2020 has been the year the world turned on its head. We are witnessing the worst pandemic in living memory. Renewed focus on the Black Lives Matter has once again shone a light on deep seated, structural discrimination. Our democracies are under threat, platforms like YouTube and tech like facial recognition, enable anti-democratic movements. Many businesses wont survive. But those that do, and there will be some that thrive post-Covid will have learned to do business very differently. Senior management, and those in the top positions (the C Suite) know they have to change. But few have direction about how to do it. The answer, is working with guidance found in the methodologies of ethics, philosophy, anthropology, social science and other humanities disciplines. Ive been running tech ethics workshops since 2017. Ive learned that there are so many willing hearts and minds who want change, but there is a complete lack of investment. Without budget towards ethics, and without buy-in, where the findings from responsible business teams are deployed in house, then nothing will change. Ethics will be mere tokenism if business leaders cannot be shown how it can drive value and cause your organisation to survive, and indeed thrive, for the decades ahead. Our objective with this report is to empower those who care about tech ethics to work with responsible business teams and the C-Suite to create real change. Were not interested in paying lip-service, or ethics-washing, we want to help you with transformative practices which will save your business, and save the planet. Many of the people we interviewed for this report said that so many business leaders saw ethics as a ’nice-to-have’, and that because ethics has so many unquantifiable benefits, that it was difficult to prove its value. Its not surprising that these problems were echoed by the students at the Hattusia campus. So, weve produced the Hattusia ethics ROI calculator, to demonstrate the real financial value of tech ethics. We believe this is a game changer that shows that businesses cant afford to miss out responsible business in their strategy, operations, products and sales process. Ultimately, tech ethics is valuable because human lives are valuable, not because of the financial return. The report will show you how to sell the holistic vision of ethics, and will lead the way as we transform our approach to the economy post 2020.
