Keep Buggering On — My long & winding road to Tech Ethics and beyond (via CSR, Stakeholder Capitalism & RRI)

Tech Ethics is a hot topic and I’m having a deja vu moment. There is nothing new about thinking about how to develop innovations which put people and not profit first, whilst also navigating inherent moral dilemmas. It has been called a number of different things, even in my lifetime, but while the names change, the technologies change, the overarching dilemma of how to develop innovations which don’t cause more problems than they solve remains the same.

When I entered the scene in the late 1980s, environmentalists were considered cranks, human rights and business wasn’t even thought about. I and many others were more worried about the size of our shoulder pads than the state of the world. This is a meander through my own personal journey and should not be seen as a through analysis of the evolution of business responsibility.

My awakening was gradual, no damascene conversion. It started with the clients I was doing PR for at the time, such as Co-op, Kelloggs and KP Foods to translate their annual reports to make them meaningful for employees. It had struck me the very people who needed to know what’s going on in the company and plans for the future are the employees and they never get told. Annual Reports were for finance people how were companies going to bring their employees with them in the next year if they don’t know what’s going on?

I gradually got drawn in to the human rights area with what was then called Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR, in the 1990s. The problems CSR was trying to solve was initially focused on

(a) environmental impacts, which shot to prominence by United Nations report Our Common Future, which became knows as the Brundtland Report of 1987 , the 1989 Exxon Valdez Alaska oil spill and by the huge furore in the UK caused by the 1995 Greenpeace campaign to prevent oil company Shell from disposing of its Brent Spar oil platform by sinking it off the coast of Scotland.

(b) human rights issues, particularly shocking practices coming to light of forced and child labour in clothing supply chains and mining.

As you can see I have deja vu moments alot, as these subjects recur and recur and remain unsolved!

It was clear companies needed to be held to account for their social, environmental and economic impacts — The Triple Bottom Line as coined by eco guru John Elkington in 1994. (I worked for him for a bit translating the TBL into the language of the financial and accounting community to try to sell them the importance of this work for mainstream finance and so get it taken more seriously in the ‘real’ world of business).

So SRI, Socially Responsible Investing was born which morphed more recently to become ESG Environmental and Social Governance. To help take this work more into the mainstream the United Nations 6 Principles for Responsible Investment were developed and launched at the New York Stock Exchange in 2006 to encourage signatories from mainstream investment to understand the implications of social and environmental factors and apply the principles in their investment decisions.

In the absence of any regulation, standards evolved — the rationale was that by encouraging more transparency, measurement and reporting of the environmental, social and economic impacts of companies there would be a race to the top, or at least a way of highlighting and penalising the laggards.

The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises probably kicked things off in 1976. The CERES Principles for environmental stewardship were created in 1989 in response to Exxon Valdez and ISO launched its first environmental standard 14001 in 1996. A more general corporate responsibility standard followed from the UK standards body Accountability, started it with AA1000 in 1997 (I was peripherally involved in that and more with its later sister publication AA1000SES the stakeholder engagement standard). Social Accountability International in New York launched SA8000 the first mainstream standard on human rights and business, particularly in supply chains (I was involved in promoting that here in the UK). The Global Reporting Initiative followed in 2000 and United Nations Global Compact in 2000.

But gradually it became clear it wasn’t really doing the job because companies were seen to be signing up to these initiatives but beneath the surface it was business as usual. CSR was discredited as a solution and a brand. ‘Washing’ as a term wasn’t invented then, but that was the accusation — all spin and no action. Deja vu again.

The main reason for the failure it was identified was the dominance of shareholder primacy as the only driver and incentive for business behaviour. A fledgling movement stimulated by corporate governance shenanigans and corporate social and environmental misdeeds began to distill the idea of and business as a force for good in society and Stakeholder Capitalism was born.

The UK lead in this with the report in 1996 of the RSA Inquiry: Tomorrow’s Company, (which I also worked on). It sought to refocus the core purpose of business away from purely shareholder value and consider how it creates value for staff, shareholders and society through a focus on purpose, values, business relationships and a long term view of corporate success. It’s come and gone a few times since then, and the damascene conversion of the US Business Round Table in 2019 just the latest group to get with the programme and think they just invented it!

The problem it and ESG and Tomorrow’s Company proposed to solve was to change the metrics of success. This seems to fall foul of system inertia, and incumbents and elites resisting change to the system. Why should they, it’s what’s making them rich and they are in charge!

