The missing link between pledges and metrics

AT A breakfast session in Davos, the impassioned president of a major bank (and signatory of the Business Roundtable) approached his newly appointed head of Sustainable Finance to say that they must set three specific sustainability-related targets to each of the bank's business lines. I suggested that the first iteration might be to ask each of the business lines how they wish to contribute to the bank's high-level pledges and then co-design those tangible targets?

On the eve of the World Economic Forum's (WEF) 50th Annual Meeting in Davos, I wrote about the need for well-intentioned corporations seeking to lead a new era of stakeholder capitalism, to convincingly separate themselves from the also-rans.

By the end of the forum which was held in Switzerland from Jan 21 to 24, I was pleased to see businesses race against each other to forcefully signal their sustainability credentials. We have seen companies make pledge after pledge, most prominently around net zero emissions, and various attempts to translate those pledges into metrics. However, in the space between pledges and metrics, one critical component may still be missing: the narrative within companies.