Every year, the corporate world participates in the same ritual. Brands conjure-up their annual Impact Reports, and almost out of thin air, they arrive as impenetrable walls of text. They are filled with endless exposition, dense ESG jargon, and fancy charts designed to make underwhelming stats look disruptive.
But what if we completely flipped the format?
Brands should start releasing their Impact Reports as children’s books. They should be built with simple stats and clear illustrations instead of endless, prolix pages of corporate speak.
If that sounds strange at first, think about the logic behind it. Isn’t it only right to speak directly to the audience that will be most affected by the issues discussed? The generations coming next?
Right now, corporate reporting is aimed at faceless investors, regulatory bodies, passing web visitors and ephemeral sharing on social media. It is often optimized for PR spin and dopamine-inducing Likes. But if you shift the audience to a tiny person, it completely changes the dynamic. It could engender a bit more empathy, too.
When writing to someone that’ll be affected deeply by your actions, you’re compelled to think about them. It gets those web visitors, investors, and vanity metrics out of the mind. The truth has to ensue because it’s significantly harder to hide a mistake or a missed sustainability target when you have to explain it simply. You can’t camouflage a poor environmental record behind fifty seven pages of synergies and frameworks if your medium is a twelve-page picture book.
And, let’s be honest with ourselves: most adults would read the kiddies versions anyway.
Modern attention spans are a joke, broken beyond repair. Most executives would happily flip through the illustrated version half an hour before a meeting and pretend to have read the full, weighty tome and its lengthy pages full of jargon. Who could blame them? More importantly, would it make any difference? If the simplified version gets the actual point across, the jargon-filled original becomes obsolete anyway.
There is, of course, an obvious pushback. Wouldn’t this reading be a bit too heavy for small people? Talking about carbon emissions, water waste, and global supply chains isn’t very pleasant reading before heading off to the land of nod.
Well, let’s not forget that many of the industries very fond of releasing glowing Impact Reports rely heavily on child labour. That’s way harder. If a child is old enough to extract the raw materials or sew the garments in a punishing supply chain, they are certainly old enough to be part of the conversation about how those processes are managed.
So, yeah, Impact Reports. Release them as children’s books or at least release a version for young folk to read.
Because if the impact of a multinational company can’t be explained honestly to a little person, perhaps we’re making no positive impression at all. We should be building companies where we are genuinely proud to read these stories out loud and see satisfied glances from the people who’ll inherit the results.
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