Making the Sausage

After spending years promoting “transparency” as an integral component of sustainability, I think its time to introduce the Goldilocks concept of transparency: when is there too much transparency, when is there too little, and when is it just right? I think the answer depends on (mixing metaphors) whether you really want (or need) to see your sausage being made.

I spent years creating, summarizing and investigating corporate sustainability reports. Even today most of these reports give only a narrow window into the true environmental and social impacts of corporate behavior. For an enviro-nerd like me, these reports constitute too little transparency. Because of the work I do, I love all the data; it allows me to see nuances, develop messages about how far we’ve come, and craft a sustainability strategy for what direction and how far we still have to go. But if everybody had access to the data underlying these reports, it would be construed as too much transparency, especially by those who are being reported on. Why? Because it would lead to misinterpretations about real corporate commitments to sustainability and the real difficulties of making change when the only control you have over social and environmental impact is indirect.

For example many companies have reduced their environmental footprint simply by outsourcing operations that used to be responsible for the bulk of their impacts. Would these companies retain the trust of their stakeholders if that were highlighted? Or would subsequent charges of green-washing just create a hunker-down response and even less future transparency?

This dilemma leads me to propose the “just-right” concept of transparency. In my mind it has 5 components:

1. Sharing your stories, hopes and summarized successes/failures regarding environmental and social aspects of the operations you do control (this level of content typifies many of today’s corporate sustainability reports).
2. Telling us how you made your customers more sustainable (a sign that you understand sustainability is more about relationships than it is about data… and I have yet to see one report that explores this impact as more than wishful thinking).
3. Adding an honest assessment about your own ability, successes and failures to influence and measure the environmental and social behavior of those whom you contract with while conducting business.
4. Posting on-line all non-spam comments, challenges, and corporate responses regarding your published sustainability report so that public response and public demands for more or less transparency can be gauged.
5. Finally, making all data underlying your reports available to outside analysts under appropriate confidentiality provisions so that different interpretations about their significance (and veracity) can be made. In this way the data could be used to look for other business risks and opportunities, as well as keeping the initial reporters honest… for anybody who is not proud of their contribution to any corporate goal, including sustainability, has an incentive and often seeks opportunities to lie and spin their way out of it.

Let’s get back to the sausage metaphor about transparency and apply it to today’s political scene to show why (or when) too much transparency is a bad thing, and why retaining the ability to control the message (through earning enough trust to return people’s focus to the goodness of the final product while de-emphasizing what you had to go through to make it), is essential before you can claim that you are really sustainable.

People in America are mad and the results of this week’s special Senate election in Massachusetts reveal that. They want action, not bickering. They want our leaders to act and give us something we can consume that will make us healthy. But revealing all the fights and gore that went into crafting a final product like the health care compromise (too much transparency) allowed the enemies of the Democratic majority to point to a messy process and give the impression that the end product was also a mess… even though those who were throwing stones are the same people who support the status quo and do not want to begin curtailing the power of the insurance companies.

The Democrats promoted transparency in their process but lost the ability to control the message about the final product because some acted holier-than-thou and a few other key players like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman accepted massive contributions from insurance interests which led to a loss of trust by the American people, leading many to believe that the Senatorial process was focused only on the interests of (excuse my anger here) the people who run the medical insurance industry for their own benefit. If the people who were charged with leading the Senate process (like Ben Nelson) or who exerted their individual power to change key components (like Joe Lieberman) were not so compromised, the people of America might have given the Democrats a pass. But they didn’t, and the result is that everybody lost.

In other words excessive transparency (which we asked for) and lack of trust (which Democratic leaders brought on themselves) resulted in difficulties controlling the message during the process of making the sausage. This gave people whose stated purpose was to destroy any Democratic initiative, an opening  to create the impression that the end product of the process was unhealthy for America, even though unbiased analysts who understand the medical and economic systems at much deeper levels than I, tended to interpret the final product as a good step to correcting some very unfair medical practices in this country.

Moral 1: if you lose the trust of the people, your enemies can use transparency to bury you.

Moral 2: those doing the burying often protect themselves by being less transparent and more manipulative, i.e. they are not necessarily better people or have better processes, but they do have less transparency, and with less transparency there is less of a call to prove their trustworthiness.

Anyway, burying the work done on health care right now would be like me saying most Sustainability Reports are garbage and not worth anybody’s attention. I might be driven to say that because I didn’t write any this year and because I don’t trust some of the people who I know provide data to them. But that would be foolish. Personally I think all sustainability reports could be better, yet I don’t think they need to be banned just because they all have underlying weaknesses.

I usually try to avoid politics in my posts but today was different. I now realize that issues arising from the intersection of “ego with ecosystem” and “ego with politics” are the same, i.e. in all cases, those in conflict invariably narrow their focus to ego when their survival is threatened. But striving for transparency can force all of us to focus less on ego and more on how we impact the bigger systems we reside in. And in order to be succesful in any of that, we first need to make sure we do everything in our power to maintain the trust of the main stakeholders. If not, we will be buried by those with less altruistic motives.