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.
Does your company have a social contract?
One of the biggest challenges companies face when it comes to developing their sustainability programs is deciding what should be on the agenda. No one company can address all the world’s problems, so how do we decide what’s in and what’s out? At CSI, we are working with several organizations to test and evaluate the concept of a ‘social contract’ as a strategy for resolving this issue.
In effect, a social contract is an agreement that already exists (at least implicitly) between a company and the various stakeholders it serves (or could serve). The content of the contract specifies a company’s own view of what it thinks its duties and obligations are to society, expressed in terms of its relevant stakeholder groups. The scope of its sustainability program can then be defined, accordingly.
The theoretical basis of a social contract is the ‘license to operate’ that a company receives from society, in return for which it arguably owes certain duties and obligations to help ensure human well-being. The opportunity to build personal and collective wealth in capitalistic societies also carries such responsibilities. A social contract is simply an instrument that attempts to make the related duties and obligations explicit.
Once a social contract has been defined, the detailed scope of a corporate sustainability program can be fleshed out. Only those duties and obligations identified as existing between a company and its stakeholders need be managed. Anything else that falls outside of the contract is irrelevant. Metrics, too, can be similarly specified in this way.
Generally speaking, the duties and obligations of a company to help ensure the well-being of its stakeholders will be expressed in the form of normative principles and policies regarding what its impacts on vital capitals should be. Vital capitals include the environment (natural capital), individual knowledge, skills, and health (human capital), social institutions required for individual and communal well-being (social capital), and material necessities, infrastructure, and technology (constructed capital).
We invite companies interested in exploring the use of a social contract as a basis for determining and/or fine-tuning the scope of their sustainability programs to contact us for more information about this innovative and exciting idea.
