Product X allows group A to do (Value Proposition), but it also allows/prevents/endangers group B … We learned a lesson from Product Y.”“In this decision, we need to find a balance between X and Y… Option A has the advantages of .., option B has the advantages of ...”"Group A might not be the direct users of our product, but they can be influenced by in ... ways, how do we answer questions such as ....?""How do we react if (Scenario X) happens?""How do we respond if someone/our stakeholder asks about ...?"
Try them out! You will be surprised by how effective and well-perceived they are.
# 2: Auditing Decisions
There are many opportunities to raise questions about ethics throughout the product development cycle. Here are the five milestones and the corresponding example questions.
1. When a business opportunity is assessedExample question: "Could this opportunity do more harm to group A than benefitting group B?"2. When an idea is evaluated
Example question: "Can this idea be taken advantage of to do something harmful?"3. When a solution is designedExample question: "Is this the best solution given our ethical values?"4. When data needed are identifiedExample question: "Do we need these data? Is the data collection approach biased?"5. When a business model is being createdExample question: "What's the downside of making profits this way?"
I suggest to set up an “audit schedule” based on the milestones. When conducting an audit about product ethics as an expert, I follow these 3 steps:
1. Review community/company/team’s value2. Identify the core and fringe stakeholders 3. Apply codes of ethics
There are codes of ethics in data collection, use of data, design, business… You can accelerate identifying ethical risks by familiarizing yourself with codes of ethics in your domain.
# 3: Finding Solutions
Once an ethical risk is identified, the next step is to brainstorm solutions. A solution can be an alternative way of doing the same thing with less negative consequences, abandoning the idea, or finding help from outside the team to correct the idea or do more research on the problem.
Most organizations have teams and experts you can reach out to for help. The goal here is to learn about the ethical risks as much as possible. The more we know about the risks, the less damaging they are.
Conclusion
Reducing ethical risks is an ongoing learning process. It takes time and effort to understand and practice ethics as an individual, a team, and a company. It’s everyone’s responsibility to be educated about ethics and take action when something unethical is anticipated.
I hope you feel more confident in participating in discussions about ethics and practicing ethics in your work after reading this article. We’ve got a long way ahead of us.
Read More
- Ethics can’t be a side hustle by Mike Monteiro on where start do good work
- A Designer’s Code of Ethics by Mike Monteiro
- Data, Ethics, and AI by IDEO Stories on how to ethically design intelligent systems.
- Product Ethics by Mind the Product
- Data Ethics Canvas by Open Data Institute, a framework to develop ethical guidance and evaluate projects involving data.
- Product Ethics Canvas by James Lynden, a workshop tool to guide discussion about ethics in product development.
- Five product ethics guideline by Roman Pichler
- The Rise of the Ethical Product Designer by Ben Rowe, which summarizes 8 questions to ask when adopting ethical ways of designing products
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This publication is dedicated to venture design. In my future posts, I will share more of my experience building venture products including tools, frameworks, and activities. Please subscribe to this publication if you are interested.
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