Author: nicholaskal

This is Part four of a six part series on ethics for the Human Venture blog.

Ethics is the study of right and wrong conduct. Why should we bother to conduct ourselves in the right manner?

Fundamentally, right conduct can be grounded in the existential reality of suffering. We would like to avoid suffering, because we know what it is like to suffer ourselves. 

We are familiar with many forms of pain – physical, social, emotional, to name a few. Suffering can overtake our whole being . As individuals and communities, we suffer heartbreak, loss, in sorrow, and in ill fortune. We are deeply and fearfully aware of our death. We often can feel a deep sense of powerlessness. As an aggregate, we can go through loss, disruption, despair, decay, breakdown, and even extinction.

By recognizing suffering, we are called not just to empathize, but to act to help alleviate the suffering, within others and ourselves. We have a very human desire to prevent and alleviate these harms. This is evident in the well known golden rule, “treat others as you want to be treated”. Humans have an innate capacity for compassion, which literally means ‘to suffer with’. Compassion allows ourselves to be moved by suffering, and experiencing the motivation to help alleviate and prevent it¹.

Compassion is more than a feeling – it is also thought and action². We not only strive to relieve suffering, but to prevent it (good intentions aren’t enough). Preventing suffering requires far more than just a feeling; it requires awareness and intelligent action. Compassion taken far enough pushes the boundaries of caring, aiding the prevention of needless suffering or wastage of human potential³.

Without compassion and care, we won’t bother with ethics. If we don’t care, we won’t act. If we care, we have a chance at wisely holding the tension of right and wrong, acting our best in the face of uncertainty and challenge.

In this piece I’m going to talk about:

– where the roots of care and compassion come from

– how care, ethics, and power collide

– duty to care in professional ethics, engineering, and technology ethics

– widening the circle of compassion

The Roots of Compassion

Humans emerged as small troop primates approximately 300,000 years ago⁴. We have inherited characteristics like in-group/out group dynamics, dominance competitions, nurturing our young, and group cohesion⁵.

Cooperation is a hallmark human trait. Even though we did not have the largest brains on the African savannah, our survival was greatly aided by our ability to cooperate with each other. “Humans are hardwired for […] solidarity; and this is what makes violence so difficult.”⁶. On a very deep level of our programming, we are built for an environment of a small band with repeated interactions. In general, we would rather work together and have friends. Caring for others in our troop is an ancient act that has helped us adapt over the millennia and flourish as a species.

The challenge starts when we expand the circle of caring beyond our capacity. Expanding our circle of caring requires continual exponential leaps:

– I care about not just myself, but I also care about you.

– I care about my family, and I also care about the whole tribe

– I care about all tribes ~ I care about all life

Dunbar’s number proposes that in our early history we coalesced in tribes which numbered roughly up to 150 humans⁷. To get past this social limit, we invented stories – myths – to expand our sense of who is in, and out, of the tribe. Christianity, nationalism, and capitalism are all examples of stories that enable humanity to cooperate in a stable fashion at greater scales. Figuring out how to cooperate across organizations, nations and the globe has enabled humanity to develop capacities that have the potential to reduce or to cause suffering at previously unimaginable scales.

As we continue to propagate as a species, we are always having a conversation about how to sustainably live with many tribes on this single planet. Instead of 150 people, we now legitimately have to answer the questions of how to globally coordinate 8 billion people on a planet with other life and a fragile biosphere.

Our aspirations for care, however, always lie further beyond our ability to actually care. There is a line in the sand of caring, whether we like it or not. Our finite caring capacity leaves some to be cared for, and others not. This is a tension that never ends because there are no bounds to who and what it is possible to include in your sphere of caring.

Knowing who and what we can care for, clearly seeing that tension and trying to reason our way through the conflicts in a wise manner, is the practice of ethics.

Power and the Practice of Ethics

Sam Rayburn once said, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” This illuminates the fact that there are many more possible harmful scenarios than there are beneficial scenarios. With an increasing imbalance of power, there is an increasing potential for abuses of power.

