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ETHICAL AGILITY LAB

Cultivating Ethical Agility in the Age of AI

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We help you develop the agility and sensitivity this moment calls for.

Species-level shifts are afoot. The landscape of work is rapidly changing. Integrity is increasingly elusive. Technical reviews, compliance audits, and policy documents won’t cut it. 

We need to sit together and build the shared skill of “discernment”, aka the art of judgement. If we don’t, we risk amplifying existing problems, team misalignment, damaged reputations, loss of staff, and even the heartbreak of missed opportunities.

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TRAINING FOR LEADERS AND TEAMS NAVIGATING AI

Ethical Agility begins with what you’re capable of perceiving.

The Ethical Agility Lab offers AI Literacy and Ethics training in a way that’s contextually relevant to your organization’s immediate challenges and builds stronger relationships across teams.

We begin with a tense organizational situation or burning question, something complex enough to contain uncertainty, disagreement, emotion, and consequence.

Then, we collectively develop ethical agility through contemplative, relational, and highly situated practice.

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Half-Day Workshop

Introduction to Ethical Agility Practice.

  • One four-hour session for 6–16 participants

  • Facilitated dialogue, reflection, systems mapping, and participatory exercises

  • In person, with an adapted online format available

  • Sponsor preparation, a participant reflection prompt, and follow-up included

Discuss a Workshop

Multi-Day Program

Develop proficiency in Ethical Agility.

  • Four to six session of two hours each for 6–16 participants

  • Supported experimentation and reflection between sessions

  • Shaped as a series of weekly or monthly sessions creating a learning loop

  • Remote or in-person delivery, with sponsor preparation and follow-up included

Discuss a Program

Bring the questions you struggle to answer.

You and your organization are grappling with big questions. AI is disrupting work, trust, culture, authorship, knowledge, learning, development, and the environment. Your team needs guidance through the emotional messiness of this strange moment.

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WHO IT'S FOR:

The Ethical Agility Lab works with leadership teams and cross-functional groups making or influencing consequential decisions about AI, including:

  • Executive and senior leadership teams

  • Strategy, innovation, and transformation leads

  • People, culture, learning, and organizational development teams

  • Technology, data, product, design, and operations leaders

  • Policy, legal, risk, governance, and sustainability colleagues

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Gain the adaptive leadership skills needed for the AI era.

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Developing Ethical Agility gives you a foundational leadership capability for the age of AI: sound judgment under uncertainty and the capacity to help shape the future your organization actually wants.

Participants leave better able to remain responsive, notice what changes, learn from the effects of their choices, and continue making meaning together.

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Session outcomes help:

Leaders develop discernment

  • Become steadier in the presence of ambiguity

  • Recognize subtle signals, tensions, and consequences

  • Develop the art of judgment rather than searching for a universally correct answer

Teams deepen their capacity for relation

  • Make room for different hopes, fears, experiences, and intuitions

  • Stay in conversation when values or interpretations conflict

  • Approach uncertainty as something that can be explored together

Organizations recover agency

  • Question narratives that make technological change feel inevitable

  • Connect stated values to everyday choices and relationships

  • Recognize their role in shaping the futures AI helps create

THE METHOD

We guide you from inevitability to possibility

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In our sessions, we combine reflective dialogue, systems mapping, contemplative practice, embodiment, and creative inquiry.

Participants work with analytical knowledge alongside sensuous knowledge, the information carried through feeling, intuition, attention, and the body.

Together, the group develops a living practice for navigating consequential choices together.

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1. Loosen

What assumptions, pressures, and stories have narrowed your organization’s sense of choice?

Participants notice where AI has been framed as inevitable and create space for uncertainty, curiosity, and agency.

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2. See

What relationships and possible worlds are being created through this technology?

Participants attend to the people, infrastructures, values, environments, histories, exclusions, and consequences surrounding an AI system.

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3. Imagine

What becomes possible when practicality temporarily releases its grip?

Participants explore alternative futures, including possibilities that may initially feel radical, uncomfortable, hopeful, or difficult to articulate.

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A black and white photo of a hand with fingers extended, against a plain background.

4. Gesture

What move might open the situation?

Participants create a situated gesture that unfreezes confusion, strengthens relationships, expresses an intention, or makes another future more possible. A gesture begins a process of ethical learning whose effects continue to unfold.

A COLLABORATION BETWEEN WAYSEEING & COMMON FIELD STUDIO

Meet your facilitators

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Dr. Madelaine Ley

Madelaine holds a PhD in the ethics of technology and has contributed to the leading edge of AI ethics teaching for seven years. With more than a decade of training in contemplative facilitation, she creates conditions for sustained attention, honest inquiry, and meaningful transformation.

Her research on the future of work has been published in leading philosophy of technology journals and featured by the BBC, NRC, and MIT. She was named one of the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” in 2022.

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JP King

JP is an organizational learning consultant, systems designer, educator, and facilitator. For more than two decades, he has designed learning experiences, tools, frameworks, and participatory processes across nonprofits, universities, creative organizations, public institutions, and systems-change initiatives.

At Dark Matter Labs, he co-led organizational development, governance, and learning. He has taught art and design at the University of Toronto, using inquiry, experimentation, visual thinking, and studio-based learning to help students engage with complex social and environmental questions.

His training in Gestalt psychotherapy and Co-Active coaching shapes how he approaches uncertainty, resistance, group dynamics, and the human experience of organizational change.

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Start a conversation

An initial conversation helps us understand your situation, consider whether the workshop or longer program is the right intervention, and identify who should be involved. You do not need a finished brief or a clearly defined problem. Bring us your questions, tensions, and uncertainties.