With a better networked community, corporate processes and responsibilities that were once utterly opaque are now much more vulnerable to scrutiny. That the climate change age will impose ever increasing requirements for transparency on the part of business is inevitable. But here’s something you might not have considered: just think what happens when something as apparently benign as sustainability reporting is suddenly transformed into a weapon of attack.
In the conventional model, the larger companies that report on their efforts towards sustainability do it of their own volition and select those of their activities and impacts on which they will report, offering no dialogue or recourse to their audience.
But in the internet age, if you take the thinking of other industries, you can flip this logic precisely on its head and you’ll come up with a completely different result. The difference in this model is that the web-equipped community will not be reticent about identifying the environmental impacts a company creates and telling it what it wishes to see accounted for.
It’s all the more reason why companies should become rightfully defensive of their environmental records and all the more diligent about preparing to manage reputational risk.
In the electronics industry, for one, it is now a tradition that companies will rip apart the new device of a competitor, analyse its design, identify its parts and calculate how much it costs to make. This is called a "teardown".
But what harm to corporations could this principle signify if it was applied to tearing down major businesses on their sustainability and climate change records?
Pulling apart companies to expose what lies within, exactly how they work, who makes their decisions and which are contributing in their actions to the mitigation of climate change and environmental depletion might leave most businesses looking very different on the inside to the impression their leaders would wish to convey to the world.
So how could a teardown be carried out?
A sustainability teardown would likely begin with the evaluation in every company of its "business models". A single business may have many ways of making money, generally related in some way, but each has its own specific mode of managerial execution.
If we wish to identify where that organisation’s business model’s impacts begin, identifying where it delivers profit to its sponsor is a good place to start. Following the money always is.
But just because a company has no obvious material outputs does not clear its name. Banks, for example, appear benign, but their culpability lies in indiscriminate lending to other businesses whose activities damage the environment.
In turn, to execute its business plan every organisation has a structure. The operation of a specific business model may itself have several divisions and departments charged with its conduct. Each will play a different role in creating its environmental footprint.
All organisations have people who make decisions, and in charge of each of its business models is likely to be a team of executives that decides how it is to be run and what are the necessary undertakings it must commit to that will optimise profit.
It is in these people's hands that responsibilities for that business's responses to environmental depletion and climate change lie.
No company is yet improving our predicament, but plenty of those who take decisions are making it worse, and with internet-fuelled ingenuity, the cloud’s citizens will not be satisfied until they find out who they are.
Equipped with the tools their shared research will provide, it is inevitable this crowd will probe and ask more demanding, better-focused questions of such managers and of their employers.
In some industries, the problems will lie in business relationships. Some will enter into or already be stuck in environmentally problematic long-term partnerships and alliances which will influence their footprints. Forced separations caused by the reputational damage of association will lead to some nasty contractual battles.
And then there are internal forces for change.
Many companies are likely to have within their ranks executives keen to find out just how, in the face of an increasingly concerned public and media, competitive advantage can be won on climate change and the environment. There will be those who would genuinely like to see their organisation do more of the right thing and will agitate for change within.
And within others there will be activists and potential whistleblowers ready to blow a big one on the actions of their employer.
But it is when these individuals combine with less forgiving external agencies that the potential for unplanned and really disruptive change multiplies.
Beyond any organisation's walls will exist former executives and workers often with little residual affection or respect for those they have left behind, but an intimate knowledge of an organisation's people, its operations and its culture.
There are industry experts with the ability to apply an analytical framework – such as environmental scientists and other technical experts interested and able to evaluate the impacts of its operations.
In an orchestrated teardown, the aim is to bring the parties together to use social connections, knowledge and collaborative insight to find the chinks in any business's armour and to press them hard to the point of collapse.
Why a sustainability teardown is damaging, and to whom
Few still are the companies with binding undertakings on the environment and even fewer those with commitments on climate change. Many are simply hoping the spotlight of responsibility for action will somehow pass over them.
Of course, this is no longer possible, but it makes the ground for competition ripe for exploitation by the enterprising and the nimble.
A guided public teardown equips the community with tools to tell businesses precisely on which environmental metrics it expects them to make progress and on which it expects them to report.
The inability or unwillingness of a company to respond appropriately will have negative consequences and create a loss of trust amongst key stakeholders, causing damage to the reputation and image of the organisation.
Poorly managed stakeholder relationships are expensive and can result in the diversion of substantial resources, time and money into reacting to adverse stakeholder actions.
Quite apart from creating potential difficulties in attracting and retaining quality staff, they will most likely reduce the attractiveness of ownership, and potentially affect the share price - and directors' bonuses - as well, possibly, as the ability to attract funding.
Internet transparency means the concerns of stakeholder groups will be much more effectively networked and shared, and the ability to reach into an organisation's stakeholder base (its customers, suppliers, partners, local communities and unions, regulators, trade bodies, industry consultants, academics and researchers, and so on) to pick it apart will promote the need for it to get busy on its management response.
Each and any of these agencies can be drawn on to participate in a teardown. And smart competitors won't hesitate to engage them to put the boot in. Indeed, there are many possible nasty tactics that can be imagined in a battle for market share and survival.
That such actions could be sponsored by a company wishing to damage a rival while at the same time getting busy in advance on its response could be doubly harmful to its target and result in a quick and dramatic loss of sales and market share, let alone what it could do to profitability.
The target organisation would almost certainly wish to defend itself and its executives from attack. But most would be extremely unlikely without extensive prior planning to mount any kind of plausible defence.
The effect within the target organisation's walls as staff became riveted with the drama unfolding at the company through their Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts could lead to a rush for the exits. Moreover, it could happen at an organisation of any scale, and quickly.
In the right hands, preparing for an almost inevitable teardown-style attack provides the motivated organisation with scope for learning, reflection and immediate work on risk mitigation. It creates the space for a new legitimacy to emerge and it is an opportunity for questions to be asked and answered.
For those frozen in the headlights, however, the outcome will be somewhat less pleasant. It is up to management to turn it to its advantage.
How will your organisation respond? Will it be a victim to the predatory, organised actions of well prepared competitor? Or will you lead your industry?
Whatever your answer, anticipating the inevitable and getting busy on your solution would be the smartest thing to do.
