Our Agenda
At CSI, our mission is to support the sustainability movement by focusing on the application and improvement of innovation in business. Of particular interest to us is the transformation of innovation processes in medium and large corporations from unsustainable patterns to sustainable ones. Our focus in this regard is more on innovation processes than outcomes, and on the capacity of an organization to sustainably learn.
Thus, our agenda is grounded in a view which sees some patterns of business innovation as being more sustainable than others. Sustainable patterns more often produce sustainable outcomes, hence their importance. Such patterns are predictable and recognizable, and tend to mirror a natural logic of problem or error detection, followed by trial-and-error for solutions. Most corporations block or interfere with these patterns, and we hope to correct that.
Truly adaptive organizations also require unimpeded access to information about how they're doing and whether or not their operations are sustainable. For this reason, we are also dedicated to innovating for sustainability ourselves, and are working on several related initiatives. Our focus on that front is on enhancing the Corporate Sustainability Management and Reporting function itself. See the Our Work page on this website for more information about that.
Can sustainability reporting be meaningful?
The list of companies in the world committed to measuring and reporting the sustainability of their operations using the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework is growing. We applaud this trend, and are proud to have been an Organizational Stakeholder of GRI since our founding in 2004.
As an international standard for corporate sustainability reporting, however, GRI is not quite cooked yet. Strictly speaking, reports prepared in accordance with its guidelines do not actually make it possible to determine the sustainability of the organizations involved. This is because they usually fail to include what GRI itself refers to as ‘sustainability context’.
In the latest version of GRI (G3), sustainability context is explained as follows:
Performance information should be placed in context. The underlying question of sustainability reporting is how an organization contributes to the improvement or deterioration of economic, environmental, and social conditions at the local, regional, or global level. Simply reporting on trends in individual performance (or the efficiency of the organization) will fail to respond to this underlying question. Reporting organizations should therefore seek ways to express their individual performance in relation to broader environmental and social sustainability.
We couldn’t agree more. Still, we have never seen a corporate sustainability report prepared in accordance with GRI that does this. In a very real and unsettling sense, then, most of what passes for mainstream sustainability reporting in the world today arguably fails to report on sustainability at all. Why? Because the sustainability context required to draw meaningful bottom-line conclusions is missing!
This is where we come into play. We are active supporters and advocates of GRI reporting. We subscribe to its multi-bottom-line orientation to sustainability measurement, and we are deeply committed to its notion of sustainability context. What we offer is knowledge about how to do it!
At the Center for Sustainable Innovation, we have been developing a methodology for bringing context to sustainability reporting in general, and to GRI reporting in particular. The result? The Social Footprint Method, the Global Warming Footprint, and other ideas that can help fulfill the promise of true sustainability reporting. We invite interested parties to contact us for more information.
