ZIPPER ETHICS Workshops

ZIPPER ETHICS workshops can be conducted virtually or in-person and tailored to your unique needs. The methodology can be applied to help individuals, teams, classrooms, and larger organizations define ethics principles and practices. It is never too early or too late to begin conversations about ethics! If you are interested, please reach out. Scroll down to learn more about ZIPPER ETHICS workshops and view upcoming workshops.

Contact

sticky note that says "Me" inside of concentric circles and "everyone" outside of the circles

The ZIPPER ETHICS process consists of three parts: Values, Principles, and Practices.

Screenshot of a Miro collaboration board

Every person and team has values, even if they are not explicitly named. These are fundamental ideas that underlie how you want to act or exist. The first step to developing ethics is to understand and make explicit the collective values that guide the actions of your team.
Principles comprise the zipper between values and actions. In this phase, we look at your team’s actions and identify how your collective values show up in that work. We then distill guiding ethics principles that your team can follow to keep your values and actions aligned.
To effectively use your new ethics principles, you will need a set of practices and structures to ensure those principles show up in your work. We will go through activities to brainstorm and develop ethics practices for your team.

Past Workshops

THE ETHICS SERIES

A Three-Part Workshop for Zipper Ethics

Use the arrows or swipe with a finger to see more of the Ethics Series.
Workshop context

Beginning with the fundamental idea behind zipper ethics, we embarked on a three-workshop series to define the Why, How, and What behind our team’s ethics.
Workshop architecture

It is important for workshop participants to understand how each part of the series contributes to the whole.
Workshop 1

In Workshop 1, participants unpacked their personal definitions for “ethics,” personal values, and times those values have been challenged.
Workshop 2 Inputs

Between the sessions, participants completed a short survey to capture businesses whose ethics they found inspiring and those who set a bad ethical example.
Workshop 2 Activities

Workshop 2 focused on the “How” for this team’s ethics. The team brainstormed ideas for implementing ethics in different areas of their work, then pushed top ideas further using storyboarding.
Workshop 3 Inputs

Between workshops, participants voted on top ideas surfaced during Workshop 2 to unpack further in Workshop 3.
Workshop 3 Activities

In Workshop 3, the team completed the series by identifying ethics principles that would enable them to keep their values aligned with with their visions for success by discussing particularly ethically challenging aspects of their work.
Ethics Series Outputs

The final outputs of this ethics series were a set of ethics principles generated by and tailored to this team, as well as ideas for intentionally implementing these principles.

EVIL INC

A Fun Workshop on Evil Ethics

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Pick your villain

Participants selected an employee badge for a day at Evil Inc.
The "5 Whys" exercise... from a villain perspective?

The 5 Whys exercise helps participants unpack a problem and get closer to understanding the roots of motivations.
"Silly Sixes" ideation exercise for our evil products.

In this ideation exercise, participants have six minutes to sketch six ideas for their evil products.
Final product sketching and sharing.

Participants worked with a teammate to choose one product (or combine ideas) from the sketching exercise and refine it. These final products were then storyboarded and acted out for the group.
Conclusion

After the final presentations of evil products, participants put away their evil personas and transitioned into an enlightening conversation about the reality of the products they had created and ways that “evil ethics” can present in their “non-evil” work as designers and strategists.