Urgently wanted: Sustainable Tech Behaviour

Because tech optimism won’t be enough

Hello!
I know, it’s been a while. But the reason for that is below, in full glory. I’ve been living inside my head, trying to get to grips with my shifting view on tech. And that’s turned into a concept called STB, Sustainable Tech Behaviour. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Happy weekend reading!
(no Vinyl of the Week this time 😭).

If you prefer to read it in Dutch, the lovely people at DataNews/Knack published it as an opinion piece.

👇👇👇👇

Urgently wanted: Sustainable Tech Behaviour

Because tech optimism won’t be enough

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. 

After 20+ years in the digital and innovation space, I’ve come to realise that my tech optimism hasn’t always been that justified, let alone sustainable. Whether it was social media, digital transformation, blockchain or - beware - the metaverse, I - and many others with me - have been looking at anything on the Gartner Hype cycle through the lens of business opportunities. And I’m sorry for that. 

Aside from the obvious business benefits, I’ve come to witness that tech also has a wider impact. It seeps into unexpected crevices of our behaviour and has unintended consequences that turn out to be non-trivial. The hard bit? These insights only truly materialise after a while. And while hindsight is a lovely thing, often the tech genie’s already out of the bottle. 

This is why I’ve started to introduce the concept of Sustainable Tech Behaviour. A framework to underpin our organisations’ tech decisions. Kind of like the SDGs of tech. Else, in another 10, 15 or 20 years, we risk having that same sense of confusion: “How the hell did we get here? If only we’d had the foresight…”?

Let’s look at the flip side of tech 

Don’t get me wrong. Technology is amazing. 

About 10 years ago I re-vamped the comms strategy of a local government, by shifting from print to targeted Facebook ads. Innovative. But more importantly: cost-efficient. 

However, I’m not sure that I would advise the same thing right now. I’m not sure I would advise to send tax payers’ money to a company with a complicated track record in tax paying. I’m not sure if a government’s values align with a content product that wants to ‘connect people’ but relies on a dopamine machine. 

I’m not wagging the moral finger here. I’m just saying that, with the benefit of hindsight, I would look at it in a more balanced, a more sustainable way. 

The flip side of tech is increasingly as omnipresent and non-trivial as tech itself. Deepfakes, data privacy, doom scrolling, Elon Musk in government, Microsoft buying a nuclear power for their data centres,… It’s getting complicated! And now we have all kinds of AI being spawned into our world. 

Speaking of which, isn’t LLM technology amazing? Need a funny name for your Fantasy Cycling team? There’s a GPT for that. Need to write a difficult email or an opinion piece? There’s a GPT for that. Need to discover new materials? AI tools will help. Efficiency FTW!

But the STB side of me then thinks: on the flip-side, what happens if we start outsourcing our thinking and language creation?  

I hear a lot of people raving about how the Chat GPTs of the world are “extremely useful to them”. Fact: all of them have been educated in a non-AI age. So they’ve been trained to process information, to question and to reason. But what happens in 2040, when we have trained Gen Alpha in a world of freely available language creation machines? Will AI still be ‘democratising knowledge’? Or will it have created an AI elite?  

Again, not judging. Just asking. Just reining in the wild horse of tech optimism. 

These kind of thoughts have been nagging me for a while. First a bit apprehensive. But then I noticed people nodding. Turns out that this paradoxical relationship with tech is like some common unsavoury rash that nobody wants to talk about. 

Why, oh why

So how come we are continuously blinded by this tech optimism? From experience, I can see a few reasons: 

• Tech is simply very, very good. Particularly at tangible, measurable things, like automation efficiency. And scaling! Hitting those targets feels lovely, for us humans. 

• The way of working of tech companies has become standard. We’re meant to adopt start-up mantras like ‘be agile’ or ‘move fast and break things’. But speed is counterproductive to embracing a more systemic approach.

• ‘Tech Creep’ is a fact. Over the years, tech has been implemented on a small-problem basis. And because it’s small, we never feel the need to ask bigger questions. But tech can be very good (see point 1), so we invite more tech in to fix another small problem. Etc etc. 

• Tech is considered to be low-risk. A friend of mine runs a medical start-up. She’s been jumping through regulation hoops for 2 years to launch a pretty low-risk product. Compare that to an app like Character AI, which can launch in a few weeks and be a unicorn in 2 years. 

The red thread: we’ve become accustomed to thinking about tech in terms of efficiency, usefulness, optimisation, business value,… and not in terms of broader impact. 

A framework! My kingdom for a framework! 

Gut feelings are great, but people want solutions. How can decision makers get a different perspective? How can product teams ask the right questions? 

Sustainable Tech Behaviour requires a mindset that is less focused on efficiency and short-term goals. People are able to do that, but they need a little nudge. And that’s where tools like frameworks and canvases come in. 

The STB framework v0.1 is simple: unearth impact and unintended consequences on 4 non-business levels: social, individual, ecological and economical.

• If you do this for the tech ‘video calling’, you may end up with a post-it in Economical like: “Do we feel ok with supporting a company like Zoom that has ‘mistakenly' routed data through China?”

• As an E-bike company, you may make an Ecological consideration like: “If people start buying our products as a replacement for normal bikes, how much more energy consumption do we facilitate?”

• If you do this for an avatar chat app, you may end up with a post-it in Individual like: “What is the impact of our product on the development of non-verbal language skills?”

As a brainstorm tool, this rudimentary framework works surprisingly well. Currently students at the Brussels Erasmus Hogeschool are investigating how this can become a more fine-grained tool. These young people were triggered by that STB gut feeling and are keen to integrate that into their innovation toolkit. Hats off!

What’s in it for me?

… say the CTO, the product owner and the CEO. 

And that’s a fair question. 

Again, my intention is not to point fingers and create hurdles. We have to make impact more visible, support decision making and identify potential benefits. 

• Maybe this is an opportunity for organisations to showcase their societal impact.

• Can Sustainable Tech Behaviour become a USP in attracting (B2B) customers, like a Nutriscore for tech. 

• Is it an advantage in the war for talent for the GenZ/Alpha workforce. Some of these youngsters are indeed more purpose-driven and realise very well that their relationship with tech is complicated. 

Regardless

Apart from the research and the tool and the advantages, I do believe it’s time to embrace Sustainable Tech Behaviour, one way or another. 

Just read this quote from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. 

“The current version of AI is going to help us run our businesses and be more productive, augment our employees, improve our margins, increase our revenues, and improve our customer relationships and our business KPIs.”

That’s good old fashioned (and very successful) business thinking. 

But if we want tech to contribute in a sustainable way, we need some STB thinking to complement that. 

We need to move beyond “Yes, we can” to “Holy shit, can we? Then we should think a bit about this.”
An STB mindset can help identify those issues. A bit like red teaming - not for security, but for society.