The Multicapital Scorecard: Rethinking Organizational Performance

For decades now, organizations have been struggling to find the best way to address their social and environmental responsibilities alongside their economic obligations. In other words, they want to know how best to effectively manage their operations based on a triple bottom line (3BL)—one that reflects social, environmental, and economic performance.

Recently, an international standard for integrated reporting has emerged that in principle emphasizes the importance of managing toward a triple bottom line. But it fails to provide specific guidance on how to do so. Organizations have been left to their own devices to respond. How should 3BL management actually be done?

In this book, sustainability and performance experts Martin Thomas and Mark McElroy introduce the world’s most advanced 3BL performance accounting methodology: The MultiCapital Scorecard. It is the first context-based integrated measurement, management, and reporting system. And, it can help corporations, public institutions, and other organizations answer the question they should be asking themselves for every aspect of their operations: “How much is enough for us to be sustainable?” The answers set internal performance standards against which operations and their impacts can be measured. Nothing less will do!

The MultiCapital Scorecard describes this open-source methodology, which consists of a structured, quantitative measurement and reporting system that complies with international standards for 3BL integrated measurement and reporting. Moreover, the MultiCapital Scorecard is designed to help organizations assess their own 3BL performance in their own contexts with context-based metrics of their own choosing. An eminently practical management aid for integrated thinking, it can be tailored to any organization’s needs.

The authors also describe how and why businesses are gradually shifting from managing impacts on only one type of capital (economic) to managing impacts on multiple types. They also provide detailed examples of worked reports, showing how organizations might develop and quantify the interim and long-term goals to meet their obligations to their employees, community, shareholders, and the environment. The examples also show how an organization can use the Multicapital Scorecard methodology to assess their progress in meeting those goals, and convey that progress to their stakeholders.

Martin Thomas came to sustainability thinking after completing his MSc in Consulting and Coaching for Change and chairing The Change Leaders (tCL). In his thirty-four years at Unilever, he headed Unilever’s global strategic planning activities and then had responsibility for several mergers, acquisitions, disposals and international ventures in various countries at different times. His work was international, mainly at subsidiary executive board level, conducted in four languages and living consecutively on four continents. Since 1999 he has been consulting as call4change and has taken on interim management assignments in various organizations.

Martin’s publications include chapters on “Scenarios in Venezuela,” in Business Planning for Turbulent Times (Earthscan, 2008), written by members of the Oxford Futures Forum, and on “Performance that Lasts” in New Eyes (The Change Leaders, 2013).

His focus on measuring organizational performance towards sustainable futures started in 2007 when he decided to complement the activities of tCL colleagues in New Angles by operationalizing triple-bottom-line concepts.

While presenting to The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research at St. Andrews, Martin linked up with The MultiCapital Scorecard coauthor Mark McElroy. Since 2011, they have been extending context-based sustainability principles and practices to include financials and measure progression towards full sustainability.

Mark McElroy is an accomplished innovator, consultant, author and educator in the theory and practice of corporate sustainability management. He is the founder and executive director of the Center for Sustainable Organizations in Vermont and is particularly well known for his development of Context-Based Sustainability (CBS), an approach to sustainability measurement, management, and reporting in which performance is seen as a function of what an organization’s impacts are or ought to be on vital capitals.

McElroy is also a long-time veteran of management consulting, having spent much of his career at Price Waterhouse, KPMG Peat Marwick – where as a partner he led a national practice – and IBM Consulting. More recently, he created and led Deloitte Consulting’s Center for Sustainability Performance in Boston, MA, a think-tank dedicated to the study of sustainability measurement, management, and reporting that he founded.

McElroy earned his Ph.D. in Economics and Business from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands in 2008, and currently teaches sustainability theory and practice in the MBA in Managing for Sustainabilityprogram at Marlboro College in Vermont. He is Board Chair Emeritus at the Donella Meadows Institute, also in Vermont, where he continues to serve on the Advisory Board.

With Martin Thomas, he is co-creator of the MultiCapital Scorecard. Their joint articles have appeared in Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, The World Financial Review, and the Harvard Business Review.