In humans it has been found that a “sense of power disrupts what is known as mirroring, a mental process which plays a key role in empathy”⁸ and “one of the effects of power, myriad studies show, is that it makes you see others in a negative light”⁹. Power has the potential to disrupt our compassion and caring. The potential combination of disruption of care and an asymmetry of power creates scenarios where the less powerful are vulnerable to harmful consequences.

Societies around the world have developed broad ideas of what appropriate and aspirational care should look like. When we trust powerful individuals, families, corporations, governments, we expect them to care about our well being in a well reasoned manner.

Preventing and alleviating suffering can occur in both scope and time. Everything is always part of a nested situation – which is to say, there’s always a larger story that anything is embedded within. Benefits and harms happen over different times and time spans. From families, to workplaces, to nations, to our species, we live out multiple stories and multiple consequences at once.

Imagine attaching a weight to the free lever of consequences above. There are always varying levels of consequences on varying levels of scope going on at the same time. What complicates matters here, is that it is not obvious what the right balance between consequences is, especially as we think further out in time. What is clear though is that “with great power there must also come great responsibility”.

Professional Ethics

Professionals are an example of a community of practitioners that we expect to care about the well-being of those within their scope of practice. Professionals hold relatively great power – from designing a bridge to holding a therapy session – which if abused, could cause seriously harmful consequences for the public. We have created professional organizations with codes of ethics to respond to this; this is part aspirational, part legal.

At its most restrictive, there is a red line where a professional could be stripped of their ability to practice – an enforced standard of caring, potentially paired with legal consequences. At its most ineffectual, a code of ethics merely serves as a form of signaling which does nothing to functionally reduce harm while upholding the status  quo. At its best, a code of ethics guides practitioners to competent, wise conduct, mindfully using power for humble progress.

Engineering Ethics

My own professional body of engineering, the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA), has a Guideline for Ethical Practice (released February 2013). I recently reviewed this document, and the following statements stuck out to me.

“In an increasingly technological world, the public is looking to engineers and geoscientists to provide societal leadership. The professional relationship of trust is a fundamental element as we do our part in guiding society to adopt technology for the advancement of human welfare.”¹⁰

– Guideline for Ethical Practice, v2.2

Why look to engineers to provide societal leadership? Because technology bestows great powers upon those who wield it. Engineers should have extra societal scrutiny because they design, operate and maintain instruments of power. While they may not ultimately wield the technology, they have an essential part to play in caring about the use and potential abuse of the technology.

The claim here is that current society holds a value of human well-being. We claim to care about human advancement. This is enshrined in the statement:

“Professional engineers and geoscientists shall, in their areas of practice, hold paramount the health, safety and welfare of the public, and have regard for the environment.”¹¹

– Guideline for Ethical Practice, v2.2

This is perhaps the most often quoted and memorable line of the guideline. There is a clear aspiration of care in the presence of power in this statement for the public and environment. If an engineer completely disregards this care, punishments may be enforced. How much an engineer ‘holds paramount’ is the difficult tension between care and power.

Codes of ethics need to change over time to respond to newly identified threats and opportunities. In previous versions of the APEGA Guideline for Ethical practice, there was not nearly as much emphasis on the environmental impacts of our work. Recent edits in the 21st century have since added language to include the environment. Societal awareness changed – sparking compassion, care, slowly changing values, and eventually making its way into the guideline for ethical practice. Society’s circle of care broadened, and the profession responded by integrating that value into the code of ethics.

“Competence and ethical conduct are two indivisible components in maintaining a relationship of trust with clients and with the public”¹²

– Guideline for Ethical Practice, v2.2

There is a recognition that technical competence, without ethical conduct, breaks down trust between the public and the profession. Said another way – power without ongoing care breeds mistrust. It is easy to see why this is the case with numerous examples of technologies past and present that have inflicted great harm and taken away from the advancement of human welfare.

