Leading Edge Forum: Recent Episodes
Leading Edge Forum
Welcome to the Leading Edge Forum (LEF) podcast. LEF helps challenge conventional assumptions with original, future-focused thinking.
LEF’s programme of progressive research and thought leadership, next-practice advisory interventions, and immersive events augment clients' capabilities for horizon-scanning and sense-making and helps some of the world’s leading organizations accelerate the business outcomes of technology-enabled change.
In our podcasts you will hear from eminent thinkers in the technology space, who are setting the agenda for the impact technology will continue to have in large organizations and government bodies.
From podcast host Chris Surdak
"In our Next Generation Operating Model research a key finding was that changes to organizational structure typically have little positive impact on organizational performance, and more often than not they have a negative impact. This notion flies in the face of decades of management theory, and initially rubbed my colleague, Lem Lasher the wrong way. Join this conversation between Lem and myself as we find the common ground in our perspectives that organizational structure can actually be extremely important to generating operational results, but it is only a small piece of the entire puzzle."
Many organizations are struggling to become data-driven. But do they understand why? Many are investing heavily in analytics and automation, but are they achieving transformation? If you have not changed your operating model, and how you define value for your customers, have you really transformed? Join this discussion between Chris Surdak, and Albert Marinez, Chief Analytics Officer of Intermountain Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare systems in the United States, as they review the importance of adopting a transformational operating model in achieving actual transformation.
When embracing digital transformation, getting the fundamentals right is, well, fundamental. Yes, you need to deploy cloud effectively. You need to incorporate automation appropriately. You need to roll out a blockchain in a meaningful and effective way. But while this is necessary, it is not sufficient. You need to then follow through with embracing real change, achieving entirely new outcomes and engaging customers in entirely new ways. According to Phillipe Mazas, CIO of Mundipharma, this is “playing in the final third of the pitch,” a reference to major league football. Getting the fundamentals right is not enough; it’s just the starting point for ultimate success. Join this podcast as Phillipe and Chris dissect this notion, and how it impacts an organization’s ability to succeed with transformation.
In this episode, Chris Surdak and Jim Petrassi (CTO, Health Care Service Corporation) discuss org structure layer cakes, disruptive metrics and the value of radical transparency in achieving ops-model effectiveness. Jim also shares with us his organization's lessons learned in rethinking their operating model in a post-pandemic world.
Chris and Jim also cover:
How do you transform your organization's results from delivering in months to delivering in weeks or even days? How do you use radical transparency to drive significant organizational change, in the fact of resistance to risk-taking? How does being less risk-averse lead to reduced risk in your operations? How does accepting less-than-perfect delivery lead to better customer results and fundamentally happier customers?
Over the second half of 2020, LEF set out to understand how organizations were revisiting their operating models in the wake of COVID-19. We undertook this research on Next Generation Operating Models (NGOMs) with the goal of contributing something new to this domain.
To mark the release of this new report, lead author Chris Surdak has been talking to a number of senior leaders and in this episode is joined by Diane Schwarz, CIO of Johnson Controls.
Chris and Diane discuss operating models, organizational resilience, the importance of setting and keeping goals, and the nonsense that is the "Center of Excellence."
The food ecosystem is critical to the UK's operation, and it is becoming more complex under the impacts of sustainability and the adoption of digital and food technologies. For example, how would you deal with the arrival of the biggest platform businesses as food distributors?
Julie Pierce is Director of Openness, Data and Digital at the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and has worked with Lucy Hart of Foundry4 to identify ways for the regulator to work with many different digital native food businesses.
In this podcast, we cover:
- What are platforms, and what is the current situation with digital native Food Business operators (FBOs) in the food ecosystem
- The challenges and opportunities digitisation of FBOs creates for the FSA
- The types of responses and tools being considered
- How might we reimagine the operating model of our Food Regulatory system?
The FSA is pioneering the regulation of hybrid physical/digital businesses in the food sector. Our podcast highlights new and occasionally counterintuitive insights into what creates a win-win for regulator and business.
