Accountability. Free downloads available at www.accountability.org.uk
There’s no doubt that the new AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard is
a Good Thing. It will be helpful to have something that gives us
‘coherent and practical guidance for designing, implementing and
assuring the quality of stakeholder engagement’. But I worry that being
a Good Thing may be the limit of its impact. The problem is that it’s
so rigorous and comprehensive it might be virtually unusable in the
real world. What I can’t decide is – does this matter or not?
Of course a ‘standard’ must be all those things – completeness, to use
a favourite AccountAbility word, is important. But can completeness get
in the way of such a standard being understood and adopted – and
undermine the impact of the whole exercise? In this instance, I think
it has.
Getting the right balance between the need for systematic theory and
the requirements for its practical application is an issue that has
dogged the original AA1000 since it was introduced. Similarly, the
AA1000SES (don’t even start me on the name thing!) seems to have the
theory in spades, but fails the practicality test – ‘over-complicated’
and ‘over-engineered’ are terms I have already heard from those who
have tried to get to grips with it. A quick read of the exposure draft
of the standard and the associated handbook again illustrates the
difficulty of finding that balance. They are both, in most parts, well
written, considered and thorough, but the totality is a dog’s breakfast.
If I were to give advice, it would be to strip out the ancillary
concepts (sections on materiality and how long a particular issue has
been around, for example), use more of the excellent tools in the
handbook to illustrate ‘what makes good stakeholder engagement’, and
communicate the central process more effectively – using clearer
language, more workable models and better diagrams.
I fear that if this doesn’t happen, it will remain a Good Thing but not the important and practical tool it could be.
Hilary Sutcliffe
