New Metrics
Mapping Maturation Pathways & Building Bridges to an Integral Economy

Bill Baue
Published 6 years ago. About a 4 minute read.

Part Ten in a 10-Part Series by Reporting 3.0. See previous parts below. “If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there,” U.S. baseball icon (and meister of understated irony) Yogi Berra famously stated. This quip accurately describes CSR / ESG incrementalism, which heads in a direction without a clear destination. By contrast, context-based multicapitalism (as advocated by Reporting 3.0) provides not only a clear destination, but also a timeline for tracking the rate of progress needed – across multiple, interrelated dimensions.

Part Ten in a 10-Part Series by Reporting 3.0. See previous parts below.

“If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there,” U.S. baseball icon (and meister of understated irony) Yogi Berra famously stated. This quip accurately describes CSR / ESG incrementalism, which heads in a direction without a clear destination. By contrast, context-based multicapitalism (as advocated by Reporting 3.0) provides not only a clear destination, but also a timeline for tracking the rate of progress needed – across multiple, interrelated dimensions.

Bill Baue and Ralph Thurm
will discuss
Blueprinting the Future
of Reporting, Accounting
and Data Management
at New Metrics '17.But even with strong navigational tools such as this, sometimes the journey seems like one of those movies where the camera pans back to reveal a painted background scrolling by behind a character running in place on a conveyer belt. Similarly, we see the pursuit of sustainability solely at the micro (company) level as a Sisyphean task (slightly different metaphor, same message), seeing as our current economic operating system explicitly excludes broader social & ecological systems from the equation (can you say “externalities”?) To exit this perpetual Groundhog Day loop, we need to transform the economic system design from monocapitalism into regenerative & distributive multicapitalism, as a means of reintegrating Commons-based capital resources into the economic equation.

Walls, Chasms & Bridges

This is one of the early lessons emerging from the Reporting 3.0 Beta Testing Program, in a pilot project mapping material sustainability issues of a leading global consumer goods company onto the R3 Strategy Continuum. The company’s sustainability goals – broadly considered amongst the world’s most ambitious – continually “hit a wall,” aiming for sustainability but not regeneration or ‘thriving’ on the horizontal axis, and similarly falling short of triggering a new, multicapitalist economy on the vertical axis. And while “a wall” is the go-to metaphor for an obstacle, we believe it’s more apt to consider this obstruction as a chasm, which is invisible from a distance and only becomes visible upon closer approach.

Maturation Pathways

The lower right quadrant of the R3 Strategy Continuum represents the destination of thriving organizations in an economic system whose markets incentivize prosperity by nurturing human wellbeing & fulfillment and resilient, well-balanced ecological cycles. So, one of the first R3 Beta Testing Program pilots plots Maturation Pathways from current performance (typically in the upper left quadrant of incremental improvement) through the mid-line of sustainability (contextually defined) and across the transformation chasm into the lower right quadrant of regenerative thriving in a new, multicapitalist economy – or what we in Reporting 3.0 call an Integral Economy for its holism.

Advocation Partners Program, for advisory organizations contributing legwork on pilots – current partners include BSD Consulting (global), Center for Sustainable Organizations (US), Simply Sustainable (UK), Sustainability Advisory (UAE), and Tellus Institute (global);
Academic Alliance, for educational institutions providing research to test R3 hypotheses;
Governments & Multilaterals Program, for providing the public-sector support needed to spur the needed economic system design change; and
Investor Program for allocating capital toward these market transformations.

In addition, the Reporting 3.0 work ecosystem is advancing two more Blueprints (following in the footsteps of the Reporting Blueprint and Data Blueprint reports released at the 4th International R3 Conference at KPMG Amsterdam in May):

Accounting Blueprint, led by Cornis van der Lugt, with Working Group participation by ABN AMRO, ACCA, Aegon, Kansai University, KPMG, SASB, The Crown Estate, UNCTAD, UNEPFI, and the World Bank (among others), which is preparing to release Exposure Draft 2.0
New Business Models Blueprint, led by Bill Baue and Ralph Thurm, with Working Group participation by B Lab, Fairphone, Flourishing Enterprise Innovation, Organizational Capital Partners, Preventable Surprises, Sustainability Advantage, TU Delft, University of Hamburg, University of Vermont, Volans and Waka Waka (among others), which is preparing Exposure Draft 1.0.

Ultimately, R3 believes in a highly collaborative, pre-competitive approach for spurring the kind of scalability necessary to resolve the unintended consequences of flawed economic system design, and to spur the emergence of a regenerative, distributive, multicapitalist economy.