I was struck by a comment in the editorial in today’s FT about the resignation of the government’s chief drug advisor Professor Nutt. At the heart of the row, the question of government moving from reliance on ‘evidence-based policy’ to one that seeks to do the opposite: find the right evidence it needs to justify its policy decisions. Moving from? Was it not always thus? As a former market researcher, I know the tricks of the trade – that is, if you ask a question a certain way, you can encourage a certain answer.. But it got me to thinking about the world in which we work with companies and sustainability issues… and to the extent they too, are guilty of the same. And are we, as their advisors, sometimes complicit in this?
Not so long ago I got a call from someone asking on behalf of their client whether we ‘do ethical supply chain policies’. We do ‘do’, I said, but there are a few other questions that come before the ‘doing’, like why do they want it, what are they buying from where, what sort of issues do they have in their supply chain, and how are they intending to use it? To which the answer was ‘because our competitors seem to have one, and customers are starting to ask if they have one. So they need to keep them off their backs, basically. A policy should do the trick, right?’ Hmm. Indeed. I suspect more companies, if they are honest, might say the same thing in an unguarded moment.
Almost anybody can cobble together a respectable-looking policy together these days if they put their mind to it. But how rooted is it in how your business thinks, what your business does, its needs and constraints, and its customer/consumer priorities? In other areas perhaps, companies do better. On environmental issues, for example, there is more evidence on which to base policies – not least the weight of science, regulation, and 40 years of campaigning.
On companies’ commitment to go Fairtrade…or for that matter Rainforest Alliance certified? We know that it’s not just about what consumers think. Because lots of them just don’t. Or rather they think about different things. So, are they acting from real evidence, an anticipation of what lies ahead? Or a deeper sense of concerns driven from within the business? Perhaps a mix of all three.
And does it matter if we don’t have the evidence, as long as the net result is a good one at the end of the day? Well, I guess it depends on who’s at the receiving end of that net result.
At the end of the day, we’re all for evidence. Evidence has to be the cornerstone of any policy or action, or it becomes meaningless. We spend our days helping companies find it, show proof of it, because, good, bad or ugly, it’s the foundation on which responsible behaviour and progress can be built.