So Responsible Business Intelligence (RBI) is the responsible application of BI and AI by responsible businesses and organisations. But who defines what is responsible?
An individual user of RBI can be sure of one truth - their own - what they consider to be 'responsible'. They can also be relatively sure of what 'responsible' means to the people, businesses and organisations they work for, or otherwise interact with closely....whether they agree or not.
But what about the majority of people, businesses and organisations that we don't directly interact with within our defined community or market? What about those outside our sphere of focus and outside our echo chamber?
For sure, we can use Responsible Business Intelligence to break down what is and isn't important to our community or market and take a coherent position on what is and isn't 'responsible' within this context. But how good are we at really understanding what's going on outside our echo chamber, as opposed to using this intelligence selectively to support our preformed arguments 'for' and 'against'? Who decides what's reasonable and what isn't?
Taken with an open mind, Responsible Business Intelligence enables individuals, businesses and organisations to to understand the breadth of what society is thinking about over any given timeframe - what's dominating, what's emerging and what's declining. In a political context, Responsible Business Intelligence informs the often misunderstood Overton Window, the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time - also known as the window of discourse.
The Overton Window simply allows a politician to understand what ideas are out there beyond their own echo chamber. It does not advocate for any given idea or for the extremes. In an interview with the New York Times, Joe Lehman states
"it just explains how ideas come in and out of fashion, the same way that gravity explains why something falls to the earth. I can use gravity to drop an anvil on your head, but that would be wrong. I could also use gravity to throw you a life preserver; that would be good."
The difference between irresponsible and responsible decisions based on good intelligence.
Lehman, who coined the term "Overton Window" after his late Mackinac Center for Public Policy colleague, Joseph Overton, also identifies that the most common misconception about the Overton Window that it is manipulated and shifted by lawmakers, politicians, lobbyists and large corporates; in fact, they are just detecting where the window is, and then adjusting their stance to be in accordance with it. This is an important concept for responsible politicians and responsible governments engaged in elections around the world this year and also has clear analogies to how responsible businesses might align and adjust their strategy over time.
Who defines what is and what isn't Responsible Business Intelligence? We do as part of society. Then the lawmakers, politicians, lobbyists and large corporates adjust to fit.
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