Progressive Care

“But what we require is a more expansive compassion; a more imaginative compassion; one that acts over the long term, recognizing the humanity of people in distant times as well as distant places” – Toby Ord

Professional ethics is just one branch of applied ethics we can learn from for what it takes to wisely use our power. You don’t need a professional body to practice ethics – you just need some curiosity, some humility, and the motivation to care. A motivation to be attuned with suffering, and to the desire to act compassionately in the face of that suffering. If you push your compassion and caring far enough, you will inevitably run into scenarios where there are uncomfortable tradeoffs between personal and public well being, or short term versus long term welfare.

Compassion and care are crucial beginnings in the journey of ethics. Intentions can be misguided though, so many capacities are needed to follow through. Discovering the consequences, reasoning through the trade-offs, deciding a path, seeing what needs to be done and successfully acting are all powers that must be honed and developed to achieve ethical action.

Our caring is finite, but the journey of ethical action is not. Ethics, like science, is a trans-generational process that is completely open ended. Science is propelled by a human drive to understand the universe we are thrown into. Despite the complexities, we keep striving for more useful knowledge. Ethics is propelled by the human drive to care in a larger scope than ourselves. The complexity is enormous, but like science we as individuals and as humanity can persevere, preventing and alleviating suffering now and in the future.

References

Circle of hands [Photograph]. https://thebohemianbliss.com/2015/04/18/what-gives-a-soliloquy-on-the-relevance-of-genuine-human-connection-or-lack-thereof/

[1] Compassion. (2021, Nov 29). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion

[2] Low, K. (2016). Map 55: Tools of wisdom & judgment notes on compassion. Action Studies Institute. The Human Venture Institute mapbook (16th ed.). 

[3] Low, K. (2016). Map 40: Compassion. Action Studies Institute. The Human Venture Institute mapbook (16th ed.). 

[4] Human. (2021, Nov 29). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_strategyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

[5] Low, K. (2016). Map 81: Levels of adaptive learning and action. Action Studies Institute. The Human Venture Institute mapbook (16th ed.). 

[6] Bergman, R. (2020). Humankind: A hopeful history. Little, Brown, and Company.

[7] Dunbar’s number. (2021, Dec 9). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

[8] Hogeveen, J., Inzlicht, M., & Obhi, S. S. (2014). Power changes how the brain responds to others. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 143(2), 755-62. doi:10.1037/a0033477

[9] Inesi, M. E., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Galinksy, A. D. (2012). How power corrupts relationships: Cynical attributions for others’ generous acts. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 795-803. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.01.008

[10, 11, 12] Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta [APEGA]. (2013). Guideline for ethical practice: V2.2. https://www.apega.ca/docs/default-source/pdfs/standards-guidelines/ethical-practice.pdf?sfvrsn=78261e0b_8

Suggested Resources

• Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bergman (2020)
• Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, Jeremy Lent (2017)

Thanks to friends and the Human Venture Associate community for reading drafts of this article.

How can we help the communities we are a part of act in ways that are wiser, less ignorant, and less likely to be destructive? This question is close to the center of what I currently think ‘responsible strategy’ is trying to answer.

Ethics can help us answer the questions at the center of responsible strategy. Ethics is a process that individuals, organizations, and societies practice to clearly see the consequences of our powers, and to inform what a more caring, more informed, less destructive path might look like.

In this article I am going to summarize some of my personal learnings and thoughts on ethics. My writings reflect a provisional perspective; I have a lot more to learn and integrate into my thinking. I have found these concepts helpful to my own journey, and I hope that sharing with others sharpens not only my understanding but provides jumping off points for others to consider these concepts themselves.

Discovering and Evaluating Values and Stories

In my last article, I briefly explored how values, beliefs, and stories inform grand strategy. The purpose of and motivation for a strategic engagement is rooted in value laden worldviews, which ultimately affects how we go about our engagements. Sometimes our beliefs are consciously and intentionally learned, but more often than not they largely embody our unconscious learning. 

To pursue responsible strategy, we need an ongoing process to check whether our unconscious and conscious learning is helpful or harmful. Ethics is a continuous process of inquiry that can help us evaluate what is helpful and harmful – and it is also useful for helping bring into focus what we don’t know, and what lies within our own ignorance.

