ESG&T

Yesterday I attended a day-long summit hosted by the Executive’s Club in Chicago on CSR & ESG, and something was said on stage that has been rattling around in my brain.

Ingrid Woolfolk from WTW, who leads ESG and employee experience (a fascinating combo), said that she thinks technology should be added as a separate letter at the end of ESG — i.e. ESGT, or ESG&T, depending on your love of ampersands.

My initial reaction to this was skepticism. We argue so much about the terms of the debates around things like this (see D&I, DEI, JEDI, DEBI, etc.) that it often ends up distracting from actually doing the work. Plus, there are some teams already thinking about the impacts of technology on the existing pillars of ESG. A practice leader at KPMG, for example, recently walked me through their workstreams underneath the “S”, and they included “digital equity.” Very forward thinking of KPMG.

But as I sat with this idea, I warmed up to it. There are some distinct issues about the technologies companies choose to build or buy. Does the ethics around the adoption of artificial intelligence, for example, belong neatly within an existing ESG pillar? How about whether a company decides to work with or advertise on a platform that creates social or ethical risk due to the association?

There could be some benefit to thinking about the opportunities and risks of technology as a category separately from the rest of ESG. And if not within an ESG initiative, operationalizing the consideration of the ethical risks around technology needs to live somewhere. I’d argue that social media run rampant without any guardrails is a risk to society, and to business, in a way similar to climate change.