Our Theory of Change

The Certified TBL program is based on the Dashboard Theory of Sustainability, according to which there cannot be sustainability in the conduct of human affairs without knowledge of the effects of human activity.  Before people can be expected to function in sustainable ways, that is, they must first have access to information that tells them what the effects of their activities already happen to be.

This may seem obvious, but it is still demonstrably the case that most organizations systematically deprive themselves of precisely this kind of information.  Thus, if sustainability in commerce is what we really want, this has to change – mainstream accounting methods must be reformed accordingly, if only on a voluntary basis by individual organizations.

With such reforms in mind, the Certified TBL program has been conceived in solidarity with multicapitalism, a new economic doctrine that interprets the performance of organizations and whole economies in terms of their impacts on vital capitals, or resources, that people rely on for their well-being.  The sustainability of human activities, that is, must be assessed in terms of what their effects on the sufficiency of all vital capitals are, and not just one of them (economic).

In order to make such assessments, methodologies rooted in Context-Based Sustainability (CBS) are needed, the use of which can make it possible to define organization-specific standards of performance and to measure, manage and report performance against them.  The MultiCapital Scorecard method so prominently featured in the Certified TBL program was designed with precisely that requirement in mind.