Designing for consent
Trust is at an all time low. This matters not just because trust disproportionately impacts bottom line business outcomes, but also because the relationship between data sharing and trust is becoming clearer. People want and expect control of their data. It’s no longer accepted that limited value is assigned to privacy. There is a tradeoff fallacy.
Our societies and economies are increasingly information driven. Information asymmetry, power imbalances and monopolies are threatening our ways of living. Individuals face increasing risk of manipulation, along with a variety of other harms that aren’t yet well understood. The ineffectiveness of the current model, particularly the lack of active participation from individuals, is resulting in billions of unrealised economic benefit.
With this as our backdrop, the question becomes:
How might we design a verifiably trustworthy, highly competitive and humanity-centric information society that truly benefits individuals and communities around the world?
At Greater Than X, our work is consistently demonstrating that this isn’t a zero-sum game, or rather, a race to the bottom. Ambitious organisations that demonstrate bold and courageous leadership can inspire a race to the top. They can inform and empower their customers in ways that encourage meaningful choice, active participation and realisation of new shared value.
Specifically, we’ve consistently demonstrated uplift across key outcome focus areas:
In fact, our core thesis at Greater Than X is that the most trustworthy organisations will eventually become the most valued. These organisations will gain access to more of the right customer data. This earned access to customer data will enable these leading organisations to deliver the most value, meaning and engagement. Designing these superior outcomes will result in the very same organisations winning their market.
But for organisations to make this shift — away from their current vertical and towards ‘horizontal’, data sharing enabled Lifestyle Services — they need to become adept at designing explicit data sharing events.
They must quit Deception by Design. They must banish Dark Patterns. They must evolve how they approach customer intelligence. They must evolve the metrics they optimise for. They must collaborate more meaningfully.
Although we’ve written a lot about consent-based data sharing in the past, including it’s challenges and limitations, much of our recent Open Banking and Consumer Data Standards work has focused on designing meaningful and empowering consent-based data sharing ecosystems.
Currently these ecosystems are largely constrained by the rules and standards governing bodies have established. However, they can evolve. They can lead us towards a more empowering and prosperous future.
Although a good chunk of this might sound niche, it isn’t. What we’re talking about here (and so much more) has the potential to (and already is) change many of societies interaction models.
This work will impact you, if it hasn’t already.
So, here’s an overview of some recent research we conducted for the Consumer Data Right Regime in Australia.
Although this work is focused on a specific jurisdiction, the practices are agnostic. They can be employed across jurisdictions and industries.
These approaches can help you:
- Deepen you understanding of the sociopolitical context impacting data sharing initiatives today
- Deepen your understanding of the motivational forces that might encourage or inhibit individuals from actively sharing their data, and
- Execute a strategy, series of tactics and focused metrics to help design more effective data sharing experiences quickly
If you want to dive deeper, get in touch. I’m the super friendly dude on the right ;)
