The issues around the how, what and who of corporate reporting continue to run around the same loops that they have been on for some time if the content of the clinic conversation we had  recently is anything to go by. The issue of sustainability reporting – as a subset of the corporate reporting agenda more generally – continues to get subsumed into the wider angst about purpose, about audience and about impact of the reporting process and outputs.

It feels like companies continue to be overly anxious about the risks that they are running in publishing anything given the 24/7 scrutiny that they feel themselves to be under. These nameless nemesis’ – civil society (which I guess includes customers?) – have, in the dominating scenario, lots of power to shift public perception and provoke activist action to the detriment of the corporations market, profitability and reputation.  The standard response which is a desire to exert micro-control over the whole thing and to risk manage the process of reporting (lots of lawyers editing the text and offering grammatical advice on the proposed text for the annual report publications). The myth of control of stakeholder attitudes by transmitting deliberate messages designed to create the appropriate behaviour continue to dominate thinking and action in this area. The myth here is a big and important one to bust and we are in the myth-busting business I would hope. The truth is that the more companies seek to exert deliberate, elaborate and beautifully designed communication control over their external audience the less, in practice, will they get that control. Why is this? Because we are entering a post-spin age where authenticity is prized most of all, where alignment between values and action is the way in which integrity is assessed (by both employees and external stakeholders) and where transparency and openness are being forced upon corporations by the web 2.0 generation of tools and users. In the main this means that the ‘broadcast’ approach to corporate communications is in the process of being replaced by two-way communication of varying degrees of sophistication whether companies like it or not. We are heading towards a new era of open communication the rules of which are emergent and emerging. Collaborative rather than competitive mindsets need to frame a proactive rather than a defensive corporate communications posture and process.

So all this means that corporate communication is two-way, ongoing, messy and exciting. Communicating something as sophisticated as sustainability is even more messy, two-way and difficult. Getting to a two-way dialogue, a conversation, where meaning is made of data and action in the process of engagement and collaboration is where the prize is. Not many companies are doing that either at all or well. But the logic of sustainability is essentially an integrative logic, that everything is connected to everything else; or to put it another way, we are all in this together (there are no externalities etc.). So sustainability reporting as a snapshot of data that is relevant to the ongoing conversation with stakeholders about sustainability issues of mutual interest is the way to think about it and the way design the process.

The most important quality of the relationship between business and wider civil society right now is trust. Difficult to build, easy to destroy says the common wisdom. Trust isn’t a tradable commodity and isn’t something that can be described in degrees; we either trust or we don’t, there isn’t any middle ground. Trust is built through relationships and is maintained by through connecting words and deeds; it isn’t about never making mistakes, never failing to live to the highest standard or otherwise being perfect. It is about being honest, telling the truth as far as it is possible (to know what the truth is, not avoiding telling deliberate lies) and dealing straight.

But ‘dealing straight’ also requires clarity of purpose. Communication strategies that blow in the wind as they seek to respond to every perceived nuance of shifting opinions and priorities of stakeholder groups and wider civil society will build little trust, erode authenticity and require the spending of big communications budgets to achieve little. Stakeholder mapping can tell you who your stakeholders are whereas relationship mapping can tell you much more. Relationship mapping would ask ‘what?’ questions rather than ‘who?’ questions. What sort of relationship does the company want with this stakeholder and why? What sort of relationship does this stakeholder want with the company and why? What is the future direction of the companies’ relationship with this stakeholder and how do we navigate from here to that future together? Knowing what the purpose of the relationship is between the company and the stakeholder both now and in the future is central to building effective strategy and creating a platform for building a reputation for ‘dealing straight’, for authenticity and for integrity and ultimately for trust.

The limits of the traditional approach to corporate reporting in our web 2.0 world are increasingly all too obvious. Annual reporting cycles, static hard copy brochures and the glossy sheen of expensive photography simply do not serve the modern dynamics of stakeholder relationships, their interests and sensibilities. Such documents and the data therein need to be seen as snapshots of key data and information that assist in the effective benchmarking of progress against stated purposes and objectives but which sit in a much more deliberate wider communication process which is building and maintaining stakeholder relationships. Trying to cram all the communications needs for all stakeholders into one annual document clearly makes no sense (however many appendices one adds) and fails the test of transparency and openness increasingly required of organisations by wider civil society. A simpler, sharper document that annually contains a snapshot of key data on organisational performance against stated objectives for the purposes of compliance with reporting standards and for benchmarking purposes is what is required. That document should be seen as no more than one component of the process and product of stakeholder relationships which is a permanent feature of the everyday work of the company.

In the end all reporting and communications process and products need to support the deliberate building and maintaining of relationships and to do this they need to tell a coherent story of what the company is trying to do, why, what progress it is making and what it is learning along the journey. The ability to tell a coherent and detailed story that has the benefit of being the truth is at the heart of any organisation's success. The reasons why it might be very difficult to tell that story clearly are exactly the same reasons why an organisation is failing and the reason why some companies are world class is because their story is clear and understood by all. This is what brand means in our emerging globally connected economies and reporting and wider communications we are told, must serve the brand above all else. We in Tomorrow’s Company will continue to support companies in getting their story straight and finding effective ways to break out of the tired loops of traditional reporting problems and move towards more effective stakeholder relationships for the benefit of us all.