As a founder, the new year is a vital time to plan ahead and to examine the blind spots within our companies. It is during this season [the first two months of the year] that we are most tempted to focus on growth without equal attention to the risks it can create.
As I write this, I am in between working sessions on my organization’s 2026 strategic plan. Beneath simple growth metrics sit harder questions. What are the unintended consequences of scaling? Where might we leave people behind? Whose perspectives are we missing?
Risk can mean a lot of things depending on your company and context. As a technology product CEO at a mental health nonprofit, my focus centers on safety and ethics.
When your work affects vulnerable people, especially young people, as ours does, there comes a point at which many decisions can be seen as both risks and opportunities. When your work sits at that intersection, you cannot treat ethics as a box to be checked. You have to develop ethical systems as core infrastructure.
The problem is that by the time safety and ethical risks are obvious, the systems that created them are already entrenched. That realization led my team and me to build a formal ethics review into how we develop our blueprint for the years ahead.
A New Ritual For 2026: Building Ethics Into Your Company (and What That Actually Looks Like)
1. Clear redlines
Ethics teams are often misunderstood as abstract or academic. Founders want to move fast and assume that bringing in an ethics team will create unnecessary processes that add friction. In practice, ethics teams are deeply operational. They exist to guide real decisions in real time.
Once we chose an ethics team (Compass Ethics) to work with, the first thing we did was write down explicit redlines. These were things we would never do. Not even if they helped us grow faster. Not even if the board asked for them. Not even if a partner contract depended on it. Never.
We committed publicly to constraints such as never deceiving users about whether they are interacting with AI, never selling user data, and never running experiments designed to monetize vulnerabilities.
These are not value statements. These are non-negotiables. Publishing them made it easier for our team to design responsibly and easier for anyone to raise concerns without fear of slowing things down unnecessarily.
2. A process for consistency
From there, ethics review became part of how work starts, not how it ends.
Every new product idea or research effort begins with a simple question: Does this cross any of our redlines? If the answer is no, we assess risk. Is this a minor iteration or something genuinely new? Could someone be worse off if it fails? Are we introducing uncertainty or operating within known boundaries?
Low-risk changes move quickly. Higher-risk work triggers deeper review, sometimes involving an independent external ethics board with no financial or professional stake in approving what we want to build.
That independence matters. Nonconflicted ethics teams do not exist to say yes. They exist to surface blind spots that leaders are structurally bad at seeing on their own.
3. Audits, stopping rules, and learning when to pause
For higher-risk work, we now define stopping rules before anything goes live. If certain signals appear, such as unexpected distress, degraded outcomes, or increased risk, we pause or shut things down. No improvising. No sunk-cost rationalization.
Clear ethics processes remove the burden of judgment calls made in isolation. Engineers do not have to wonder whether raising a concern will be seen as disloyal. Leaders do not have to make high-stakes decisions without a framework when pressure is highest.
At first, this feels slower. Over time, it becomes faster because fewer decisions turn into emergencies.
Why This Matters as We Enter 2026
As we head into a new year, many leaders are asking what they should build next. Perhaps we would all be better off by first asking how we can build better.
Building ethics teams early did not make our work easier, but in many ways, it made it simpler. It brought clarity. It replaced ambiguity with constraints and anxiety with process.
There is a quiet benefit to this approach that I did not anticipate. It helps CEOs, me included, sleep better at night. Knowing there is a credible system and independent people designed to catch what you might miss is more effective than melatonin, in my experience.
For 2026, may we lead in ways that invite more perspectives and hold us accountable to what matters most: the people impacted by what we build.
Rob Morris is the co-founder and CEO of Koko, the leading nonprofit in providing free, evidence-based mental health support directly on the platforms young people use every day.
Photo courtesy Curated Lifestyle for Unsplash+
