Practice : Ethical Impact Assessment
Purpose and Strategic Importance
Ethical Impact Assessments identify potential harms and unintended consequences of product decisions. They ensure fairness, inclusion, and societal responsibility are considered early.
Without this practice, teams risk reputational damage, regulatory breaches, or exclusionary design.
Description of the Practice
- A structured evaluation of ethical risks and impacts.
- Covers areas such as privacy, bias, environmental sustainability, and safety.
- Outputs include mitigation plans and escalations for high-risk issues.
How to Practise It (Playbook)
1. Getting Started
- Introduce lightweight ethical checklists.
- Discuss trade-offs openly during discovery.
- Document identified risks and actions.
2. Scaling and Maturing
- Standardise assessments as a discovery step.
- Involve diverse voices to broaden perspective.
- Establish escalation pathways for ethical concerns.
3. Team Behaviours to Encourage
- Courage to raise ethical concerns.
- Transparency in documenting trade-offs.
- Valuing fairness and inclusion in decision-making.
4. Watch Out For…
- Treating assessments as compliance-only.
- Excluding impacted groups from reviews.
- Prioritising speed over responsibility.
5. Signals of Success
- Qualitative: Teams proactively raise and address ethical issues.
- Quantitative: Reduction in incidents linked to ethical oversights.