10x better at ethics
The concept of “10x better” is something many of us have heard about. Although the concept is often used loosely, it really resonates with me in the context of an organisations ability to operationalise ethics.
We’ve written about this extensively. Organisations are failing at ethics. This ethics failure has resulted in widespread distrust.
This isn’t a simple thing. It’s not a matter of good versus bad people doing good versus bad things. It’s complex and it’s systemic.
A lot of people want to do good. They have ethical intent. But, just like New Years Resolutions, few follow through. This applies to indviduals (myself included) and institutions. We refer to this as the ethical intent to action gap.
As we’ve built Greater Than Learning, our services firm has evolved. We’re no longer doing complex ‘whole of organisation’ projects. We’re no longer engaged in implementations. We have a distinct focus on executive advisory and virtual workshops. This is high leverage stuff that we are uniquely positioned to do. We have demonstrated that we can achieve massive uplift across industries and geographies.
For instance, our Better Disclosure Work consistently demonstrates metrics that matter.
“The Better Disclosure Canvas is the best tool I’ve used in a long time. It’s a game changer for disclosure and helping overcome the common Agreement Bypass Bias.”
— David Di Sipio, Founder at UX Psychology and Host of Designing Behaviour Podcast
We rarely have the opportunity to run these programs with big sample sizes, control for variables and do all the great stuff we’d like to. That’s why we’re collaborating with The Kellogg School of Management’s Trust Project. We’re adding far more rigour and will have more and more data to share over the coming months.
But, although rigour matters, the early results suggest we are making incredible gains in an area that is too often dismissed.
In the context of consumer data sharing - particularly consent based data sharing - we’ve demonstrated similar uplift.
In fact (compared to out of the box approaches), when consumers are actually given choice (true optionality, no dark patterns), our design patterns (which are backed up by an entire toolkit) have literally demonstrated an 8x increase in the propensity people have to willingly and happily share data.
These models and methods have been integrated into things like the Consumer Data Right in Australian and Open Banking in the UK. They’re being used by practitioners and teams all around the world.
“Our approach to consent-driven data sharing has drawn from their frameworks, principles, approaches, and their broad experience in various jurisdictions.”
— Michael Palmyre, Design and Research Lead at CSIRO’s Data61
But perhaps our most exciting work has been in the field of operationalising ethics. This is really important to us. We’ve spent years thinking about this stuff. We’ve spent years doing this stuff. We’ve learned and lot and as a result, recognise how far we still have to go.
Our approach is enabling tiny ethical actions to be seamlessly embedded into daily behaviours. This isn’t a compliance thing. This is a doing innovation right thing.
We support these habit forming approaches with whole of organisation frameworks that enable organisations to overcome feel good statements and actually deliver on their ethical intent.
“All modern data enabled organisations are quickly realising how important data ethics is. But high level principles and feel good statements are not enough. Data ethics need to be translated into meaningful action. Greater Than X is one of the few organisations that has the capability to support enterprises in taking action and making progress.”
— David Watts, former Commissioner for Privacy and Data Protection, Victorian Govt.
Our intent is really clear. We want to help uplift the entire market by an (or multiple) order of magnitude (hence “10x better”). It’s clear we can only do this is we work together to overcome the (largely) failing, principles driven approaches of today. We need action oriented toolkits embedded into our daily learning, thinking, doing and being.
So, if you wanna start getting hands on with the approaches we use to achieve the outcomes described above, check out our 10x Workshop Series.
If you have questions, throw them at me. I’m here to learn and to help.
