Friday, March 30, 2018

Signal to Noise: What Cambridge Analytica Taught Us

When a company can be brought down through one indiscriminate
 act it becomes increasingly important to embed ethical behavior
Ultimately, it is the individual (an employee at any level) who is responsible for assessing knowledge and how that may or may not affect business prospects, company credibility, industry disruption and ever changing customer preferences in any company. As businesses continue to flatten their hierarchy and employees are becoming more educated they have put decision making in more and varied hands within their organizations.  

Gone are the days that senior management sat at the top of a company hierarchy and made decisions about the company’s future (of course - there are still a few dinosaurs out there that manage from the top down.)Today, resilient forward thinking companies empower all levels of employees to consider and evaluate potential agents of change. Employees are more educated, they tend to enter fields of work that drive their interests and as a result, they are able to research, identify and consider new and alternative strategies more readily.

Take for example, the recent Facebook data leak engineered by Cambridge Analytica where Christopher Wylie claims, the company he worked for, improperly harvested Facebook data from some 50 million users in order to help seal victories for the Trump campaign. While Wylie was simply named as a contractor by Cambridge Analytica , he was still able to influence the direction and fortunes of this company without being integrated into the management hierarchy of the company. His research and unique viewpoint created a new means of utilizing data.

This can be cautionary tale, really a tale of two possibilities depending on how you evaluate knowledge and the process you have in place. The first possibility, we have already covered but let’s look at another opportunity that presented itself to Mr. Wylie. He pitched his services to the Liberal caucus research office and the Liberals signed a contract with Wylie in 2016 and he launched a pilot project. After seeing what Wylie had to offer, the party chose not to proceed further with the project. We are assuming that the techniques are similar in both instances, with Cambridge Analytica and with the Liberal Party Caucus.

I can’t provide a lot of insight into Cambridge Analytica’s process for evaluating knowledge, but one can guess that the evaluation parameters are far less onerous and opportunities are largely evaluated based on profitability rather than credibility, as was not the case with the Liberal Party Caucus.

Most tool sets and strategies available to business in this relatively new category of assessing and evaluating new ideas and strategies use tools such as the Balanced Scoreboard which analyses profit, customer experience, goals and innovation - or alternatively, the Success Case Method that primarily promotes the use of a field trail to evaluate effectiveness and outcomes. Regardless of the process, most of these options are designed for companies with larger infrastructure. Small business has a much more difficult time of it given the lack of resources and the need to innovate.

Embedding ethical culture in companies is becoming an increasingly important component of an organizations’ s life-cycle. When a company can be brought down through one indiscriminate act it becomes increasingly important to embed ethical behavior to ensure that all levels of management understand, promote and communicate ethical tenants and benefits when evaluating opportunities.

An article in Financial Management Magazine provides us with some interesting insight into the process about how effective embedding ethical behavior is- in today's decisions making. This study was conducted in 2017 and it explores the importance of upholding ethical standards. The study indicates that there are differences in demographics in how fraud, corruptions and unethical behavior is viewed by differences age categories.

While Christopher Wylie had a pang of quilt in the aftermath as he surveyed the damage his initiative wrought, clearly the management of Cambridge Analytica did not –even when they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. If your company is built to succeed now and greed (the gentrified term of course is profit) is the defining architect of the company vision - then embedding ethical standards all levels is not your concern. But if you are building for long term growth you need to consider developing strategies that raise awareness among employees and their role in preventing financial, reputation, or regulatory damage to the organization when considering new and transformative business initiatives.









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