Sheryl Cababa
Sheryl Cababa
VP of Strategy @ Substantial
“A lot of us can benefit from the idea of: What if we did nothing? What if we didn’t create something that’s going to cause cascading, harmful effects? What if we thought about that a little bit more heavily, and actually slowed down?”
Action Prompts
Systems thinking is an approach to examine the interconnected & circular nature of our reality so we can design and problem solve in more holistic, sustainable, & impactful ways.
// SELF REFLECTION
When Sheryl talks about the need to slow down to ask questions that account for impact, where in your experience, have you sensed resistance to that? Which organizational norms deter this?
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// TEAM EXPLORATION
Sheryl talks about bringing awareness to ripple effects of a product/service, and pulling that forward as we design, build and deliver “value”.
Consider potential blind spots and unintended consequences for your product/service:
1. How does it respect people’s boundaries and the other parts of their lives?
2. Who could it most directly benefit outside of your targeted users?
3. What feedback would the environment give about it?
These Qs were sampled from the Tarot Cards of Tech.
Resources
Learn about the habits of a systems thinker.
Check out animated causal loops for social media ripple effects and reinforcing cycles.
Sheryl Cababa, VP of Strategy @ Substantial, and international speaker and workshop facilitator, has developed methods for designers to integrate systems thinking within their practices, including the infamous Tarot Cards of Tech.
Jyoti first heard Sheryl speak at SIC in 2018, where she presented a session on the unintended consequences of design. She called out YouTube and Facebook, for using behavioral manipulation techniques to promote endless device usage and spread disinformation.
Sheryl’s wisdom around waking up to the ripple effects of our products and services is timely and relevant in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election.
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The Accountability Gap In Tech
I personally care a lot about racial differences and women of color in tech. I’ve felt the cascading effects of racism in this country. As an individual, I try to do what I can in terms of advocacy, and personal advocacy.
There's oftentimes this disconnect where, this summer, technology leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and his wife donated money to racial justice causes. My reaction to that was, what about your day job? What are you doing to prevent your platform from causing some of the very things that are contributing to this environment of polarization?
Throwing virtuous side hustle money at the problem once it happens doesn’t absolve them of their responsibility for creating that environment in the first place.
There’s also a disconnect with company hand wringing about their lack of diversity -- so they say they care, and release statements about Black Lives Matter, but many of these organizations are terribly toxic environments for their black employees and ex-employees.
I’m trying to make sure people like me don't experience the same things I had to experience coming up in this industry. I never actually got a title promotion until a few years ago, when another woman of color in my (former) organization vouched for me, and that was after two decades in the industry. In order to move up the chain, I actually had to actually leave my organization. The things that I've experienced are suddenly being amplified in the world. It’s validating to know it does exist and it wasn't just my personal experience.
Translating Good Intentions To Long Term Impact Through Design
So many tech people I work with are really authentic about the issues they care about in the world. They care about fairness. But there's a sort of cognitive dissonance between them caring about these issues in the political and life sphere, and not really connecting to the work that they do in the day to day the products they create.
I’ve been working to help technologists better understand the outcomes of their work, and how the work that they're doing can often lead to unintended consequences. They need to understand the ramifications that they're creating. It doesn't matter if you're working for Facebook, you could be creating an app for a nonprofit that could have really intense, unintended consequences and potential ramifications.
In the industry, we prioritize intent. Sometimes it doesn't matter how good your intentions are if you're unable to foresee what might happen with the things that you're making and putting out.
It requires the headspace to ask, “OK now what’s going to happen three degrees from here?” Understanding the causal loops that lead to that is an exercise, in facing the things you don’t have control over. You just want to make things work right, and that’s not trivial.
I focus on not just talking about how we should be more ethical, because that's really easy. It's about how we integrate the tools and methods that we can actually sprinkle throughout our process, in order to be able to think more long term about the effects of what we're building.
A Wakeup Call And A Tarot Deck For Tech
The 2016 election was a pretty big wake up call. Cambridge Analytica just happened and it was public. Suddenly the industry that was thought of as innovative was being taken to task for its negative impact on the world. So we started to talk a lot about what we do to understand the ramifications of our work.
