Best Beginnings and their Responsible Innovation Journey with Consequence Scanning
By Matthew Black from Best Beginnings
If you had asked me what ‘Responsible Innovation’ was one year ago, I would have naively dismissed it as jargon used by digital agencies to stand out in a competitive market of digital solution development. With a bit of googling, I would have seen that it’s a more established notion than that — in fact, there are EU Commission policy papers on Responsible Innovation, and a substantial number of tech and business publications referencing the term in commentaries on big data.
I wasn’t aware that Responsible Innovation could and should be something understood and practised in digital organisations of all shapes and sizes — including charities! But in January this year, a workshop with Doteveryone and TNLCF Digital Fund made Responsible Innovation a very tangible practice for me to introduce to our team at Best Beginnings, and helped me understand the assets required in a team to make it work. This blog is going to talk about that journey, and what we’ve learned as a team.
Doteveryone defines Responsible Innovation as ‘making responsible business decisions about a technology product based on an understanding of the consequences.’
The workshop helped me think about this definition in three parts:
1. Why does Responsible Innovation matter?
2. How do organisations make collectively responsible business decisions?
3. How can an organisation think more about consequences?
I will go into each of these more deeply in the following sections.
Why does Responsible Innovation matter?
Thinking about the public perception of how technology impacts society, Doteveryone’s 2018 Digital Attitudes Report looked at the most universal digital technology used in society, and the basis for all new digital innovations: the internet. Rather unsurprisingly, the study showed that people see the internet as good for them as individuals, but less good for society as a whole.
This perception alone gives reason to the need for responsible innovation. The numbers highlight that people don’t just experience technology in isolation, but rather they experience technology with other people, within their communities and within their jobs. It is therefore the responsibility of new innovators to take responsibility not only for the individual that accesses their new technology, but for the society-wide impact that a new technology inevitably affects.
Delivering to the need for Responsible Innovation can be done by developing organisation wide practices to act on, influence and monitor collective responsibility.
Collective Responsibility: How do organisations make collectively responsible business decisions?
Recognition and ownership of collective responsibility are essential duties within any charitable organisation striving to ensure transparency, effective governance, and delivery of efficient, collaborative and impactful projects. However, recognition of responsibility and ownership of responsibility are different beasts. The former is widely present in a sector that attracts teams of socially driven individuals, but the latter requires regular and protected organisation-wide commitment to instil.
When in receipt of public funds to resource projects, charities are inherently accountable to the local communities that they serve.
Practical applications of this include organisation-wide consideration of:
- What does it mean to be accountable?
- What impact are we aiming to achieve?
- Is this impact in the interest of the communities we serve?
- How will we measure our impact?
- How will we share it with local communities?
- Why us?
- Are we the best people/organisation for the job?
- Is someone already doing this?
- Could someone do it better?
These questions are a starting point for unpicking the collective responsibility of an organisation, and are relevant in three pivotal areas of the work of an organisation:
At Best Beginnings, understanding and ownership of our collective responsibility is now a highly valued asset amongst our trustees, staff and volunteers. We see it as a fundamental organisational value that enables us to create sustainable, impactful and socially driven digital products that address health inequalities. Furthermore, we see added value in its ability to enable junior members of our team to make organisational decisions; this is undoubtedly empowering and improving efficiency within the organisation.
Putting this into practice: How can an organisations think more about consequences?
Discussion and acknowledgement of responsible innovation is not enough. Organisations must put mechanisms in place to review their innovations. One such mechanism developed by Doteveryone, is ‘Consequence Scanning’.
I recommend reading through the practical steps of running Consequence Scanning here, but essentially it is a dedicated time and structured process for organisations to consider the potential consequences of their work. At Best Beginnings, we have added protected Consequence Scanning sessions into our project timeline for the iterative development of our new app. We have scheduled consequence scanning for the end of each roadmap phase and will run a session between each feature iteration.
The first session we ran was a consequence scan of the very product principles that we have written for the development of a new digital platform that we are creating with TNLCF funding. It was important to have a multi-disciplinary voice reflect on our work, so we invited members of different teams at Best Beginnings to take part. The group identified potential unintended consequences of our principles; highlighting impacts that the Digital Team had not considered. We collectively agreed on the positive consequences that the Digital Team would focus on and chose the consequences that required mitigation.
Time will tell how this practice plays out in our digital projects, but the exercise has since been adopted by other teams at Best Beginnings, showing us that Responsible Innovation does not only apply to tech innovations, but to all delivery arms of an organisation.
