Crowd-powered Benchmarks
Deliberative and Fluid by Design
Responsible 100 has created a structure through which common cause and collaborative action builds both shared knowledge and community. Our performance benchmarks, and how they are created and used, sit at the heart of this.
Over many years, we’ve developed benchmarks on scores of social, environmental and ethical issues, working with hundreds of businesses and partner organisations such as NGOs, campaigners and civil society groups. We’ve learnt that there is inherent nuance, ambiguity and complexity in almost every responsibility issue. And that creating opportunities to deliberate together helps to overcome this.
The future has always been unknowable and uncertain. And now more than ever. Defining good or bad performance too narrowly or tightly today risks becoming prisoner to those definitions tomorrow.
Therefore, we define Poor, Okay, Good and Excellent performance together whereby every time a new participant submits a new or updated story, these definitions are tested yet again, and redefined and recalibrated as needed.
A Simple Performance Scale
Irrespective of the issue – and we look at the widest range of things from modern slavery to cyber security to customer complaints and redress – we’ve learned that performance can almost always be summarised in the same, simple terms at the highest level.
Further, and again irrespective of the issue, the performance of a business is best assessed in terms of how it impacts society and nature through its policies, practices or simply the positions it takes.
We’ve arrived at a simple rule of thumb in regards to performance:
- Excellent – We champion this issue.
- Good – We impact more positively than negatively.
- Okay – We impact both positively and negatively. Or this issue does not impact us in any way.
- Poor – We impact more negatively than positively.
A deeper explanation of these performance levels can be found in our FAQs, starting here.
Participating organisations test the latest definitions of each performance level, issue by issue, as they submit new or updated stories, as these contain the explanation and evidence as to why the chosen performance level applies. Rejecting or disproving the current definition is not a problem. Indeed this is welcome because it forces a recalibration which requires useful conversations with other businesses that have previously used the benchmark and with the issues experts we work with.
How to contribute to our benchmarks
We have explored hundreds of responsibility issues over the years. Currently, there are just 24 in our list.
We felt this was an adequate number to offer something of a one-stop-shop by covering a broad range of issues. But by limiting the number of issues to 24, we keep things as manageable as possible for our participants and partners, and in managing and administering everything, as this second version of Responsible 100 soft launches and grows.
This stated, we welcome suggestions for new benchmarks on new issues not yet in the list. And we welcome your suggestions on how to improve the current set that we’re already using.