One of the techniques of screenwriting (disclosure: wannabee screenwriter talking) involves thinking about point-of-view (POV) when writing a scene. For example, this means thinking about whose POV the scene is focused on or how the scene may benefit from switching from one character’s POV to another. Anything that helps to give the scene more clarity or depth. And it’s no different with corporate reporting, except that one POV – financial – has always dominated. But that’s gonna change.
When you want to view what a company does from an environmental, social and governance perspective (ESG) you quickly find that the financial POV – companies, LOBs, departments, accounts – just doesn’t cut it. What you care more about is how businesses manage their resources – based on their inputs and outputs – and what lifecycle impacts are generated by their business processes and key deliverables such as products and services. The kind of POVs that look at how a company behaves operationally rather than how it performs financially.
This means that report writers, like our CrossFire for example, need to be capable of presenting multiple POVs – mixing and matching them to help surface the links or disconnects between them. Obviously both balance sheet and income statement POVs are still a vital foundation for corporate performance management. But in the world of ESG reporting, the resource and lifecycle POVs are a vital foundation for evidencing corporate behaviour management and governance, and for presenting an impact-centric POV of what the company actually does rather than only what it earns or spends.
So to switch back to the screenwriting analogy – scene action and dialog represents the surface ‘performance’ of the scene but the ‘impact’ is what is meaningful, what it is really all about, what a movie audience relates to or is repelled by and what, in the end, individuals remember and tells their friends about.
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