Reporting 3.0 Tells the Story of its 5th International Conference with Summary Report, Videos, Blueprints, Speaker Presentations, and More

Maintaining a tradition that distinguishes its conferences, Reporting 3.0 is releasing a comprehensive yet concise summary report and video distilling the 5th International Reporting 3.0 Conference that gathered the r3.0 community of Positive Mavericks on June 12-13 at KPMG Headquarters in Amsterdam. The report and video complement a host of other multimedia materials to “tell the story” of the Conference, as outlined below.

Summary Report

The report, co-authored by Reporting 3.0 Managing Director Ralph Thurm and Senior Director Bill Baue, gleans the essential learnings in a chronological flow, drawing on diverse sources such as the #Reporting3 twitter feed for diverse real-time perspectives. For example, the report displays tweets that bookended the Conference capturing why KPMG’s Wim Bartels enjoys hosting:

In the opening session, Bartels said he “appreciates Reporting 3.0 Conferences as opportunities to gain new knowledge — particularly on Sustainability Context, moving beyond incrementalism to addressing Planetary Boundaries.” In the closing session, he reiterated and expanded on “the value of learning on Sustainability Context — Thresholds, Allocations, Planetary Boundaries, Social Foundations.”

In between, the report weaves together photo collages, links to videos, speaker slides accompanying text summaries of presentations, graphics from Blueprints releases, and other resources into a rich tapestry.

Videos

The Conference kicked off with surprise guest John Elkington addressing the audience via video, reflecting on r3.0’s progress since he keynoted the 2nd International Reporting 3.0 Conference in 2014. “I really like what the Reporting 3.0 Community is doing,” said Elkington. “I think the shift from a focus on the business case for sustainability — and everything that goes with it, including reporting — to business models is both timely and important.”

Elkington seized the opportunity to soft launch a “recall” of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL, or “people planet profit”) concept that he first introduced a quarter century ago, but now frets that its incrementalist implementation has fallen short of its original transformative intention. “It’s almost as though we’re on a commercial airliner headed full speed toward a very big mountain. If you look at the dials on the dashboard in the cockpit, it’s clear that we’ve got enough fuel, we’re going at the right speed, the temperature in the cabin is wonderful, the food is being served, the audio system is working quite nicely – but we’re still heading for that mountain,” Elkington quipped. “Most the reporting we do doesn’t take that mountain properly into account.”

Elkington subsequently fleshed out the TBL recall more fully in articles on Harvard Business Review and GreenBiz, where he invited input for integration into the year-long Tomorrow’s Capitalism Inquiry project to revamp the TBL. Thurm and Baue answered this invitation in a Medium article laying out “how the Reporting 3.0 Blueprint Work Ecosystem already proposes and is actively testing many viable solutions to the TBL shortfall through our Transformation Journey Program.”

Reporting 3.0 also released a summary video encapsulating the Conference in five minutes through live footage and speaker interviews. Testimonials include Richard Howitt of IIRC, Lois Guthrie of WBCSD, Designing Regenerative Cultures Author Daniel Christian Wahl, Ralitza Germanova of International Finance Corporation, Tjeerd Krumpelman of ABN AMRO, and many others.

“Reporting 3.0 plays such an important role in transformational change by not only being a platform for technical guidance but also by bringing everyone together in a collaborative way,” said Frank Blasio of the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism. Caterina Camerani of AkzoNobel said: “We are very happy to test the Reporting 3.0 Blueprint and we would also like to invite other companies to do that because at the end of the day, it’s us, the corporations, that have to make use of them to improve our business.”

Blueprints

At the Conference, Reporting 3.0 released final reports for three Blueprints: Accounting, New Business Models, and the Transformation Journey. (Final reports for the Reporting and Data Blueprints – available here and here — were released at the 4th International Reporting 3.0 Conference last year.)

Wim Bartels joined lead author Cornis van der Lugt to release the Accounting Blueprint, which proposes “Integrated Accounting” that harmonizes the sub-disciplines of financial, management, and sustainability accounting. As well, it proposes new multilayer, multicapital balance sheets, income statements, and statements of long-term risk and value creation.

“What’s being proposed is quite radical – it’s so ambitious and forward-looking,” said Richard Martin of ACCA, who spoke in the accounting standards plenary panel after the Blueprint release.

Baue and Thurm released the New Business Models Blueprint, which builds on (and identifies gaps in) existing work in sustainable business models, and so proposes Integral Business Models that exhibit eight characteristics, such as multicapitalist, contextualized, and scalable. The Blueprint, which is addressed to both startup entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs transforming existing business models, also includes a process flowchart and template for assessing business models. With foundation support from Stichting Doen, the Blueprint included 3 case examples road testing the template: Co-op Power, ReBlend, VDMbee.  

“One of the things that got me engaged with reporting 3.0 was the move out of the measurement world into the design world, designing new business models,” said Antony Upward of Flourishing Enterprise Innovation, an r3.0 Advocation Partner. “We're going to build frameworks, methods, tools, practices that actually enable the advice in the New Business Models Blueprint to be implemented.”

Baue and Thurm also jointly released the Transformation Journey Blueprint, which responds to demand from the r3.0 community for a distilled synthesis of the four primary blueprints into a single concise document. The Blueprint also employs a mountain climbing metaphor (juxtaposed to Elkington’s airliner flying into a mountain!) to introduce the Transformation Journey Program, the new mechanism for translating the concepts and recommendations in the Blueprints into practice and scaling uptake.

The Transformation Journey Program is the primary avenue for Reporting 3.0 to work collaboratively, exemplified by the partnership on the shift from monocapitalism to multicapitalism that International Integrated Reporting Council CEO Richard Howitt announced in his Opening Keynote (that was concurrently published in a Thomson Reuters article jointly authored by Howitt and Thurm).

“This is incredibly exciting and innovative work, we're proud to be involved in a partnership with Reporting 3.0 on a joint white paper on multicapitalism,” said Howitt.

Presentations

The Conference Website features all of the speaker presentations in downloadable formats, enabling broader exposure of the pioneering ideas explored at the event, including:

• GRI Co-Founder Allen White proposing three strategies for incubating r3.0’s Global Thresholds & Allocations Council;

• Katie Hill of B Lab UK mapping B Corporations’ Impact Business Models to r3.0’s Blueprints; and

• James Quilligan of Economic Democracy Advocates advocating for “resource thresholds and population allocations” by leveraging dynamic tension between the 3 Laws of Thermodynamics to optimize syntropy over entropy.

The Conference yielded overwhelmingly positive testimonials, including one that called the work of Reporting 3.0 “Holy even. And I use that word without exaggeration.”

For more information, please contact:
Bill Baue
Senior Director, Reporting 3.0
b.baue@reporting3.org

Ralph Thurm
Managing Director, Reporting 3.0
r.thurm@reporting3.org