Training for “Sustainable Development Performance Indicators”

They didn’t ask me to do this – but it looks worthwhile so I’m plugging this training program described below (based on this note from Mark McElroy):

As many of my colleagues know, I have for the past four years been serving as a special advisor to the United Nations on the design of their Sustainable Development Performance Indicators (SDPI). Later this month on 1/25-1/26, I will be joining Bill Baue and Ralph Thurm of r3.0, who also worked on the SDPI project, to conduct a training program on the indicators we and others co-developed.  Importantly, most of our focus will be on the more authentic, context-based indicators in the SDPI portfolio and how they work.

Indeed, while the SDPI report published by the UN on November 1 presents some 61 specific indicators, only 16 are fully context-based, meaning that only 16 make it possible to measure and report sustainability performance in authentic terms.  Still, the 16 context-based SDPI indicators cut across the triple bottom line in all of its dimensions, while also assessing performance in a bottom-line category the UN refers to as ‘Institutional’.

In addition to introducing and explaining the SDPI indicators with an emphasis on its context-based elements, we will be addressing two other issues left largely untouched by the UN in its report: Materiality and Integrated Reporting. To do that, I will be presenting the content of a paper separately written by myself and published by the UN during the course of our work, entitled ‘Making Materiality Determinations: A Context-Based Approach’, and will also be presenting an implementation of context-based integrated reporting in the form of a ‘Context-Based Integrated SDPI Scorecard’.