Let’s not report for reporting’s sake, argues Mallen Baker

My favourite overblown headline in advance of the Global Reporting Initiative 2013 conference was, “Perspectives on the G4 as the World Waits”. I don’t think the headline writer was being ironic.

To listen to some people, you would think the launch of a revised reporting standard was akin to the release of the latest Apple product – all shiny and bright and inviting admiration and devotion.

And that, for me, is part of the problem. When the form of reporting takes the attention, rather than the substance of what is being reported – then you have a vehicle that is immature at best, and unfit for purpose at worst.

For me, the problem is with the experts. They are both too expert and at the same time not expert enough. Let me explain.

On the one hand, the experts have driven the evolution of the GRI framework to make it overcomplicated, overtechnical, and really a barrier to effective communication.

In a recent survey (the CR Perspectives Survey), those polled mostly agreed that reports should continue to be aimed at all stakeholders. This view is based on a romantic idealised view of what is driving company accountability to whom – and it has considerably muddied the waters.

There is no other communication produced by these companies allegedly aimed at so many different audiences, with such different interests, language, perspective and information needs. That’s because other communications are driven by a professional communications process.

Here, it’s being driven by experts who are not much in touch with non-expert audiences. Any company that is serious about reaching its direct audiences – customers, employees, suppliers – doesn’t start its reports with a bunch of dry stuff about governance, stakeholder engagement process and materiality.

The experts are falling into the trap that besets so many specialisms – that of becoming so vested in your own specialism, with its perspectives, its jargon and its rationales, that you lose sight of the fact that it may not describe the world outside of that specialism very well at all.

But that’s only half the reason why the experts are not serving us well. They are also not being expert enough.

Performance overlooked

In advance of the GRI conference, I read a number of reviews of corporate responsibility reports. Some of those reviews talked predominantly about the form of the report – how many pages it had, was it externally verified, did it follow GRI and to what level. With respect, that may be holding the report writers to account, but it certainly isn’t holding the company to account.

Those reviews that did look at the content of the report and reproduced some of it did simply that – they reproduced some of what the report told them. Without context. Without added insight.

Contrast that with the expert audiences that analyse companies’ financial reports. They look at the numbers, and can form a judgment of what lurks beneath them, because they know how to interpret a balance sheet.

Then they bring their own knowledge of the marketplace conditions, the track record of the leadership, the competitive environment – and they use this knowledge to read the numbers and tell a story.

It may not always be the correct story – that comes down to skill in analysis. But it isn’t just about taking what the company has offered and accepting it without question.

We suffer for the absence of such experts – those that will use these reports to provide data they can use to tell a story. That expertise may exist in the offices of the SRI analysts, but not within the offices of the business press, or sadly even the specialist journals that send people breathlessly to cover the GRI conference.

Of course, the problem is not with the presence of corporate responsibility experts. It is with the absence of knowledgeable commentators who understand how to read the report and add it to other contextual information to tell a story. You can’t blame GRI for that, or the corporate responsibility experts who have driven its focus.

But the fact that those people are more interested in the form of reporting than the content makes them badly positioned to advise companies that genuinely want to use reporting to achieve an end rather than as an end in itself.

And that’s a choice. There’s no reason why experts can’t be a little more expert in the function of reporting and a little less worried about the exact terms and conditions of the latest framework.

Mallen Baker is managing director of Daisywheel Interactive and a contributing editor to Ethical Corporation.