Why is education and awareness raising so important?

Well, first and foremost, consider the issue of family planning: there is no doubt developing countries need to lower their birth rates dramatically to reduce the social, environmental and economic burden of providing education, healthcare, food, water and jobs amongst other things, to so many people. For sure, some of the poor in those countries understand this and want to have less children but cannot, for reasons including sexual pressure from males, lack of access to (or awareness of) contraceptives and reproductive health knowledge. 

But, for many they are not aware of the impacts their children will have: the impacts on the child, on the parents, on the wider family, on the country, or on the environment. They have not done the calculations: if they have they probably still believe that having more children helps provide for the family in the medium-term, and for their parents in the long-term. Overlooked is the real short-term needs as well as a sophisticated understanding of longer-term impacts from splitting land up between children for example. Of course it is on the larger-scale where most of the problems lie, and this falls to the government to deal with (i.e. in providing social services, employment, food etc).

Thus it is hugely important for governments to take the lead, for their own self-interest, in in-expensive education and awareness campaigns for their citizens to better understand the impacts their children might have. Without creating this desire, through role-models, peer pressure, media, peer-to-peer education and so forth (varied and thought-out campaigns utilising all available channels), the poor may never even want to limit their family size.

Once such a desire is created, then specific education on family planning and contraception can be provided along with increased access to a variety of contraceptions and other longer-term social activities to address larger issues such as coerced sex, female empowerment, poverty etc.

Will you have to pay for climate change damage?

Businesses have long been acutely aware of the implications of breaking laws or having adverse impacts on others: punishment normally ensues. Recently the latter category has moved up the agenda with tobacco companies being held responsible for the health of non-smokes affected by smoke, for example.

 

The last 2 years have seen less debate and more agreement on the human rights impacts of environmental destruction on local communities. Where there is a proven link businesses have been required to make compensation and their reputation has suffered, although most businesses fight such legal claims and such claims can take several years to be resolved.

 

Now governments are establishing climate change policies with an acceptance of the impacts of climate change, and such policies are impacting businesses directly (and legally). It is safe to assume that there is now agreement that hgih emitting countries and companies are responsible for the impacts of their emissioins, so it is only a matter of time until those affected by climate change seek legal recourse. Though such legal actions might take years to be resolved, the defendents must recognize such claims as liabilities and prepare accordingly.

 

Will such liabilities, risks and, ultimately, financial costs, lead to both companies and governments reassessing the negative impacts of their business and accounting for these as real costs in their business strategies, in addition to their current Kyoto and future Copenhagen commitments with financial implications (from Emissions Trading)?

 

Will we see massive lawsuits against highly polluting companies/countries, particularly by groups in developing countries? Will companies consider the costs of these in their strategies and will that make any material difference to their strategies? Could entire businesses or countries be forced to change by those in developing countries, who rarely have a voice?

Tell.... the truth

Transparency and Accountability are great concepts and are tremendously popular words nowadays, but, working in the area of Corporate Responsibility reporting, but with reference to general communications from companies and other organizations, it is clear to me that it does not matter how much you say, or what you say.

What matters, is that what you say is true; but even then, what about what you do not say? It is perfectly fine to say the truth, but not say certain things, and thus, in effect you are not telling the truth -but how do you say everything (of course, being truthful about everything)?

This is the challenge, and one complicated by the fact that revealing such information may well be commercially sensitive or create difficult situations for those involved. The easiest answer is to work out what you need to say that people want to know about, as much as possible -and for each of these topics have a group of people who can represent those who might want to know the information and can decide what information should be released or not to ensure the overall picture is fair.

You might also want a second group of people to then be able to actually know all that information: the bad, the good, the sensitive etc, and be able to judge that what was said is a fair reflection or not.

Now doing both will be very hard and time consuming, but might be necessary in some situations, where it is important to rebuild trust after having lost it. In reality, no-one will go to such extremes to prevent losing trust, but will after they lose trust and get desperate!

Each organization needs to tell the truth, and that requires telling the good, the bad and the ugly. If not, no-one will trust what you say, and that seems to be the problem with business now. Business has not tried hard enough to say the truth, and now wonders why no-one trusts business! Business has to get its act together, and find a solution.

Mandatory Sustainability Reporting?

Last week the Global Reporting Initiative that has led the movement behind Sustainability Reporting (which goes by several other names as well) called for reporting to be mandatory in light of the recent financial crisis and even lower lack of trust in business that this is generating. This is a real change from their previous position that reporting should be voluntary; though they did encourage reporters to use certain criteria.

However, I think what needs to happen is not just for reporting to be compulsory, but that the contents of Reports needs to be mandated in one specific (and new) way. Every company should have to set a level of risk and be required to report any event or activity that is above that level from both a historic perspective, and future perspective.

