In this talk, futurist Charlotte Kemp addresses nonprofit service providers at the Think Good 2024 event in Cape Town, urging them to redesign their systems for social good through a futures‑focused lens. She highlights how rapidly emerging technologies—such as donor‑data analytics, drones, and DNA splicing—create novel ethical dilemmas that existing policies may not cover. Kemp proposes using scenario thinking to stress‑test and evolve ethics policies before real‑world incidents arise, and she offers a downloadable cheat sheet of probing questions to guide organizations in anticipating future ethical shifts. The overall message is that by adopting a futures‑focused mindset and asking challenging, forward‑looking questions, nonprofit leaders can stay ahead of ethical challenges and actively shape the preferred future they envision.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Charlotte Kemp. I am a futurist and I coach executive leaders in how to prepare themselves and their organizations for the future. And I was invited recently to speak at an event called Think Good 2024. It is hosted here in Cape Town, South Africa by the NPO Network and is intended for the service providers of nonprofits and charities. They asked me to speak about redesigning systems for social good, a futurist perspective. And While we explored the systems, one of the slides that I presented was really interesting and challenging to us because it deals with new ethical considerations we need to make because of the future. As you can see from the slide, there are lots of different concepts that anyone in the nonprofit world would need to consider in terms of ethics. But really, it is an issue for all of us as we have new technology, new relationships, and access to each other across the world. New things happen that we have to now create an ethical framework for. So everything from donor privacy to drones to DNA splicing introduces new ethical considerations. And if we want to stay ahead with that futurist edge, we need to consider those ethical implications before they happen. For any one of the organizations we were dealing with, they had an ethics policy already, But we know that sometimes our ethics policies need to be tested in a real-world situation, and that is where scenario thinking comes in, that we can prepare ourselves for different ethical considerations so that when that real-world situation comes along, we're ahead of the game. If you'd like a cheat sheet about questions you need to ask yourself or your organization about ethical changes in the future, then please follow the link at the end of this video and you can download that. Having a futures-focused mindset means that we anticipate and prepare ourselves for different potential scenarios in the future while we actively work towards creating the preferred future that we would all like to have. And it is in taking these small steps and asking these challenging questions that we prepare our minds and our organizations for the future.
