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.
What makes for a good sustainability metric?
Most of what passes for mainstream metrics in corporate sustainability measurement and reporting, including GRI, arguably fails to do the one thing it purports to do, which is make it possible to understand the sustainability performance of an organization. What experienced practitioners are increasingly looking for is a better way. At CSO, we think we’ve found it in the form of what we call Sustainability Quotients!
Sustainability quotients are models for sustainability metrics that make it possible to measure non-financial organizational performance (e.g., the triple bottom line) against standards of performance. Numerators express actual impacts on vital capitals in the world, and denominators express norms for what such impacts ought to be in order to ensure human well-being. For more information and examples of this approach, click here.
