Crowd-powered Benchmarks

Leadership and civic organising guru Marshall Ganz believes that “meaningful change only happens when people come together for a shared purpose”.

After a lifetime exploring civic action, Ganz concludes that lasting change requires that human beings come together and connect through shared values and common purpose. And when that is achieved, that common cause and those shared values can be transformed into sources of power, influence and change.

We agree. Responsible 100 is an agency-creating tool and collaboration between people and organisations. What connects us is a shared desire to help businesses to increase their positive impacts on society and nature, and decrease their negative impacts, for their own benefit and for everyone else’s.

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. All the more so in periods of great change and upheaval. 

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. Responsible 100 has developed performance 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.

Our rule of thumb:

  • 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.

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.  

What are our current benchmarks for our 22 issues?

You’ll notice that each of our issues pages provides similar materials, e.g.: 

  • An simple, clear introduction (30-60 words)
  • A longer explanation and exploration (a few hundred words) 
  • A few questions that respondents should be thinking about 
  • An outline of Poor, Okay, Good and Excellent performance
  • Definitions of jargon and technical terms
  • Links and further resources

What we’d like to soon add is guidance and materials to enable businesses to improve. Diagnosis is important and valuable, but a starting point. Once a participant has undertaken our initial steps and is clear on the priority issues it will be tackling first, it needs to know how to get from:

  • Poor to Okay
  • Okay to Good
  • Good to Excellent

Usually, expert partners don’t simply possess a deep understanding of their issue, but also knowledge and experience as to how the issue impacts business, and how business impacts the issue. They offer examples as to how businesses have changed their policies and practices to impact the issue more positively, and impact it less negatively. 

Increasingly, our issues partners are interested in ways of building a positive culture around business improvement on their issues of expertise. We believe that Responsible 100 can play a useful role in helping to develop those cultures and communities.

How to contribute to our benchmarks

We explored hundreds of responsibility issues over the years. Currently, there are just 22 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 22, 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 already have a handful of additional issues we’d like to add in ASAP. There will soon be a 23rd and a 24th! Which issues are missing, in your opinion? We’d like to hear from you… Please reach out in regards to any of the above. Our “Contact Us” form allows you to provide a few sentences as to your issue, your expertise and your particular angle or experience. By all means provide hyperlinks to your work and any comments, feedback and questions you may have. 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.

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