The practice and application of ethics needs to be able to surface the most important elements of benefit and harm and expose them to scrutiny and discourse. And it requires moving in and out of different frames – including time (from the far past to the present) and scale (from the individual to all life on earth).

How do we know what is helpful and what is harmful?

A useful starting point for ethical discussions is, “What is being helpful? And how would we know whether we are being helpful or harmful?” 

Often, our default is that anything that can be seen as “progress” is positive. However it is useful to note that whether something is helpful or harmful, or can be defined as progress, depends on how you are framing the situation.

Let’s say you work at a company with a product that you sell to customers. The default starting point for corporations is to frame progress in terms of economic growth, but there are other starting points too: 

• Progress means having a job which allows me to provide for a family
• Progress means increasing our revenue quarter over quarter
• Progress means creating a better world for the next generation to live in

This shows the nested nature of any situation we find ourselves in; progress looks different at different levels, and there often are conflicts between these levels. What if selling this product to the world supports my family this year, but creates a worse world for my children in the coming decades? The ensuing ethical discourse often means engaging in balancing the consequences of action at different levels.

Exploring ethics fundamentally requires humility – a deep appreciation that progress in one realm so often can mean regression in another. Ethics encourages us to revisit and extend our definition of progress, in our pursuit to be less destructive, wiser, and more caring for ourselves and the world.

What is ethics?

The standard dictionary definition of ethics is “moral reasoning, or reasoning about appropriate conduct in different challenging or uncertain situations”. The operative words here are moral reasoning and conduct. Conduct is defined as “a mode or standard of personal behavior especially as based on moral principles”. Moral reasoning is defined as “the study of how people think about right and wrong”.

To rephrase – how do we think about rights and wrongs of given behaviors in challenging situations? Many questions flow from this inquiry. Despite our best intentions, how do we know we are doing more benefit than harm? How do we weigh short term priorities vs long term priorities? How do we weigh consequences for the individual vs the group / humanity? How do we develop our capacity to expand our circles of caring?

Consequences – harms and benefits

When we are morally reasoning, we are trying to determine rights and wrongs by applying our logic to a set of behaviors performed by some entity or agent. An agent or entity could be a single person, or it could be a society or all of humanity. When an agent/entity performs a behavior, it produces consequences in the world. With ethics we are attempting to ask ourselves, are the consequences of this behavior right or wrong, harmful or beneficial?

At a high level, benefits could mean:

• increasing opportunities
• reducing threats
• decreased waste / suffering / injustice
• increasing resourcefulness, resilience, and wisdom
• increased ability to adapt

Harms could imply:

• decreasing opportunities
• increased threats
• increased waste / suffering / injustice
• increasingly vulnerability to manipulation, exploitation, misdirection
• decreased ability to adapt

The picture starts getting even more interesting when we start asking what types of harm or benefit happen to whom, and on what time scale.

• Consequences for
  • individuals
  • groups / organizations
  • societies / nations
  • humanity
  • life / Earth / biosphere
• Consequences to the agent responsible for the behavior
  • Character
    • What kind of character or values does a certain type of conduct imply?
    • Can I / we as the agent live with ourselves knowing the consequences of the behavior?
    • Are there certain behaviors that are never justified, no matter the consequences?
  • Capacities
    • Will this behavior degrade or enhance the agent’s ability to adapt going forward?
  • Are there certain actions that are never justified because of the consequences to one’s character?
• Consequences in time
  • the present (now, the next few months)
  • the near future (within the next year, within our lifetimes)
  • the human far future (within our lifetimes, “think 7 generations ahead”)
  • the cosmic future (the next eon, the billions/trillions of people yet to exist)

The purpose of looking at different scopes and times is to start revealing the limits of our thinking, caring, and wisdom. It is far easier to make moral choices if we don’t look outside our immediate gaze. If my sense of caring is limited to consequences for myself within the next hour, justifying the behavior might be fairly straightforward. However, if we consider how an action might play out for other humans, other lifeforms, our society, or our biosphere, knowing the right and wrong behavior gets significantly more complex. It is easy for this constant tension and complexity to be paralyzing. Ethics doesn’t provide the answers, but rather a process by which we can reason about consequences to the best of our caring and ability to act.