Kicking off our series of podcasts on Platforms and Ecosystems Bill Murray speaks with Simone Cicero, Managing partner of Boundaryless and creator of the Platform Design Toolkit.
Bill has followed Simone for the best part of a decade and he's that rare thing – a thought leader that builds practical capability to change in many organizations and people.
In this episode, Bill and Simone discuss the main trends carrying over to the other side of this Covid shock, in 'the marketplace age and Network Organizations' rise made up of entrepreneurial units. They also cover the biggest challenges faced by traditional companies in becoming more entrepreneurial.
Simone gives his views on what will happen beyond 2021; the trends that we must consider when designing firms and organizing a society in an age of platforms and ecosystems.
Crucially, they discuss 'The unbundling of the firm', how it is happening, and the challenges to the traditional organization in unbundling and re-bundling propositions.
For Simone's latest Whitepaper – 'New Foundations of Platform Ecosystem Thinking' https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/new-foundations-of-platforms-ecosystems-thinking/
Simone Cicero is the Platform Design Toolkit creator and an independent designer and a facilitator, speaker, and entrepreneur focusing on open business models. Former Chairman of the Open Hardware Summit, and program fellow of OuiShare Fest conference. Thanks to The Platform Design Toolkit's work, he has contributed to launching a new design domain and has empowered hundreds of thousands of practitioners worldwide. Simone has worked with all organizations – from Fortune 500 to the United Nations, from social enterprises to start-ups – on platform and ecosystem design.
Ollie Buckley is Executive Director of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI), an independent UK advisory body launched in 2018 to advise on the governance of AI and data-driven technologies. Immediately prior to this, Ollie led the Digital Charter team in the UK government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), where he was responsible for policy development on the societal impacts of the internet and new technology. Ollie has over 10 years’ experience shaping the UK government’s digital agenda in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office, Government Digital Service and DCMS. Before that, he was a strategy consultant working with a variety of private and public sector clients around the world.
One of the key challenges with developing appropriate governance mechanisms for data-driven technologies is the sheer ubiquity of how these technologies permeate every aspect of our lives & work. Multi-stakeholder approaches have been used in the past to develop governance approaches for tricky ethical issues, but often these examples are limited in the scope of their application. Ollie used the example of how governance for the application of stem cells in fertility research in the UK was developed through a dialogue between the scientific community, faith groups, medical practitioners, patients, and others. While the scale of that challenge was large, developing governance for data-driven technologies is more akin to developing the overall governance for all of medicine, not just one small piece. The scope of the challenge is vast and the appropriate governance mechanisms will necessarily take time to evolve.
As prior guests on the podcast have noted, governance happens at many levels: at the data model, organization, and at the regulatory level, to name a few examples. Ollie views the role of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation as a sort of ladder between the layers: seeking out the places where governance already exists and providing the essential links that allow all the elements of governance to come together in one robust system so that everyone from a CEO to a technologist to a citizen-consumer knows what the expectations are and how to ensure they are met. Two examples of how the CDEI is developing these essential links are its AI Barometer analysing the risks & opportunities for data-driven technologies across five sectors, and a recent report proposing a new framework for trustworthy data sharing across public-sector services.
Ollie ended on an optimistic note: those of us who are steeped in the challenges of digital ethics may be deluged by the many negative stories we see on a daily basis, or even by the fragmented nature of so many seemingly disparate frameworks and models for regulating the space. The problems can seem too vast to contemplate. But one positive takeaway is that public discourse on the subject is maturing. The importance of developing robust digital ethics mechanism is becoming a more recognized aspect of our day-to-day lives, and the digitization of formerly analogue systems and processes affords us another opportunity to recognize the bias inherent in these systems. It’s only by recognizing the challenges we face with societal fairness that we can start to redress those, and automation gives us an opportunity to put right some harms that have already been in existence for a long time. Creating a better future is something we can all look forward to.
On this episode, I’m joined by Mark Hughes, DXC’s senior vice president of Offerings and Strategic Partners. Mark is responsible for DXC’s technology strategy by driving innovation in DXC’s core offerings. Before stepping into this role, Mark led DXC's security organization and offerings and he previously served as BT’s Chief Executive of Security. Mark is a Royal Military Academy graduate and British Army veteran and he serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Board.