So moving on to around 2008 and Responsible Research and Innovation became the Next Big Thing, particularly in Europe. The problem this was supposed to solve was the furore around the values clash and potential environmental impact of GMOs, harmful chemicals and scary upcoming tech like Nanotech (digital and data ethics wasn’t mainstream then). The issue was exacerbated by the hype about technology progress (essential to getting money out of government and investors) — electricity too cheap to meter (Nuclear Power ), an end to hunger (GMO’s ) elimination of cancer by 2015 (Nanotechnology ) and soon to join the puff-fest was AI promising an end of work and melding our minds with machines.

The idea was that science and tech should be created to align with societal values and that this should be embedded ‘upstream’ in academic research and company R&D rather wait to have the conversation when it was all too late and the tech was out there doing its thing. Being a bit unfair here, as there was some great moral underpinnings in many areas, but a large part of the impetus for this was to avoid another problem like the social rejection in Europe of Genetically Modified Foods, or GMOs — “How do we create new products and make loads of money without society kicking off”.

I initiated a multi-stakeholder initiative on responsibility in nanotech, resulting in a Responsible Nano Code of Conduct and a website for citizens called Nano&me. The EC also did a similar Responsible Nano Code around the same time, mine focused on companies and theirs on research. We launched it at the same meeting.

But as a very smart guy on my steering group from Unilever told me — “In the end these principles for Nano are just the same whatever the tech.” He was right. Take the name of the old tech out and put in the name of the next one and the principles and values desired from them were the same. Responsible Innovation was the name which evolved.

I was commissioned by the EC to write a primer ‘An Introduction to Responsible Research and Innovation’ in 2010 which roughly sums up the approach. I heard from a well respected academic recently that because of this I was supposed to have ‘invented’ RRI!

It got more traction in Europe because of the EU Framework and Horizon 2020 research programmes which have spent perhaps by now €170+million with mainly academic institutions in its ‘Science With and For Society’ type programmes which focused on 5 rather artificially prescribed Pillars of RRI (ethics, gender, open access, public engagement, governance).

UK academics did some innovative work, notably with the AREA Framework for Responsible Innovation — Anticipate, Reflect, Engage, Act, much of which I was a stakeholder or peripherally involved. The most interesting for me was working with Professor Richard Jones at the University of Sheffield with a working group considering how to embed the principles of responsible innovation throughout the whole university and focusing attention on three areas, robotics, genetic modification and disability studies. We were really getting somewhere, but he was the driving force and it petered out when he moved on.

Has this ‘worked’ in shaping academic science and social science towards a more ‘responsible’ approach? Certainly not in my book in relation to the money spent. Many reasons for this — including

(a) the incentives for academics were equally perverse (academic papers and not real world impact),

(b) because businesses and practical policy folks didn’t want to come to their meetings or read their findings because they were very often full of incomprehensible academic jargon and

(c )the research really lead nowhere because the academic system meant you had to move on to the next project which may not be much connected. And all the other reasons above about business and shareholder primacy.

Because the money was pointed mainly at academia business got off the hook a bit. But Responsible Innovation from a company perspective began to have some traction post 2010 with new tech like AI, Self Driving Cars, Robotics, Drones and new gene editing techniques like CRISPR. These were scary, and we were gradually beginning to see how digital tech, in for form of social media was affecting society in a negative way.

It also worked well funding wise becuase the academics could work with the governments to do something together and which are close to actual citizens. Also similar thinking evolved around the monikers of Sustainable by Design, Design Thinking Safe By Design.

Then we reach now and the same issues are being described as Tech Ethics. The problem being solved here is perhaps a meld of the three areas and focuses almost totally on digital platforms, data analytics, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

As usual we had to wait until the harms were visible to take action — Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, the dramatic changes to society brought about by social media, the increasing surveillance of society through biometrics and facial recognition to name just a few. (BTW, the environment is pretty much nowhere in this. It should be and will be soon.) It covers lots of things and there are literally hundreds of ethics frameworks, particularly for AI. (Here is not the place to nitpick those!)

I think it was called ethics because the technologies originated in the US where ethics was still the dominant terminology. In the UK the Institute of Business Ethics had started in the mid 1980’s. And seemed to focus on the internal behaviours of companies, particularly business integrity, corruption and the negative impacts on their employees and embedding cultures which supported those who spoke out against company misbehaviour. It did begin to evolve and perhaps later morphed into CSR — I recall in 1998 doing work for BT — 101 Reasons why Ethics Matters full of jokes and quotes and cartoons. I dug it out recently and it made a great starting point in co-creating the 2020 booklet I wrote for the World Economic Forum Values Ethics and Innovation Council — A How To Guide for Tech Ethics for Start Ups and SMEs !