Like a scientist would rigorously and systematically test a hypothesis to explain an observed phenomenon, ethics puts a moral challenge through different lenses to systematically look for ignored consequences. Ethics is a system for finding the hidden consequences of our moral actions.

Ethics is an ongoing process

Ethics is a humbling activity. Knowing that we are ignorant, finite beings with limited resources, time, and wisdom, we are still forced to choose a path (inaction can have grave consequences as well). Choosing a path while acknowledging our ignorance and lack of ability to care in larger spheres lies at the heart of ethics. In the face of this, we can resolve to revisit and re-evaluate our behaviors as we learn about the unfolding impact of our actions.

As life plays out the actual consequences, ethics plays an ongoing role of oversight. If we are open to revision, new information can shift the balance of our view of right and wrong conduct. Not only does the situation change over time, but the agent themself will change as well. We must continually revise our stories about progress and our actions in order to maintain and expand our capacity to care. 

Ethics is similar to strategy in the sense that we are trying to pay attention to the right information from the right frames as new streams of information come in. We are in a state of always having to update our models of reality. More accurate models of consequences can give us greater freedom to act in a more caring manner. The scientific method revises theory in the light of contradicting evidence; the work of ethics is to revise our conduct in the light of revealed consequences.

Lastly, ethics is not just the ongoing work of individuals, but of cultures and civilizations. Not just within a lifetime, but within the span of ongoing on a societal level. It is ongoing because the responsibility of ethics never rests solely on an individual’s shoulders. Individuals are too limited in their ability to accurately assess consequences through time and space on their own. Ethics is an ongoing collaboration of the wisdom of agents present and past. In this way ethics is much like the ongoing process of science – constantly revising our understanding of reality by building upon the collective intelligence of those before them. Ethics, like science, is not just an individual pursuit, but an ongoing pursuit of humanity.

Conclusion

“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions, and the depth of our answers” – Carl Sagan

At the core of ethics is a desire to better our conduct – to be wiser and less destructive as we engage with challenging situations. There are always consequences to any action (or inaction). Ethics acknowledges the breadth of consequences and provides the chance to change the course of our conduct if needed.

Responsible strategy is a marriage of two ongoing processes – ethics and strategy. We need strategy to adapt and guide execution, but we also need ethics to evaluate the values and stories of progress that inform strategy. By clearly seeing the consequences of our behavior, we can make conscious decisions about what responsibility in responsible strategy means.

Ethics is hard work. It can be confusing, awkward, overwhelming, and a struggle to persevere in questioning our stories and revising our conduct. We can recognize and allow these challenging emotions to be with us – to hold room for multiple perspectives at once. To compassionately hold and clearly see different perspectives is essential in expanding our capacity to care. There is room for both the challenging and the rewarding when we tap into a deep conviction that better is possible.

I have briefly outlined my thoughts on the what of ethics; in the next set of articles I’ll be exploring the why, the who, and the how of ethics

References

Justice in fog [Photograph]. https://img.src.ca/2009/07/15/480×270/090715justice_8.jpg

Ethics. (2021, Oct 14). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

Low, K. (2016). The Human Venture Institute mapbook (16th edition). Action Studies Institute.

Suggested Resources

Michael Sandel’s Harvard “Justice” Course

Other presentations and resources by Nick Kalogirou

Human Venture Meta Framework

• Map 81.2: Science & Ethics: Human Learning Ecology Definitions
• Map 131.2: Ethics – Semantic Reflections

Thanks to friends and the Human Venture Associate community for reading drafts of this article.

What is strategy?

Strategy is derived from the Greek word “strategos” – the skill of a general.

In a military context, a general is trying to achieve a goal while being surrounded by the fog of war (ignorance). Not only is the general trying to select a promising path with limited information, they are also trying to continually learn, in order to adapt to changing circumstances, changing goals, and often a dynamic and intelligent adversary.

