The Responsible Business Summit (RBS) ended yesterday and I was privileged to be part of this interesting conference. The last two days helped me to get a feeling about some of the major developments within the Sustainability / CSR field.
This is the link to a previous post about my impressions of the first conference day. Day 1 of the RBS 2010 if you are interested in the first day in particular. The second day was equally interesting but very different as there were only so called “break out sessions” on a wide range of Sustainability / CSR topics. I attended several of these break out sessions. My aim was to find these topics which included elements such as trust, social media and leading CSR best practice.
At the end of the conference I tried to identify several interesting developments which I wanted to share with you. Here they are:
- The Sustainability / CSR agenda within organizations is changing. It is moving into the mainstream but only really slowly. Why? Well, there are individual companies such as GSK, BAT, Tesco, etc. with engaging and groundbreaking best practice. But the problem here is that 85% of all other organisations do not know much about the topic of CSR / Sustainability and most of them have no idea about how CSR / Sustainability can enhance their business. I feel that this is still a worrying sign and continues to represent a lot of work for us as Sustainability / CSR professionals.
- Sustainability / CSR professionals nowadays are distributed mainly across two geographic areas. North American and Europe. But what about the rest of the worlds participation in this field? This is a big issue i. I almost feel as if Sustainability / CSR is now a profession for the Western world predominately.
- The trend is going towards online conferences to supplement offline conferences. Ethical Corporation has done a great job with the speaker list and organization. But it seems to me that online conferences will be the fast growing tool to engage with other practitioners in the future. The latest example is the upcoming SustainabilityNow next week.
- Trust remains the big topic in the field. Trusting organizations to do the right thing has been seriously undermined with the failures in the banking sector and its corporate malpractice. It will be interesting to see the development of trust once we are out of the economic downturn and organizations are looking to reach out to stakeholders more instead of purely focusing on organizational survival.
These are four of the developments I have observed. Any comments on these and whether you agree, disagree or would like to add points?