Engaging Engineering Teams Through Moral Imagination: A Bottom-Up Approach for Responsible Innovation and Ethical Culture Change in Technology Companies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a 'Moral Imagination' methodology to promote responsible innovation and ethical culture change within engineering teams in technology companies, demonstrated through extensive workshops at Google.

Contribution

It presents a novel bottom-up approach to fostering ethical awareness and responsible innovation in tech organizations, complementing existing formal initiatives.

Findings

Over 50 workshops conducted at Google

Enhanced ethical deliberation among engineering teams

Complemented existing ethics and compliance initiatives

Abstract

We propose a "Moral Imagination" methodology to facilitate a culture of responsible innovation for engineering and product teams in technology companies. Our approach has been operationalized over the past two years at Google, where we have conducted over 50 workshops with teams across the organization. We argue that our approach is a crucial complement to existing formal and informal initiatives for fostering a culture of ethical awareness, deliberation, and decision-making in technology design such as company principles, ethics and privacy review procedures, and compliance controls. We characterize some of the distinctive benefits of our methodology for the technology sector in particular.