Mark’s extensive experience with the development of cybersecurity and privacy moving from concepts to recognized business functions gives him a window into the possible future for digital ethics. Mark described several phases of cybersecurity coalescing to be what it is today, from industry recognition of the risks to aligning on a systemic multi-stakeholder approach, to the development of governance frameworks both within industry and from external regulatory bodies, to identifying specific roles that are now responsible for ensuring adherence to those regulatory frameworks.
But building an effective approach to cybersecurity (and by extension digital ethics) isn’t just about developing the right formal processes, it’s also about building the right culture of expectations so that doing ethics is simply part of the everyday practice of developing new products & services. It’s important to have formal checks in place, but a lot can be managed by simply making ethical considerations a regular part of the development cycle. One area that Mark often sees being missed is developing an approach to rapidly respond when things do go wrong, as they inevitably will no matter how carefully considerations are made leading up to that point. Without minimizing the importance of the avoidance of harm, often the thing that really differentiates successful approaches from unsuccessful ones is the ability to respond quickly & effectively to a problem once it’s been identified.
Mark finished with the idea that it’s more important to get started with a simple process than to try and perfect everything before proceeding. In software development we’re all familiar with the idea of patching to respond to threats that have been identified since these systems are far too complex to identify every potential issue from the start; we also need to develop an approach to digital ethics that keeps potential risks & benefits in constant review with processes to respond to emergent harms.
For this episode, I’m joined by Katie Shay, the head of Business & Human Rights at Cisco. Katie compared the growing strategic focus on human rights in business operations to the prior development of Privacy Engineering as a discipline: she believes the trajectory from being an important but loosely organized set of principles to a recognized business function is beginning to coalesce. We’re starting to see a move towards a recognizable discipline of Human Rights Engineering. We can observe this broader trend not only through Katie’s direct work at Cisco but also examples of companies like Salesforce taking a proactive stance by creating an Ethical & Humane Use of Technology Office, as well as firms long beleaguered by criticisms of their human rights records like Facebook and Twitter hiring human rights directors to critically examine their impact.
Katie pointed to two essential frameworks as fundamental background reading for anyone looking to build human rights operational governance processes: the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Katie focused on several principles for developing an effective human rights governance process: understanding bias, creating a diverse team and noting where there are gaps in order to figure out how to bring those perspectives to the table, interdisciplinarity in approaching an issue, and strong cross-functional relationships. By using these principles, Katie finds that a human rights-based approach not only provides an effective framework for risk mitigation but also by its very nature gives more insightful outcomes to enhancing all kinds of business decisions.
As with so many of our guests, Katie focused not only on the risk mitigation aspects of ethics but also the opportunity for identifying market gaps and driving strategic success: she spoke about one initiative in Cisco’s internal incubator where a technology team came to Katie’s team for human rights guidance. The Business & Human Rights Team were not only to find examples of risk areas and talk the incubator team through some strategies for mitigating those risks, but they were also able to identify several new ways the technology could be used for enhancing human rights, thus adding to the incubator team’s business case for taking this novel project from an experiment to a technology worth backing in production. While the technology was still too early-stage to discuss in detail, the approach of using human rights to guide better business outcomes should be an inspiration to any team seeking to accelerate their decision-making capabilities.
As the lead creator of one of the first commercially available algorithmic tools to identify & mitigate bias in AI systems, Accenture’s Fairness Tool, Rumman Chowdhury is perhaps the best person to describe why algorithmic approaches aren’t enough. Over the past three years, Rumman and her team have been increasingly focused on the importance of developing the right critical thinking skills to interrogate the specifics of AI governance models. There are many tools and frameworks available for digital ethics governance, so the hard work is not making a new one, but choosing which one to apply. This contextual decision doesn’t require the quantitative skills of data science alone, but also the contextual and critical thinking skills that other disciplines can bring to the table. Rumman recommended Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson’s work on ‘Metaliteracy’ as a useful toolkit to help all kinds of specialists navigate a digital age that requires us to be fluent not only in our own areas of expertise but a variety of digital domains.