My team created the Tarot Cards of Tech which reflected the questions we had been asking within our projects. It’s a series of prompts around themes like, who are you forgetting? When you're designing this product, who is invisible to you? It forced conversations with people in their organizations, and I was hearing how people were using it in these ways that I didn't even expect.
I'm always surprised by the effectiveness of simple, accessible tools, and how much they can make a difference. You can be super analytical and very abstract and write a white paper about these things, but if people can't integrate it with their day to day work, it's just something that gives them anxiety.
Lightweight tools can introduce concepts and get things started. It’s like the kindling, creating the little spark that creates change. Sometimes change needs to happen incrementally, you know? Nobody's going to overthrow Facebook right now. They need to be doing something different inside, as well as governments that are meant to protect us, putting serious policy and regulatory pressure on companies like that.
Power Plays And Who Can Really Make Change Happen
I used to give a talk about designing for outcomes, and some of the key comments I’d get every time were: those decisions are above my paygrade; I don't have any control over the business or the business model of what we're doing; I only have so much power in my organization.
So I started integrating a story about an intern who I worked with. She convinced her team, who were using an emerging technology, to focus on a subset of people with a disability instead of designing for a very privileged class of people. She believed in inclusive design as a tenet and wanted to integrate that into her work. She presented her why, and she was able to convince them to change. It showed me, even if that feels like a small win, you don’t have to keep sitting back and designing features and products you think are terrible. You have to find creative ways to have a positive impact, or you have to live with that cognitive dissonance.
The Numbers Truly Show Where Your Values Are
It’s hard to make change when your performance indicators and metrics aren’t aligned with your values and the impact you want to have. A YouTube engineer I know who questioned his organization. He asked for more complex metrics beyond more people watching more videos, and longer videos for more time, forever. That has tons of ramifications for the kind of content people will consume. It was a struggle, and he left the organization. If you’re making money off of people’s attention, you’re never going to make change because you’ll never make business decisions that result in people spending less time on your platform. We have to interrogate the metrics we’re working against. Does that allow us to be able to say no? Does that allow us to do nothing?
In mainstream business culture, you can’t say, “why don’t we just do nothing?”. There's this machine and it just has to keep going and going. You have to keep creating, you have to keep making. Everything has to be new. A lot of us can benefit from the idea of, what if we did nothing? What if we didn't create something that is going to cause cascading, harmful effects? What if we thought about that a little bit more heavily, and actually slowed down? I’m both a cynical and optimistic person because I recognize the problems that we have today, but if enough people want this to change, I feel like it'll change. It might take a long time. The first step to that is really interrogating what you’re being measured against within your organization, and forcing it to be different.
Ethical technology is becoming a part of our strategy as a company, and we’re trying to integrate it into our practice. Not everybody comes to you wanting that, but I do think everybody needs it, especially if you're building digital products.
Does The Triple Bottom Line Really Help You Make Better Decisions?
Let’s say you hired a really diverse team. It might actually hurt you from an immediate profit perspective. You have no ground to stand on if you need to make a good decision, and you're giving up profit. Oftentimes, they say hiring diverse teams creates better performance. But, what if it didn't create better performance, but you have a diverse team? Isn't that still the right thing to do?
What if it was the opposite in terms of measurement, like diverse teams move slower and are more difficult to work with? But you have an all white team of people from Harvard, and they're really fast, and they create lots of efficiencies for your organization and your organization is profitable. Does that mean we shouldn't hire diverse teams? For me, the answer is, of course we still should have diversity. If it’s not helping us from a profit perspective, it’s still the right thing to do.
Trade some of the profit for doing the right thing. For attention-based platforms, it means slowing things down, knowing you’re going to have less profit, but you will have a better ecosystem that will lead to long term health.
No Time Like The Present
Maybe everything that's happening right now is a forcing function that will lead to meaningful change. We're at that point where we need to start making hard decisions, because we can't just keep doing things the way we're doing things. This year has been a catalyst that’s showing a lot of the ways we’ve privatized everything, and the responsibility to shareholders that businesses are oriented around, hasn't helped the majority of us.
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Use this collection of 28 self reflection prompts and team activities. Each one is designed to support you in exploring empathy, and building a work culture in alignment with your values and vision.