Think about the various operational theaters (domains) that a general must consider in modern warfare. Most people can label sea, air, and land. But modern warfare must consider new facets of both threats and opportunities – like cyber warfare, and human/psychological warfare. Maneuvering in all domains to a position of relative advantage requires joint integration. A general who can understand and coordinate across different domains can preserve a good possible range of options going forward. With options comes reduction of risk and the flexibility to use limited resources for maximum impact.

A general at war is not looking at specific operations and tactics, but rather the streams of information coming in from different domains and higher levels. Higher levels contain information about longer term implications and consequences. The saying ‘lose the battle but win the war’ can be interpreted as having an understanding of the larger context forces at play which may supersede the operational level.

The art of strategy lies in paying attention to the right information, at the right level, at the right time. There is a continual evaluation of multiple paths that new information sheds light on. The unfolding circumstances feed into multiple models (Fig 1) of how the general thinks reality will play out. Incoming observations help prove and disprove various developmental paths, all aimed at the same strategic goal. As more information streams in, new hypotheses may be created, Action (or inaction) ultimately follows, feeding back into the unfolding situation. In this way strategy is more a process rather than an end point.

In business, strategies follow the same principles but are largely centered around economic goals. The competitive landscape is constantly shifting, so businesses try to orient themselves to garnering the right data to feed into the right analytics. Extracting the pros and cons patterns along multiple paths set the stage for a hypothesis and an action. 

A business trying to outwit its competitors might determine with analytics that it could be more successful by acquiring and merging with the capabilities of many different companies (horizontal integration), vs developing in-house capacity and expertise (vertical integration). As the situation continually unfolds, the business entity strategically tries to match and maximize limited capacities to the challenges of the environment and adversaries.

If we know the strategy, what is the process that informs what the strategic goal should be?

What is grand strategy?

Grand strategy is the means by which long term objectives will be achieved. Long term objectives (the timeframe could be in years, or even generations) interact with the long term arcs of a wide range of external forces – e.g. political, economic, environmental, and even planetary forces.

“While the horizon of strategy is bounded by the war, grand strategy looks beyond the war to the subsequent peace.” – Liddell Hart

What is the sustainable, long term objective of the direction of a nation or organization? When we start asking questions like this, we have to clarify the motivations which lie behind strategy. In the context of war, the motivation comes from national policy foundations, and the desire for a nation to continue its existence and thriving (what is desired after the war in peacetime?). Likewise in a business, the motivation is the continued existence and operation of a corporation in its long term economic context.

Sustaining corporate power in the service of shareholder return is a very common motivation for large businesses. To upkeep this economic motivation over the long term, such as for pension plans for multiple generations of investors, businesses must act and adapt in non economic domains, such as the environmental and the political. However tensions can easily arise between the long term economic objectives of a corporation and the well-being of the political, social, and environmental context if the core business activities are not in sustainable alignment. Lobbying for favorable monopolistic conditions is a classic business grand strategy battleground which can be highly problematic outside the economic context.

When we start asking enough questions about grand strategy, we inevitably run into questions of purpose. What is the purpose of this organization / entity over the long term? And how much of our purpose needs to be aligned with the systems that gave rise to the entity in the first place? 

Pursuing grand strategy requires thinking and acting on the long term relationships and responsibilities between an entity, the intelligent adversaries it faces, and its environment. The pursuit of these questions is shaped by individual and collective values, beliefs, and stories.

Values, Beliefs, and Stories

Values are intertwined with beliefs and stories. We learn what to value, what to believe, and how to act from experiences that are patterned into stories. These stories range from the personal to cosmic – and help us make sense of the world. Individual, cultural, and life stories can both help and hinder, depending on their match to the unfolding situation.

The stories that guide us can be pinned at different levels, and often can conflict with one another. One common example is that individuals and their organizations must balance the personal level with the group level. A soldier may have a family to care for, but may put their life at risk by fighting for their troop or nation. We are individuals and have personal responsibilities, but also are part of larger groups which also carry responsibilities. There are stories which emphasize the individual responsibility, but also stories which emphasize the collective responsibilities.