Thus a Report would say:
"Last year there were 9 events or actions (etc) that represented a significant risk to the business. These 9 events were xxx and we responded by yyy, and to prevent these happening again we have/will do zzz"

"We expect this year, that the major risks will be around ffff, ggg and hhh. Thus we are doing iiii to prevent them".

Right now Reports are too opportunity focused and are not really providing investors (or other stakeholders) with a real assessment of their CR related risks (or indeed business risks, depending on how you define CR). There needs to be a degree of honesty from companies about what has gone wrong in order to ensure stakeholders the company is dealing with this.

In this sense, CR reports could be a very useful, strategic and forward-looking, activity that is adding real value. I still struggle to find many reports that mention any of the negative aspects of a company's work.

Whether the kind of CR report I mention needs to be publicly available is not particularly important. Of course the report needs to be (legally) available to regulators and to investors -and as such, this report does not need to be succinct -instead it needs to be comprehensive and large companies are going to need to, presumably, have long reports if there were so many activities that breached the threshold (that should be set by the company through a stakeholder dialogue that meets some minimum legal level).

If a company chooses to make the report publicly available (and easily navigable online), this would be a bonus; though I would expect certain contents would need to be kept our of the public-eye for privacy, regulatory and competitive reasons.

As previously proposed, many of us 'rich' are unable to take responsibility for our own lives. We need the government to build barriers in the road to stop us crossing the road when it is unsafe, we need companies to reduce their promotion of bad foods, as we cannot stop ourselves eating too much of them, we need regulations to restrict smoking, because we smoke too much. This is not new, but it is depressing. However, we are educated, and we know what choices we are making and the sacrifices we are making.

The poor though, are not as well educated, so do they have an excuse for making such bad choices, which an interesting article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review proposes they regularly do, with significant negative impacts. As the author notes:

The consequences of bad choices are bad for everyone, but even worse for the poor, who lack the resources—financial, psychological, social, and political—to compensate for their errors.

A recent field study in Sri Lanka reveals that more than 10 percent of poor male respondents regularly spend their entire incomes on alcohol.

More generally, poor people “could easily save more without getting less nutrition by spending less on alcohol, tobacco, and food items such as sugar, spice, and tea,” Banerjee and Duflo conclude. For example, the typical poor household in Udaipur could spend up to 30 percent more on food if it did not spend money on alcohol, tobacco, and festivals.

Evidently education is not the answer to this conundrum, since the rich have education too -or, a fairer comparison might be that the poor in the rich countries have good education (comparatively) but still make the same mistakes. Or is the answer that our education, one that is influenced by school, peers, families, media and more, all geared towards taking away our sense of personal responsibility, or focusing too much on short-term, or personal, gain? If it is, then this could be changed. Whereas, if this is more genetic and evolutionary, then it might be harder to change. Food for thought...

Do the right thing

There has always been a strong sense amongst the CSR movement, that doing the right thing is the right thing to do. If it does not make profits, does it make it the wrong thing to do? Why do we need to have to have a better reason to do something than the reason that it is the right thing to do?

Well now, in the current crisis, it is pretty clear that the right thing to do is going to work out as the right thing to do in the future, even if it is not clear now. So, if you are looking for a reason to do the right thing, then you need to remember that you don't need a reason -and if someone requires a reason, then you can tell them that the reason will be apparent in the future, as those banks that did the right thing and have still survived have now realized!

Mallen Baker's blog article covers this, and some other nice tips on responsible leadership here

Building communities

Community, to Block [the author], is about membership, feeling part of something larger than oneself, feeling at home, relating to the rest of the world — and participating in, owning, and being accountable for what one creates with others. It matters not whether the community is a small group, a neighborhood, a city, a multinational corporation, a global governance organization, or any other structure. Organizing any human enterprise is an exercise in developing community.

Block has applied rigor and years of experience in honing his understanding of how people can work together to create what they need and desire, “a future distinct from the past.” He focuses on the structures of belonging, giving detailed attention to the many elements of design, location, and process that contribute to having productive conversations, gatherings, and relationships. He says, for instance, that conversations should be structured around questions that evoke not answers, but commitment, accountability, and the possibility for transformation. These include questions of invitation (not mandate, coercion, or persuasion); questions about possibilities, how we wish to live in the future (not problems to be solved); questions about ownership that lead people to accept responsibility; questions about dissent that leave space for authentic doubt and reservations; questions about commitment that evoke promises and accountability for observable results; and questions about gifts that surface what we and others can bring to the quest for a different future.

Very interesting perspective here, especially in light of the traditional view that we should identify problems and try to solve them. Here we need to inspire people to come together to imagine something better, give them a stake in developing a successful outcome, encourage alternative opinions and create mutual accountability and commitment which should be recognized. Some lessons to be learned.

taken from a review of Best Business Books 2008: Capitalism and Community, by strategy + business