Reporting for the ‘future we create’ – shaping next-generation transparency

Recently the report of the October 6/7 Reporting 3.0 Platform Conference ‘Reporting at the crossroads – ensuring purpose, practicability, performance’ was posted at http://www.reporting3.org, together with a great video summary, a repository of presentations as well as an event gallery that wonderfully highlights the spirit and buzzing enthusiasm of the 170 participants from 4 continents and 13 countries. Please find the report attached here as well: R3_Conference_Report

I had the honor to curate the design and facilitate the conference on both days, together with a great team of BSD staff and voluntaries, and also wrote most parts of the conference report. During the whole process in the many months of preparing the conference (that included working on two Transition Labs and two Regional Roundtables), post-conference writing and thinking about how to shape Reporting 3.0 for 2015, I often wondered how much more would already be possible in reporting through a combination of existing vision, methodologies and tooling. Reporting 3.0 brought the majority of influencers together, so a glimpse of the possible was clearly visible already during the two days of the conference.

The report therefore also focuses on three main messages and gives a whole plethora of insights and examples:

1. The ingredients of the ‘green & inclusive economy’ are becoming much clearer and more tangible for corporate decision makers, investors and leading thinkers from academia and the civil society; 

2. New approaches, standards and benchmarks are under development or will be developed to close the ‘sustainability context gap’ in reporting; 

3. Information technology and respective providers offer new solutions for big data management and algorithms as well as applications that enable a new level of sustainability driven decision-making by corporate managers, investors and consumers.

As a teaser to read the full conference report I am also posting parts of my pre-conference speech that I held at the speakers dinner the day before the conference officially started here, shedding light on intentions, focus and ambitions.

“Let me start off by quoting Otto Scharmer, the author of Theory U, who once said, ‘We cannot transform the behaviour of systems (and the people in them) unless we transform the quality of attention that people apply to their actions within those systems, both individually and collectively’. I think this already comes quite close to what we want to achieve with Reporting 3.0, both the conference, but also the platform. We started off from three basic ideas: 1) that we will take serious the plea to achieve a green & inclusive economy and the design for a capitalism achieving that, made at Rio +20 in 2012; 2) that we believe that reporting has a trigger function to create necessary change (many from us come from the early days of sustainability reporting when that was indeed the case); 3) that reporting with that trigger function to achieve a green & inclusive economy will need to be different from what it is today, and most likely it is needed within just one decade.

Reporting 3.0 can change the ‚quality of attention that people apply to their actions towards an envisaged system’ through various pathways: 1) By taking note of the various developments that surround reporting, especially around new business models (circular, sharing, regenerative, restorative), and the enhanced role of (big) data, data architecture, and IT capabilities; 2) By assessing the necessary consequences of the idea of a green and inclusive economy to accounting, given the fact that these new business models need different accounting rules, and that accounting will need to embrace a grand design as well: true costing, true pricing, and even more necessary, true taxation, to balance the burdens to consumers and communities, and to allow to set new economic system boundaries in which market mechanisms can work towards the right direction, on a better and global level playing field; 3) By embracing the idea that measurement needs to much stronger close the sustainability context gap, meaning that macro-data and micro-data allow for assessing performance from a future-readiness perspective and give stakeholders confidence that what an organization says and does is good enough or in the right direction to achieve a green & inclusive economy.

Looking at the vast variety of players with different backgrounds, all knowingly or unknowingly part of the ‚grand design’, and many not from the reporting terrain, reporting more or less logically rather comes at the end of the thinking, if it comes up at all. And those in the reporting space often don’t have the time, capacity, capability to convene formats that deliver insights with these forward-looking players. They normally convene with other experts in the reporting field. The early infusion of knowledge to build the ecosystem for forward-looking reporting is rather uncovered terrain, reporting at this moment adapts to the unavoidable, and doesn’t deliver on a ‚grand design’.

To be clear, we already do benefit from what has been produced so far. There are indeed strong shoulders of that little child Reporting 3.0 to sit on! And still, not enough has been thought of, produced or tried out to sketch the new reporting landscape and to build a ‚grand design’, stemming from the North Star, the green & inclusive economy.”