Values like humility, caring, compassion, power, kindness, and good will, can span the spectrum from the individual to the broadest reaches of the planet, life, and humanity. They inform our character and conduct as we go about executing strategy. Similarly, the absence of these values also affects our strategies. The story of economic entities externalizing the costs of their business to the environment is a common example of prioritizing economic values to the exclusion of values of care for our home planet.

Stories and values are not necessarily wise and/or responsible. Wisdom is not a guarantee even if we ask questions of grand strategy. So how do we judge whether our stories and values are aligned with the long term objectives of a nation, a business, humanity, and life on this planet?

Ethics, Briefly

Ethics gives us the chance to reason about appropriate conduct (moral reasoning) in challenging situations.

These are some hard, but not impossible ethical questions:

• What is the common good?
• What is our responsibility to the common good?
• What is progress? Individually, as a society, as humanity
• What’s the gap between our espoused values and values in action? Is that an acceptable gap?
• Should organizations (like corporations) align their goals with other societal systems, life systems, and planetary systems?
• What values in action matter to us as we work towards our goals? Does it matter who we are as we work?

Debating and discerning the right actions at different levels based on values is the realm of ethics. 

Working through questions like this informs what values and stories to live by – which informs our grand strategies – which informs our strategy. All three of these hold great potential for achieving both long and short term objectives.

Ethical thinking and action is possible – we’ve had millennia of practice taking different approaches. In the next article, I will dive a little deeper into exploring the role of ethics in pursuing responsible strategy.

References

Henry, J. (2017). Ships in fog [Photograph]. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jjwhenry/36474580784/

Grand strategy. (2021, Jul 15). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_strategy

Grand strategy. (2020, Aug 17). Retrieved Jul 15, 2021, from https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/8/17/defining-grand-strategy

OODA Loop. Retrieved Jul 15, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

Low, K. (2016). The Human Venture Institute mapbook (16th edition). Action Studies Institute.

Suggested Resources

• Smarter Every Day: The future of war and how it affects you – multi domain operations
• The Mystery and Mastery of Strategic Thinking, by Dana Penrice, humanventure.com blog
• Range (2019) by David Epstein
• Other presentations and resources by Nick Kalogirou
• Recommended books by the Human Venture Institute
• Human Venture Meta Framework
  • Map 66: Biosocial Horizon Lines – boundaries of caring
  • Map 69.1: Frames of Action – tactics to grand strategy

Analytics and strategy help us navigate the fog of war, but don’t necessarily make us responsible or wise.

The ascendance of analytics and its importance in strategy today is truly remarkable. One only needs to admire the seemingly simple act of a Google search to marvel at how analytics is affecting our ability to adapt and learn.

Yet with this rapid increase in instrumental power, more and more people are being left behind. The concentration of power and wealth into the hands of a few individuals and corporations has worrying implications for equality, liberty, and our relationship with truth. Our ability to collectively deal with the great challenges of our time (e.g. climate change) is hampered by algorithms which introduce rage and division into our political discourse.

Business strategy for a handful of technology companies has been staggeringly successful, especially in the last two decades. But what impact has this success had on human and life grand strategy? With the incredible opportunities technology has opened up to us, how are we managing the longer term threats of powerful technology to human flourishing and the common good?

The wise strategy for life and humanity is an ongoing pursuit. Trying to expand our caring while reducing threats is a challenge that spans all generations. In this series of articles, I will be exploring how we can pursue responsible strategy.

• Responsible Analytics
• From Strategy to Grand Strategy
• How Ethics Informs Strategy
• What We Can Do

Pursuing Responsible Analytics

Analytics helps us answer questions about the uncertainty and complexity of our world by finding meaningful patterns in data. One of the ways we perform analytics is by building models – simplified versions of reality – which produce predictions to our questions about the world. With analytics we test these approximations of reality until we have sufficiently worked out the dynamics or reduced the risks of a problem to a satisfactory level.

