Impressions | FabianPattberg.com

I arrived in Amsterdam for the GRI Conference yesterday expecting to connect with many likeminded people and to pick up the latest trends and opinions on Sustainability and CSR.

This is the first of three posts I will do this week covering this conference.

Impressions from Day 1 (A more detailed report will follow during the later stages of this week):

In general the mood of conference organizers, sponsors, speakers and participants I talked to seems to be a good and constructive one. The conference is now sold out and despite the economic downturn Sustainability/CSR professionals still find this conference highly useful, for them and their business. The venue is good and a lot of the key players in the field are attending.

Integrated reporting seems to be the major theme here from what I can tell after the first day. Everyone is talking about it here and some of the plenary session speakers today really went into detail about it. GRI also announced that it would fully support a move to integrated reporting. So does the organization supported by the HRH the Prince of Wales- Accounting for Sustainability. These are two heavyweights in terms of Sustainability / CSR opinion and this for me is a clear sign that integrated reporting will be a key area of work for GRI in the coming months.

Twitter is making the conference very interactive. There was one point half way through the plenary session where I counted something like 14 different people tweeting on a regular basis throughout the day when I searched for the #griconference hashtag on Twitter. This is a sign of the future to come with regards to stakeholder engagement at these kind of events. Two years ago this kind of engagement would have been unthinkable. GRI also provided free Wifi which was great to foster communication via Twitter. Tomorrow we will hopefully see the continuation of this online engagement.

In summary:
Day 1 of the conference was really interesting. But Day 2 will hopefully be even more interesting. Now we are going into the individual discussion panels and topic specific presentations.
So stay tuned for coverage of Day 2 tomorrow evening or follow the live tweets on Twitter with the hashtag: #griconference. This is the direct link to all the tweets from the conference. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=griconference If you prefer to follow individual Twitter users attending the conference then you will find a list of these participants here: http://www.fabianpattberg.com/2010/05/people-twitter-attending-gri-csr-conference/

The purpose of this post is to be a reflection of my impressions of the first day attending the 9th Responsible Business Summit hosted by Ethical Corporation here in London yesterday. The participants list promised some interesting discussions and I was looking forward to connecting with Twitter friends such as Mallen Baker, Scheubel Develop, Lumina CR, James Farrar as well as many other friends and former colleagues.

What are my main impressions from this first day?

The overall impression I got from the corporate and consultancy participants was that business is difficult at the moment and everyone is feeling this negative effect in their area. Businesses and individuals. I doesn’t matter whether you are in the the steel industry or telecoms business. The recession has hit business hard and CSR activities, budgets and headcount took a hit too.

This just reinforced my feeling that CSR and Sustainability is at a cross-roads at the moment. There are these companies that are still very successful and are going from strength to strength. This is usually the first line when you talk to people from the corporate CSR world. But once you start getting into the more detailed conversations I found that there are equally as many companies that have to make very tough decisions with regards to what CSR / Sustainability activities. The theme is scaling down and business process optimizing. As a consequences many practitioners pointed out to me that these are decisions that will inevitably effect the innovation capabilities within the CSR / Sustainability field and its best practice.

And this this seems to be an important aspect. The overall popularity of CSR and Sustainability is rising when you look at the big picture but at the same time best practice innovation is stalling. This is what I could tell from my conversations and discussions throughout the day. I have not come across the innovative initiative or strategy that really wowed me so far. It seems to be business as usual as far as I can tell. CSR and Sustainability know what they need to do but so far I am missing the strong will and attitude to achieve change within the industry. Everyone is doing business as usual but not more unfortunately.

In later conversations during the day I exactly pointed this out to Mallen Baker and James Farrar just to name two people also present on Twitter. They agreed to a certain degree to my assessment but also pointed out that this might be the perception and feeling of people who have been working in the CSR Sustainability field for quite a while now. Which I have obviously. We (the CSR / Sustainability professionals) might be to saturated with best practice to not appreciate the innovation currently happening in the field. I had to admit that this made sense to me.

What is your opinion on this? Are the people that have worked in this field for several years not able to see the really valuable new best practice out there? Any feedback would be very useful as always.

Let’s see whether the second day will provide me with a different impression. So stay tuned for more from me this week.

Fabian Pattberg

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