Ethics, Technology, & Public Policy with Stanford School of Engineering

Over the last several years, my career has taken me through healthcare, workforce development, nonprofit leadership, and organizational operations. I've worked as a physical therapist helping individuals navigate life-changing injuries and diagnoses. I've led technical training programs preparing people for careers in technology. I've supported organizations through growth, restructuring, and cultural change. Today, I lead a nonprofit focused on digital literacy and economic mobility while also helping organizations strengthen their operations and people practices.

A recurring finding of that intersectional experience is that every tool, process, policy, and platform reflects choices made by people. Those choices determine who benefits, who is excluded, who bears risk, and whose voices are heard.  This complexity of not just modern work, but modern life, prompted me to apply to the Ethics, Technology, and Public Policy for Practitioners (ETPP) Program with Stanford School of Engineering.  Over the course of seven sessions, our cohort explored topics such as fairness in algorithmic decision-making, privacy and civil liberties as impacted by data collection, the impact of AI on democracy, and the future of work.

Key Takeaways 

The most important questions are often asked too late

One of the course’s themes was the importance of asking ethical questions before implementation rather than after harm occurs.

Whether discussing algorithmic hiring systems, AI-powered decision-making, or online moderation, organizations often focus first on what technology can do and only later ask what it should do.  As someone who has spent much of my career building programs, processes, and organizational systems, I’ve seen first hand how in fast-moving environments, leaders are rewarded for execution. We are trained to identify opportunities, remove obstacles, and move quickly.  But speed can create blind spots.

The Ethics Toolkit exercises challenged me to slow down and ask different questions:

• Who benefits from this decision?

• Who might be harmed?

• Who is missing from the conversation?

• What assumptions are embedded in the solution?

• What values are we prioritizing?

Going forward, I want ethical reflection to become a routine part of planning rather than a reaction to unintended consequences.

Fairness is more complicated than most organizations acknowledge

Many organizations talk about fairness as if it is a single objective that can be optimized, but the reality is far more complex. Different definitions of fairness can conflict with one another and efficiency and equity do not always align.  This insight felt particularly relevant given my work in workforce development and digital inclusion.

I regularly encounter well-intentioned efforts to expand access to education, employment, and technology. However, success alone does not guarantee equity. Systems that appear neutral can still reinforce existing disparities if they are designed without understanding the experiences of the communities they serve.

The course reinforced something I have observed throughout my career: meaningful inclusion requires participation, not simply representation.  The people most affected by a technology, policy, or program should have a voice in shaping it. For me, this means continuing to prioritize community-centered design and listening before implementing. I have never and will never want my work to be for communities, but not with them.

Ethics lives in systems, not just individuals

An important takeaway from the course was recognizing that ethical outcomes depend on more than individual intentions.  Many conversations about ethics focus on personal decision-making: What would a good person do? What is the right choice?

While those questions are important ones, organizations are collections of incentives, policies, processes, norms, and power structures. Even highly principled people can produce harmful outcomes when operating within systems that reward speed over reflection, growth over accountability, or convenience over inclusion.

This lesson connected strongly to my experience leading teams and organizations. Over the past few years, I have spent significant time developing performance systems, organizational structures, accountability frameworks, hiring processes, and operational standards. I increasingly view these activities as ethical work.  The way we define success, evaluate performance, allocate resources, communicate expectations, and make decisions all shape human behavior. Ethics is not simply a statement of values hanging on a wall. It is reflected in what organizations measure, reward, tolerate, and prioritize.

What Happens from Here

The course has strengthened my commitment to approaching technology and organizational leadership through a human-centered lens.

In my nonprofit work, I want to continue helping individuals build confidence and competence with technology while also fostering critical conversations about privacy, digital safety, information literacy, and responsible AI use; the ETPP Program has even directly informed updates to our curriculum in the upcoming year.

In my organizational leadership work, I plan to incorporate more intentional ethical reflection into planning, decision-making, and change management processes. I also want to engage more deeply with practitioners working at the intersection of technology, workforce development, education, public policy, and community advocacy.  Many of the challenges discussed throughout the course cannot be solved in silos. They require collaboration among educators, healthcare professionals, policymakers, nonprofit leaders, researchers, employers, and community members.