Models

Models involve simple to complex computation and are always limited by a finite amount of processing power. To answer ‘what will the weather be tomorrow?’ a human brain or a computer constructs a model consisting of statistics on some data points to make a prediction. It is necessary that the data is restricted to relevant observations like clouds and current temperature – as opposed to irrelevant data like the current price of Bitcoin.

For models to work effectively and efficiently, modellers must narrow the scope of what our models can see to only the information that is potentially helpful. Reducing the variable space makes modeling possible. Yet here lies the potential danger – what variables does the modeller choose to leave out, and what are the consequences of ignoring that data?

One of the classic representations of the lifecycle of analytics is called the CRISP-DM (“Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining”).

Image adapted from Provost & Fawcett (2014)

This lifecycle acknowledges that the modeling of data is only one part of the process. Understanding, preparation, evaluation, deployment, and ongoing oversight of the data are crucial to successfully answering an analytics question.

Even if we do all the steps of the CRISP-DM, business and data understanding alone is not enough for responsible analytics at scale. Analytics at scale can generate immense value for users and incredible returns for shareholders, but also shocking threats to the society and environment that it is embedded within.

To engage with analytics responsibly, considerations must be made of how the business model interacts with broader systems such as population health, political systems, justice, and planetary health. If a business limits its understanding to a customer-centric or purely economic horizon, it runs the risk of ignoring the waste, suffering, or injustice it may be causing in the systems that support it.

Analytics runs on the limited datasets given by its creator. This creates models which are heavily influenced by the creator’s values, which in turn are heavily influenced by the organizational and societal culture they reside within. If we want to pursue responsible analytics, it becomes critical to not just look outwards, but also inwards at ourselves and our organization’s values, caring, and motivations.

Unintended Consequences

Social media algorithms are a poignant example of a powerful piece of analytics with highly problematic consequences. Human behavioral data is extracted from our clicks, likes, and comments. Artificial intelligence models process this data to predict our behavior. Our news feeds then fill up with personally tailored content determined by analytics, imperceptibly manipulating what we see to achieve maximal exposure to the highest bidding party. An unintended consequence of this type of analytics is that in order to keep your attention and keep you consuming tailored content, everybody in your news feed sounds like you. This echo-chamber effect has led to an epidemic of polarization that is making it far harder to have civil discourse at a time where we need to navigate big problems together.

Mathematical models themselves are not the danger. What a model sees and does not see is up to the modeller. When a model starts affecting its context at large scales, it is up to the modeller to feedback the consequences into the analytical process. Humans, not models, are responsible for the threats that powerful models produce. Human modellers have values, ignorance, standards, and levels of caring – all of which are heavily influenced by the organization and culture they reside within.

Responsible Analytics

Analytics is a learning process that helps us navigate solutions to problems. Modern computing power, mass data, and mathematical models have given analytics great power – revealing both incredible opportunities but also incredible threats. To wield this power in a way that supports greater caring while reducing unintentional threats requires a deeper understanding of ourselves and the human and life systems we are a part of.

There are other learning processes that can help us explore broader horizons wisely. Strategy is a way of learning that tries to consider multiple models, paths, and time frames. In the next article in this series, I will discuss how strategy may help us pursue wise decision making.

References

Zuboff, S. (2019). Surveillance Capitalism. Profile Books.

Low, K. (2016). The Human Venture Institute mapbook (16th edition). Action Studies Institute.

Cheng, K. (2014). Sunrise in fog [Photograph]. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ky0ncheng/36702735110/

Provost, F., & Fawcett., T. (2014). Data science for business: What you need to know about data mining and data-analytic thinking. O’Reilly Media.

Suggested Resources

• Surveillance Capitalism (2019) by Shoshana Zuboff
• Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) by Cathy O’Neill
• Your Undivided Attention – podcast by the Center for Humane Technology
• Humane Tech Design Guide by the Center for Humane Technology
• Other presentations and resources by Nick Kalogirou
• Recommended books by the Human Venture Institute
• Human Venture Meta Framework Map 66: Biosocial Horizon Lines – boundaries of caring