Responsible Tech Collective Pioneer Spotlight: Chris Northwood at Culture Shift
Ahead of the responsible tech curve
There are organisations at every stage of the curve in a responsible tech journey. Of all the people and organisations that I’ve spoken to in the last few months, Chris at Culture Shift must be on the leading edge.
At Culture Shift they are creating a tool which supports a happy, safe working environment, giving places a way to become more responsible through technology. Intrigued? Read on for thoughts on the design process, activating organisational change and much in-between.
Culture Shift’s purpose is enabling a positive experience at work or study. Giving people the ability to confidentially report incidents of harassment or bullying and organisations a tool to take proactive and protective steps in maintaining a safe and productive environment. Their platform is already providing support to a staggering 1.95 million people — and that figure is growing rapidly.
Knowledge, expertise and software
Culture Shift works with many organisations including universities, the NHS and private sector companies.
Chris explains that the tools benefits are both the carrot and stick.
The stick being that employers and education providers are expected to provide safe spaces and certainly have a plan in place for tackling sexual harassment, sexual violence and gender based violence.
The carrot is in creating a positive atmosphere with tools like this that can tackle bullying, leads to a more productive environment, greater staff retention, with a better and more creative team.
“One of our design goals is to remove barriers to reporting.”
Chris Northwood @ Culture Shift
Finding a pattern of unwanted behaviour using technology
Culture Shift provides software that organisations can unbox to tackle incidents which make places unsafe for people
“Our analytics can identify patterns of unwanted behaviour.”
Chris Northwood @ Culture Shift
The platform includes tools that fit the circumstances. From bigger incidences which might include sexual violence or abuses of power. And what many might consider more minor incidents, but these can help to build and see a wider pattern of behaviour. What’s clear is that these methods have reduced the barrier to report and have centred the survivor.
An ethical fit with Responsible Tech Collective
Culture Shift became a founder member of the RTC and what’s clear is that it was a decision born from place, mission, personal interest and ethics. The very business of Culture Shift is a responsible tech tool.
“Tech in society is so intertwined. We have an ethical responsibility as technologists.”
Chris Northwood @ Culture Shift
Chris talks a lot about impact, her mission to create a positive impact and good impact on the world, that these impacts are fully considered.
“I don’t think we talk about ethics enough, certainly compared to other engineering disciplines such as civil engineering and mechanical engineering. In software development, there can tend to be a focus on technical skills rather than how the application of the software affects society.”
Chris Northwood @ Culture Shift
The core of Culture Shift’s product is about working in a responsible way, which makes them a natural collaborator for the RTC.
Competing ethical concerns
Balancing the different drivers in an ethical platform is a common topic of discussion within the RTC membership. If you’re interested in joining this debate then be sure to follow Culture Shift on Twitter and LinkedIn.
For Culture Shift the key balance between competing concerns is the desire for societal change and commercial need for people to buy the product.
If you’re interested in insights from the Culture Shift team, read them on their insight platform.
Making change more likely
We turn to talking about making change more likely in general. Chris is highly experienced in development, she currently leads the team at Culture Shift and previously worked at the BBC. For her community engagement is central to the development process, as this part of the process makes change more likely.
“Developing the insights and finding the levers to pull for change can be complex.’
Chris Northwood @ Culture Shift
The conversation turns to looking at who holds the power, empowering people to make changes and engaging people who already have power to make responsible tech choices part of their roadmap. Looking at change from this zoomed out perspective, it’s about thinking of change as an ecosystem, rather than single choices or single moments of design.
How does Culture Shift practically make change happen?
Let’s look at how practically, participation increases trust and trust increases reporting within a university setting.
Chris comes onto a more concrete example with their onboarding process. When Culture Shift begins working with a new partner, in this example a university sometimes Culture Shift’s services are procured because there’s been an incident, this then drives university decision makers to look at who they could partner with to address the issue.
When a university has procured Culture Shift services, there is naturally a bias, because the people who hold the budget are not necessarily using Culture Shift’s tool. At this point, often, the student body has a low trust level with the university and staff. There might be hostilities between the university and trade unions, with worries over how the reporting tool could be used against staff.
In these circumstances, Culture Shift recommends a student union rep and a trade union rep as part of the onboarding team. Although Culture Shift’s team can give all the insight and best practice on how to implement the system, each use case comes with its own challenges and differences and ultimately students and staff need to trust it.
Only a very small percentage of incidents are reported
Culture Shift is trying to move the needle on this fact.
“Without trust, the tool won’t be used to report incidents. Without trust, it could appear that a new system is a ‘check-box exercise’.”
Chris Northwood @ Culture Shift
These voices at the table allow Culture Shift to make adaptations which really allow the system to work for them. And when the student rep has been bought in, generally they are proactive in pushing the tool through their own student union communications.
Make sure you understand the problem before going into build
“At Culture Shift our design process is built around the double diamond technique.
We begin by centring ourselves on the problem, it’s a classic user-centric design process. And of course users are not the same as customers.”
Chris Northwood @ Culture Shift
If you’re interested in the Design Council’s Double Diamond framework you can read about the process and principles on their website.
Chris simplifies the framework by summarising it as:
“Make sure you understand the problem before going into build.”
Chris Northwood @ Culture Shift
The first diamond asks you to explore and then refine. Whilst the second diamond gives you freedom to look at a wide range of solutions before prototyping.
Products that we use that help us to follow this methodology include Consent Kit (who are also part of the RTC).
How can data ethics be progressed?
For small organisations, who are looking to address the systemic barriers to engaging people in organisations and in communities, I ask Chris what advice would you give around progressing data ethics?
- GDPR is very good, its well thought out
If you are doing GDPR well then you are probably doing data ethics well. Having a good understanding of what data is being handled, how it’s stored and how it is being processed is essential for good data ethics.
2. Good engineering can help with good data ethics
Applying good engineering practices allows an organisation to make reasonable data ethics decisions. This should be part of the design process and it makes it easier to see the answer, because you can see what you’re doing with the data.
Interested in continuing conversation in responsible technology?
Could you be a Culture Shifter? If you’re interested in working at Culture Shift — where 100% of people say it’s a fair and equitable place to be — then visit the Culture Shift careers page to find out more.
Thank you to Chris Northwood for your insight into how technology can be our best activator in enabling a positive work and study environment. Join us over on LinkedIn and Twitter to share your comments and build on the conversation around sharing best practice, positive impact through technology and how good engineering helps with good data ethics.