In keeping with guests saying in prior episodes that getting the terminology agreed from the start is critical to future success, Rumman unpacks the term ‘governance’. A data scientist might be referring to model governance, the technical specifications that define how a model works & what to do when it goes wrong, where others might be speaking at the level of organizational governance mechanisms like ethics boards or review processes. There are also regulatory mechanisms for governance operating at the industry and national level, as well as a whole ecosystem of civic society pressure organizations which is successfully influencing both actual legislation and reputational factors that impact how organizations are doing business.
Rumman also recommends several organizational mechanisms to support better governance approaches to AI ethics: most importantly, being aware of who has the power to make & influence decisions over digital projects. Interdisciplinary approaches are critical to success, but often difficult to enact in practice. She points to the emergent mechanisms within cybersecurity as a particular success: using ‘red teams’ with many different specialisms to identify and address problems. Second, having a process for critical conversations to take place is key. This can be in the format of an ombudsman office whose function is to independently represent the interests of various stakeholders, a review board, or an open-door/town hall policy. But Rumman says for real change to work, a no-blame culture is essential: consider medical ethics review boards, or flight safety, where the focus is on limiting future damage through open and transparent conversations about what went wrong, rather than on identifying & punishing bad actors.
Rumman’s work on Putting Responsible AI into Practice is available to read in Sloane Management Review. You can learn more about Rumman’s work on responsible AI at her website.
For this episode, we’re joined by Mutale Nkonde, founder and CEO of AI for the People, a non-profit focused on the social justice implications of the use of AI in public life. Mutale is currently a Practitioner Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab in The Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. She is also a member of the TikTok Content Advisory Council and a key constituent 3C UN Roundtable for AI. Before this, she was an AI Policy advisor and was part of a team that introduced Algorithmic Accountability and Deep Fakes Accountability Acts to the US House of Representatives.
Mutale encouraged listeners to move away from the concept of ‘ethics’, which can be too slippery to design policy around and to focus instead on harm reduction for the most vulnerable groups and reducing inequality overall. By designing for the consumer who has the least systemic power, we can all benefit. Mutale’s prior research includes a framework on racial literacy designed to empower technologists to reduce the harms of racism through three foundations: acknowledging that structural racism has a bearing on technological outcomes, developing the emotional intelligence to have these conversations instead of avoiding them, and making a commitment to take action for harm reduction.
A powerful example of recognizing a problem and working quickly to commit to addressing it happened in the week we recorded this podcast: Twitter users noticed that the algorithm which crops images in the news feed was repeatedly prioritizing white faces. Community pressure grew to address this problem, and Twitter eventually committed to reviewing the system again—even though they had originally tested the system for racial and gender bias when it was originally deployed, clearly more work is needed. Mutale highlighted this as an example of people who were being affected by an issue of bias managing to create accountability where there would otherwise have been none. But there are many technology systems which create invisible unequal outcomes, and there is still more work to do to ensure technologists recognize the harms they might cause and have mechanisms in place to reduce these harms—with one of the most powerful being involving the stakeholders who might be disadvantaged by a technological choice in designing the systems that affect them.
As well as the racial literacy framework, Mutale pointed to two other major levers that can be used to improve technological outcomes for all: the first is introducing better technology legislation and more powerful penalties for violating consumer protection law and human rights law, and the second is to develop more creative visions of the future of what technology can do for us, both in terms of benefits as well as possible harms. Many of the technologies which are regular parts of our lives today started not as a research experiment or commercial project, but as an imagined piece of science fiction which was eventually brought to life by passionate and committed engineers. Mutale recommended the work of Octavia Butler as a great starting point for those looking for more imaginative and egalitarian future envisioning.
You can find out more about Mutale’s work at https://www.mutale.tech/, and her work for Data & Society on racial literacy, including a comprehensive framework for harm reduction, at https://racialliteracy.tech/.