There was also medical ethics of course which has a long history, but I don’t think really got attached to companies as well as it might have, a pity as there is really useful learning to be had, but I see it moving more to the the fore with Neurotech and assistive robotics.

So has that worked? Not really. I am stilll puzzled as to why we seem no further on after all this thinking. Why has this failed in the main to alter the innovation development mindset?

Probably for all the same reasons as the previous initiatives weren’t. The mindset of senior management which is primed by the metrics of neoliberal capitalism, which in turn is primed by narrow GDP metrics. The wilful blindness is all too easy because those in charge are distant from the impact of their actions and focused on a seeming ‘right to make money’ which trumps all else. And also of course because new tech entrepreneurs are convinced they are right and the rest of the world will find out how right they are very soon! Which is essential to survive in a dog eat dog world and if they didn’t we wouldn’t have many of the fabulous innovations we use, we love and which have transformed our world. I have written a short blog on this for the World Economic Forum post Covid The 4 Building Blocks for the Great Reset

So, disheartened with all this failure a chance meeting at the WEF Global Futures Council in 2017 led to a shift in my focus onto trust and governance. After all, everyone was saying that trust was the most important thing of all — but what it really meant in practice seemed very half baked and obscure.

I had also concluded that regulation and forcing organisations to behave in a certain way by law was about the only thing that worked. So with support from the World Economic Forum and funding and a research partnership from Fraunhofer Institute for Systems Innovation in Germany I set out to research the interlinkages between societal trust and tech and governance. The trust literature was a minefield and the connections to tech governance not easy to make, but the key findings of the report Trust and Tech Governance and exploring embedding the three new competencies — Building Trusted Environments for Collaborative Governance, ‘Nothing about us without us’ Embedding the Involvement of Citizens and having Evidence of Trustworthiness be the focus for communications from companies and regulators area all keeping me busy.

But hey, guess what. People aren’t that interested in trust either! They love the theory, and love talking about the importance of trust. But when it comes to the hard bit of changing their culture, questioning their business model and potentially making less money by upholding the 7 Drivers of Trust — Good Intent, Integrity, Openness, Inclusion, Fairness, Respect and Competence don’t seem worth the effort and trust not as important as they thought after all!

But I am now involved with a new approach to governance to incentivise organisation into thinking what they don’t want to think and doing what they don’t want to do — Professor Chris Hodges work on Outcome-based Cooperative Regulation and Conduct Auditing. The problem this was designed to solve was the financial crash and answer the question posed by Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of us ‘How did they not see this coming?.

The starting point is that values clashes and misconduct problems stem from corporate cultures which reward putting money before anything else, that repress speaking out about problems in response and reward individualistic behaviours over collaborative goals. A regulatory system which puts evidence of effectiveness, trust and cooperation at its heart may be better placed to make corporatations behave in the public interest. I’ll work on that premise until I come across anything better!

I wrote this as COP26 in Glasgow was closing and Covid has rocked everyone’s world which I think has genuinely brought home to us what really matters. It has shone a light on inequalities, wellbeing, and the problems facing society. The Great Resignation is underway (I wrote my Master’s thesis predicting this as a rectifier of corporate behaviour in 2000, so won’t be holding my breath on that!). Add to this the looming climate crisis and the recognition of the devastating social negative impact of digital technologies and I feel a dawning in the minds of serious politicians and business leaders that business as usual is not an option. This gives me a glimmer of hope.

I am pinning most of my hopes on the growing dissatisfaction and empowerment of us citizens and civil society groups, particularly young people to put our foot down to force governments and business to make a dramatic change. Though the transition will not be easy, and many will find ourselves worse off in the shorter term, change is not inevitable. So I’ll finish with a 2017 blog that was perhaps a bit premature ‘Let’s make this the 1st Empowerment Revolution and not the 4th Industrial Revolution’.

I had a tattoo put under my watch in 2019 with the letters KBO, this is Winston Churchill’s mantra Keep Buggering On. Looking back on this little resume of my working life, I think that’s all there is to be done. Keep going, keep curious and keep trying to make things better tomorrow than they were yesterday.

I wrote this at the kind request of someone who I greatly admire, who was interested in my journey and the arc of tech development it describes. They wanted to publish it as a blog, but I thought it was too boring and I would rather have the attention on my current work, rather than my meanderings about the past.

But I have just found it quite useful for drafting a new report — Innovation is Society in the making — How innovation can work better for people and planet, without causing more problems than it solves. This will be a reflection and update of thinking on Responsible Innovation over the last 15 years.

I am promoting it here because sod it, I did the work!

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