At Agile Cambridge 2024, this workshop explored how tech ethics can be integrated into Agile practices, challenging participants to consider the balance between innovation and responsibility. Through real-world scenarios, attendees identified key ethical principles for tech development and developed actionable ideas to promote responsible innovation within Agile teams.
Introduction
Agile Cambridge is England’s premier practical, hands-on Agile and Lean conference. It takes place each October in Cambridge, UK. Alongside talks, it offers a range of session formats to give participants opportunities to engage in hands-on activities to learn by doing and build community.
The Brief
Inclusioneering was selected to host our workshop, “Tech Ethics in an Agile World”, at Agile Cambridge 2024.
Tech Ethics is a topic rapidly increasing in prominence, but what does it mean in practice for Agile teams?
The Horizon Post Office scandal highlighted how crucial it is to have ethical practices and oversight in technology development at all levels of an organization. As artificial intelligence grows, it offers great opportunities, but the rush to release AI features can also increase the risk of harm to people’s fundamental rights.
However some of the principles of ethical technology development seem to conflict with the agile way of working used by most tech firms. Extra governance and accountability needed to reduce the potential impact of technology may slow things down and require new skills and responsibilities that aren’t always present in current Agile teams.
This workshop asks: how can we maintain empowered, self-organising teams with continuous development and incremental delivery, whilst also maintaining appropriate governance, oversight and accountability to protect individuals and society from harm?
Our Approach
We promoted “Tech Ethics in an Agile World” as a workshop for everyone interested to collaboratively explore how tech ethics can look in practice in an Agile development environment.
Our expert speakers introduced key ethical principles of Responsible Technology and AI, before moving onto facilitate the workshop elements. Participants worked in small groups to consider a scenario, of their own choice, to apply these ethical principles into practice. Our approach was to enable participants to explore, learn and co-create a set of possibilities for responsible Agile development collaboratively.
Outcomes
In a session described by one participant as “mind blowing”, our teams of participants explored two topics that they selected in depth.
The first scenario was a chatbot that answers questions from the public about cancer. Our participants chose to examine this through the ethical principle of “validity, reliability, and accuracy”. Highlighting a number of risks, ranging from increased referrals to the NHS from the worried well, to potential for sensitive data to end up in the wrong hands, to risk of emotional harm to vulnerable users, the team identified strengths of Agile approaches to mitigate risk. They also found some limitations of current approaches and tech culture that would need to be addressed.
The second chosen scenario was fraud detection. Our participants determined that strengths of current practices including frequent iterations, reflection, transparency and accountability are important in governing AI systems, but also that a number of new responsibilities and skills are required.

Impact
Participants left the workshop energised and buzzing with new actionable ideas to take to their teams to establish responsible innovation practices in their businesses.