On this podcast, we’re joined by Tim Gordon, founding partner at Best Practice in AI, a research firm that helps organizations use AI to build competitive advantage. While it might seem as though there is little or no guidance around digital ethics, for those familiar with the space like Tim, the problem is actually that there are hundreds of frameworks to choose from. However, we’re starting to see these frameworks coalesce around six themes: fairness and inclusivity, explainability and transparency, safety, social benefit, responsibility, and accountability. Accountability is one of the key responsibilities of any board, and as such it’s absolutely vital that boards are capable of handling the legal, regulatory, operational, and reputational questions which can arise from an increasing dependency on automated decision-making systems.
Most importantly, Tim highlights that trust is the key factor which will enable competitive advantage in the future for AI-driven businesses: organizations which are highly trusted will find it easy to obtain the data they need to power automated decision making systems, while low-trust businesses will come up against increasing barriers in the form of reputational costs, regulatory frameworks, or pure operational cost to obtain the data they need to function. Best Practice in AI has worked with the World Economic Forum to develop a series of checklists boards can use to ensure they’re prepared to raise the right questions at the right times to challenge their operational teams, with ethics forming the central heart of the guidebook. Their next step is to build a new framework for C-level leaders to think through the nitty-gritty operational questions they’ll need to face in order to live up to the board’s expectations. While most companies are still nascent in their exploration of AI, regulatory frameworks are already starting to emerge (GDPR being a frontrunner example) which will begin to impact on the technology industry landscape within Europe and beyond. Boards need to get to grips with the regulation on the horizon, not only within their own region but also the international cooperation and competition factors, to ensure they’re prepared to continue innovating.
Tim outlines three basic problems with AI: the technology isn’t working as designed, the data being used to train algorithms is based on existing biases which reflect societal bias, and finally, the new business models that are enabled by AI. Tim believes the first two categories are indeed ethically problematic but they echo existing ethical risks that are already faced within industry. It’s really the enablement of new business models that empower ethical problems that are unique to the digital age, such as mass surveillance through personalization, the attention economy, and the polarization of echo chambers as personalization forces us into increasingly narrow paths. The more accurate our automated decision-making systems become, the more accurately they reflect our existing societal structures, with all its flaws: this enables new questions to be raised not only about the usefulness of automated decision making systems, but about the systems we use to govern broader society.
In episode 4, we're joined by Ivana Bartoletti, Technical Director for Privacy at Deloitte, who recently authored An Artificial Revolution: on Power, Politics, and AI.
Ivana’s key message is that technologies are the systematic way we distribute power. When we’re talking about ethics, one of our fundamental principles is usually around fairness, and that really comes back to the distribution of power and resources within a system. We cannot shy away from questions about power when we’re thinking about AI and digital ethics, though they may be uncomfortable, and it may be challenging to develop a common vocabulary for addressing the issues.
It’s especially important to have a common vocabulary for talking about digital ethics because what ‘fairness’ means to a statistician might be very different from what it means to a consumer rights lawyer or to a product manager. In all cases their individual definitions might capture an important facet of the full picture, but to really make progress, everyone needs to be on the same page.
For organizations seeking to make progress on digital ethics, the first step really is to start by forming a common vocabulary. After that, Ivana says, it’s about learning to engage with subject matter experts throughout an organization in the right way to get the most out of the expertise they have to offer. Governance mechanisms like AI ethics boards are beginning to emerge, as well as external regulatory mechanisms to build accountability. And finally, a very interesting growth area for accountability is analogous to financial auditing: algorithmic and data model review services offered by commercial companies as a service. We can expect to see more of these services emerging as automated decision-making systems continue to become ever more ubiquitous, and the regulatory and control mechanisms around them continue to mature.
Find out more about Ivana, including where to get a copy of her book, at www.ivanabartoletti.co.uk
For this episode, we’re joined by Sarah Drinkwater, Director of Beneficial Technology at Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm. For Sarah, the important thing about digital ethics is to get it out of the hands of specialist experts and to empower everyone to feel like a confident decision-maker on these important issues. Digital ethics issues impact all of us, and for those who are designing and making digital products, there is a lot of responsibility to get it right and an often confusing array of resources to draw on. The Digital Ethics Explorer Kit was designed by Sarah and the Omidyar Network team to empower people who are passionate about digital ethics but who might be working with tight decision timeframes in organizations with limited structure in place to advise on digital ethics challenges.
