The Global Reporting Initiative recently produced its latest sustainability report. For me, it highlights the dilemma for a small catalyst organisation that might reasonably be expected to practice what you preach.

You can look at this through two lenses. The first lens recognises the GRI as the prime mover in influencing how corporations should produce sustainability / CSR reports. On that basis, you would expect this to be a model report. You would expect that a company could look towards how the GRI itself reports on its performance in order to see what best practice is meant to look like.

After all, if they can't do it, they can't expect you to do it. Right?

And I would say that the report as published aims to fulfil that brief.

But there's another lens. That is the lens that recognises the GRI as an organisation of around 50 people - a small company by anyone's reckoning. So then you ask yourself whether the GRI's report represents their statement about what other small companies - of 50 employees or so - should be doing.

Any small company that looked at this report as the model it should follow would throw up its hands in horror. The huge quantity of resource that goes into producing something like this - totally disproportionate for an organisation of that size.

Incidentally, when I was at Business in the Community I used to have similar discussions there about that organisation's decision to fill in its own CR Index. Completely over the top, I said, it was not designed for organisations of our size. No, no, we have to be seen to do the things we ask others to do, I was told.

I was right, but then so were they. I think the biggest value from doing this stuff yourself as a prime advocate is that you get to feel the pain that everyone else is feeling. It helps to promote improvement in the framework quicker than anything else.

For me, the GRI report highlights a couple of interesting questions.

The first - I wasn't convinced whether the GRI had any better an idea than so many others in really being clear who this report was for. Some of the information and language is very corporate and technical. But in other places, some of the images and style are very informal. For me, that reflects confusion over what style of organisation the GRI is, and who is it primarily speaking to?

The second - the issues dealt with in this report were mostly dealing with impacts that were trivial in their scale because, after all, we are talking about a small office-based company. The focus of these impacts were summarised in the title of the report 'Paper, Planes and People'.

But, as some of the narrative acknowledges in principle, the GRI is an organisation whose influence is much larger than its immediate impacts arising from the running of its office.

If it is being successful in persuading growing numbers of companies to use its framework that could be a hugely positive impact - if it is helping those companies to drive improvements in their own performance, or it is helping outside players to better hold companies to account. If it is actually failing to drive performance, obviously that is a factor as well.

Although GRI provided commentary on numbers of reporters, and who reads reports and so on in a recent, separate, summary of the year, I would want to see it engage with this core marketplace 'how well we achieve our mission' focus within its sustainability report.

Because if its main impacts really are 'paper planes and people' then it's not doing its job properly.

Do I care how much paper GRI uses? No, although I would expect any well run company to minimise this. Do I care whether its 50 employees cycle to work or go in private helicopter? Not much. But I do care whether these globally important frameworks are actually helping to achieve sustainability, since that is the scale of their ambition.

Posted on: 22 Aug 2011