Introduction
I recently read The New Yorker’s piece questioning whether Sam Altman can be trusted to lead OpenAI, given the importance of the company’s technology. It’s a thought-provoking article, and far from the first to raise questions on how AI development can be done ethically and responsibly. I think it’s the right time for a broader discussion on how innovation and ethics intersect, in AI and beyond.
I’ve built five technology companies and invested in more than 100 startups, and I firmly believe that ethical thinking needs to be woven into the creative process from the start. The most successful companies I’ve worked with don’t treat ethics as a gate that ideas have to pass through on the way out the door, but as a lens that sharpens the quality of ideas before they ever get built. Ethics becomes a core piece of the innovation process.
Why Top-Down Principles Aren’t Enough
Most large organizations have done some version of the ethics work. They’ve written a set of company values and built compliance teams. Some of them have even published public-facing AI principles.
And all of that matters, but those top-down structures rarely change how people actually think and work on a daily basis. The values poster on the break room wall doesn’t influence the tradeoff a product team makes on a Tuesday afternoon when they’re behind schedule and facing pressure to ship.
A research paper by Benjamin Lange and colleagues at Google (Engaging Engineering Teams Through Moral Imagination: A Bottom-Up Approach for Responsible Innovation and Ethical Culture Change in Technology Companies) makes this point with real operational evidence. They developed and ran over 50 workshops across Google’s engineering and product teams using what they call a “Moral Imagination” methodology, a bottom-up approach designed to build ethical awareness and deliberation into the daily work of the people actually making design decisions.¹
Their central argument is that formal initiatives like company principles, ethics review procedures, and compliance controls are necessary but insufficient. Those structures create guardrails, but they don’t build the muscle. What actually changes how teams operate is giving engineers and product designers the skills and the space to think through the ethical dimensions of their work themselves, as a regular part of how they build things.¹
That resonates deeply with my experience. In every company I’ve built and every organization I’ve advised, culture change happens when the people closest to the work internalize new ways of thinking. You can’t mandate that from a policy document.
The Three Capabilities That Matter
What I find particularly useful about the Moral Imagination approach is that it breaks ethical culture down into something concrete and buildable. The researchers identify three core capabilities that teams need to develop.¹
- Ethical awareness: the ability to recognize that a design decision, a product feature, or a business process has ethical dimensions in the first place. This sounds obvious, but in practice, engineering teams are trained to optimize for technical values like efficiency, scalability, and elegance. Ethical considerations are rarely part of that default vocabulary. Most teams don’t ignore ethics deliberately. They simply don’t have a habit of seeing it.¹
- Ethical deliberation: the ability to reason through those dimensions in a structured way, considering different stakeholders, potential harms, and competing values. This is where the workshop format becomes powerful. Rather than lecturing teams about moral philosophy, the researchers create scenarios where teams practice working through real ethical tensions together. The approach is non-didactic. It doesn’t impose a particular ethical framework. It builds the team’s capacity to reason through complexity on their own.¹
- Ethical decision-making: the ability to actually translate that reasoning into concrete choices about what to build, how to build it, and what tradeoffs to accept. This is where most organizations fall short. They can identify the ethical question, they can discuss it at length, but when the moment comes to make a decision that costs something, whether that’s time, revenue, or competitive speed, the ethical consideration gets deprioritized.
What This Means for You
If you’re a leader trying to build a culture of innovation that lasts, ethics can’t be a separate workstream. It has to be integrated into how your teams think, design, and decide every day.
- Start with awareness, not policy. Before you can build ethical culture, your teams need to recognize the ethical dimensions of their own work. That means creating moments, through workshops, team discussions, or structured exercises, where people practice seeing the ethical implications of the decisions they’re already making. The Moral Imagination methodology shows that this capability can be built through facilitated practice, not through compliance training.¹
- Make it a team practice, not an individual burden. One of the smartest things about the bottom-up approach is that it changes team norms, not just individual awareness. When ethical deliberation becomes something a team does together as part of their regular workflow, it stops feeling like an extra obligation and starts feeling like a standard part of how good work gets done.
- Reward the right tradeoffs. If your incentive structure only rewards speed and output, people will optimize for speed and output. If you want teams to make thoughtful ethical choices, you need to recognize and reward the moments when someone slows down to raise a concern, flags a potential harm, or proposes an alternative that’s harder to build but better for the people it will affect. What you celebrate is what you get more of.
- Lead by example. When senior leaders visibly wrestle with ethical tradeoffs, when they’re transparent about the tensions between growth and responsibility, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. The Moral Imagination approach works because it creates safe space for teams to have these conversations. As a leader, you’re the one who determines whether that space stays safe outside the workshop room.
Innovation without ethics is fragile. It might win in the short term, but it creates the kind of risk, reputational, legal, and human, that eventually catches up. The organizations that will lead over the next decade are the ones building cultures where creativity and conscience grow together. That combination produces innovation you can be proud of and competitive advantage that compounds.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is “Moral Imagination” and how does it differ from traditional ethics training?
A: Moral Imagination is a methodology developed and tested at Google that uses facilitated workshops to build ethical awareness, deliberation, and decision-making capabilities within engineering and product teams. Unlike traditional ethics training, which tends to be didactic and top-down, Moral Imagination is non-prescriptive. It doesn’t lecture teams about ethical principles. Instead, it creates structured scenarios where teams practice reasoning through real ethical tensions together, building the skills organically rather than through compliance.¹
Q: Why can’t company principles and review processes handle ethics on their own?
A: Formal structures like published principles and review boards are necessary, but they operate at the institutional level. They create boundaries, but they don’t change how individual teams think and make decisions on a daily basis. The research shows that deeply ingrained norms within engineering culture, such as prioritizing efficiency and scalability, tend to dominate unless teams are given deliberate practice in expanding their frame of reference to include ethical considerations.¹
Q: Does building an ethical culture slow down innovation?
A: In my experience, the opposite is true. Ethical thinking forces teams to consider who their work affects and what the longer-term consequences might be. That deeper consideration leads to more durable innovations and avoids the costly mistakes that come from moving fast without thinking broadly. The short-term tradeoff in speed is real, but the long-term gains in trust, quality, and sustainability more than compensate.
Q: How do you get engineers and product teams to care about ethics when they’re under pressure to deliver?
A: You make it part of how they work, not something added on top of their work. The Moral Imagination workshops are effective because they integrate ethical reasoning into the existing workflow rather than creating a separate process. When teams experience ethical deliberation as something that makes their work better rather than something that slows it down, adoption follows.¹
Q: Can small or mid-sized companies build this kind of ethical culture, or is it only for large organizations like Google?
A: The principles scale down well. You don’t need a formal workshop program to start. What you need is a regular practice of asking your team to consider who is affected by the things they’re building, what could go wrong, and what tradeoffs they’re making. That can happen in a weekly team meeting. The key insight from the research is that ethical culture is built through practice at the team level, and that’s accessible to organizations of any size.¹
Citations:
¹ Lange, B., et al. (2023). Engaging Engineering Teams Through Moral Imagination: A Bottom-Up Approach for Responsible Innovation and Ethical Culture Change in Technology Companies. arXiv:2306.06901.