Consider how you can reduce harmful outcomes & boost Tech for Good.
10 Ideas for Reducing the Unintended Consequences of Emerging Technologies.
The appeal of ‘emerging technologies’ is undeniable. It seems like every week there’s a new gadget, app or platform released that sparks excitement about improving operations, services or products. Being an early-adopter can certainly create benefits for your organisation, but the dream of radical positive transformation quickly turns into a nightmare when there are harmful unintended consequences.
New technologies can help to future-proof organisations, but can we future-proof new technologies so they make organisations (and life) better and not worse? Can we reduce the harmful outcomes?
The first hurdle is that the risk of unintended consequences increases along with the ‘newness’ of a technology. By nature, emerging technologies — or EmTechs — haven’t been around for very long or haven’t been used for every specific purpose. The potential for a great outcome can be very high but they are essentially untested; the full spectrum of consequences is unknown.
To add to the challenge of using EmTechs, the consequences of implementation now spread further at a faster rate than ever before. A decision to use an EmTech can impact more people and systems in less time (e.g. environmental, economic, political, social systems). This rapid spread of impact is in no small part due to advances in digitisation and connectivity technologies. The luxury of time for experimentation and trial-and-error, or adopting a wait-and-see strategy is no longer viable. Instead, it’s imperative to ‘get it right the first time’.
How can we steer towards the best possible outcomes from using EmTechs and away from undesirable consequences? I’ve put together 10 ideas for decision-makers to ponder, tweak and build on as they consider integrating EmTechs into operations and products.
Read the full article here.