Sarah points out that large organizations usually have someone who is responsible for these things sitting in a legal capacity or perhaps in a strategy function, but in some ways, that’s a luxury of scale. Smaller organizations often don’t have that type of specialization to draw on, but their responsibility to deal with it doesn’t go away just because they’re a tiny team.
However, despite the Explorer Pack being designed with smaller teams in mind, the Omidyar Network is finding that in practice organizations of all shapes and sizes like academic departments, government services, and large corporations are also finding it useful for helping to frame their conversations about developing new products and services or evaluating current ones.
Like other guests on the series, Sarah raised the point that ethics isn’t just a way of saying no to things, it’s not solely a risk evaluation tool, but also a very important strategic driver for change, particularly in hiring: both in the UK through a Doteveryone survey in 2018 and more recently in the US, Omidyar Network has been able to show that technologists working in some of the most in-demand roles are demanding that their employers demonstrate values that match their own: being perceived as an ethical employer is a powerful draw in a competitive market for talent. You can find out more about the ethical explorer pack at www.ethicalexplorer.org.
On this podcast, we’re joined by Paul Miller, Managing Partner and CEO of Bethnal Green Ventures, a London-based early-stage venture capital firm focusing on tech for good. Before co-founding Bethnal Green Ventures, Paul worked as a senior researcher for think tanks Demos and Forum for the future and founded an ed-tech company.
Paul Miller agrees that digital ethics is more than just risk management: we need to move beyond thinking about ethics as a risk management strategy and start considering how it can play into impact evaluation and strategic investment decision making on a broader scale. There are some important distinctions in terminology evolving in this space as it matures. Paul distinguishes between ‘tech for good’ which he believes is more about values, mission, & impact evaluation, and terms like ‘responsible technology’ or ‘ethical technology’ which he thinks are more about mechanisms and governance for how to carry out the strategic vision. Ideally, a corporation is doing both.
For organizations which care about digital ethics and tech for good more broadly, it’s important to be able to assess impact in a systematic way: Bethnal Green Ventures uses an impact evaluation framework called the Impact Measurement Project which was developed by Bridges Fund Management as well as Nesta’s Standards of Evidence for impact assessment. Rather than developing their own unique framework, Paul says that these industry-standard accepted tools show that the space for impact evaluation is maturing, allowing investors to take a holistic industry-wide look at how tech for good is evolving. Paul also highlighted that the B-Corp framework is being increasingly recognized not only for small businesses but also for larger corporations as a means for standardizing a common understanding of how ethical (and more broadly, beneficial) businesses are.
Find out more about Bethnal Green Ventures at www.bethnalgreenventures.com
On this episode, we’re joined by Anne Currie. Anne recently designed an ethics module for the Computer Science department at the University of Hertfordshire. Anne is also the Tech Ethicist for Container Solutions, and author of the four-book Panopticon series, a near-future science fiction exploration of issues we’re currently facing like climate change, AI, surveillance, and the individual vs the state.
Anne Currie says the key action for companies to take who want to move forward from ethical intentions to ethical action is to leverage middle management. She points out that in the wake of the 2008/09 financial crisis, the financial services industry underwent a sea change in terms of its ethical governance processes. Of all the strategies tried, it was found that neither top-down nor bottom-up approaches work terribly well: top-down approaches are greeted with scepticism unless it’s been the consistent policy of an organization all along. Bottom-up approaches usually fail due to the individuals’ lack of organizational capital: they simply don’t have enough power to enact true change. But middle managers are the heart of the organization: they can influence above and below. What kind of incentives can un-freeze the middle? Anne says one of the most effective is really facing an existential threat: if the business itself is at risk, or your job is on the line, you’re much more likely to sit up and take notice. Anne’s writing as a speculative fiction author helps her to imagine some of these potential existential threats and work through how different groups might approach them—something she finds very helpful in her day job as a technical ethicist and strategist for Container Solutions.
Read more about Anne’s work, including her Panopticon book series, at https://www.annecurrie.com/.