what is the application of critical thinking to corporate social responsibility

Picking the right CSR program for your company is harder than it might seem, and requires some disquisitional thinking

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I recently participated in a conference on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), where I gave a short presentation on the role of disquisitional thinking in leading a visitor toward improve social operation. Basically, I argued that in social club to motivate employees to embrace some version of CSR—any you accept that to mean—you need to think critically about the way your CSR activities dovetail with the goals of your organization, and with the values and commitments that are already motivating your employees.

Interestingly, I received some button-back, in the course of a question from the audience, from someone who suggested that what CSR efforts really need is passion and a sense of purpose. What's really needed, this person said, is not critical thinking at all. Indeed, for purposes of pushing the CSR agenda forrard, critical thinking is actually a bad idea.

As someone who teaches critical thinking for a living, I was naturally somewhat taken aback.

This person had a bespeak, of course: getting something done—whether it's opening a new partition or launching a new product or strengthening your CSR profile—takes passion. It takes commitment. And sometimes disquisitional thinking, which involves request questions, could seem similar a stumbling cake. Now isn't always the right moment for asking abrasive questions and expressing doubt.

Simply I thought I would accept the time to lay out, here, the office that critical thinking can play—indeed, must play—in launching CSR activities and bringing them to fruition.

To brainstorm, what is critical thinking anyway? Near of usa accept a sense of what it is, and nearly people are more often than not in favour of it, in most contexts, only what is it? The textbook definition is that critical thinking is the systematic evaluation or formulation of beliefs or statements by rational standards. In other words, it'south about figuring out what to believe, and doing so by determining what beliefs are backed by good reasons. It means request questions like, "Is that really truthful?" "How practice I know that?" "How certain am I?" and "What assumptions am I making?"

Then, how in particular does this use to CSR?

First of all, a company needs to think critically in order to decide what its CSR objectives are. It doesn't brand sense for a company to dive into CSR past tackling any and every project that anyone has e'er associated with that concept.

So, think critically. Will you focus on minimizing (or off-setting) the environmental bear upon of your operations? Will you lot incentivize employees to volunteer for charities? Will you build a hospital in a remote village? Will philanthropy exist part of your CSR portfolio? Passion is important, only so is directing your passion. Setting objectives requires asking hard questions. Information technology requires, in brusque, critical thinking. (For a more detailed have on how to think critically almost your company's CSR agenda, run into Michael Porter and Mark Kramer'southward article, "Strategy and Social club: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility").

Second, a successful CSR program requires that a company think critically near methods. The need for businesses to call up critically about methods is quite literally why universities have business schools. Managing is not like shooting fish in a barrel. Regardless of the issue at hand, managing requires developing a strategy that makes expert use of the materials at hand in order to reach your objectives.

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Then once you've decided that, for example, that you desire i chunk of your CSR program to focus on literacy, then what? Exercise y'all leverage your highly-educated workforce by sending your employees out to volunteer at an adult literacy clinic? (And how practice you motivate them? Merely offer them the chance to practice information technology on company fourth dimension? Offering bonuses? What else?) Do you partner with other like-minded companies to raise awareness? Practise you build pro-literacy messages into your own product-oriented advertizement? Or do you merely donate money to the offset literacy-oriented charity you observe? Is there testify that that volition accept an bear upon? The most impact?

Finally—and this was the part I focused on in my presentation—think about engagement. It should go without saying that a successful CSR program requires the appointment of your employees. Later on all, a turn a profit-oriented company that of a sudden decides that it takes its social responsibilities seriously may well find itself facing a skeptical, or otherwise hesitant, workforce. If you lot say "we put community beginning," only employees secretly believe that the unwritten rule is "profit above all," they're going to find all sorts of ways, passive or active, to undermine your CSR activities.

And then you need to call back critically about what your own argument in favour of CSR is. If y'all can't limited why you believe in CSR (once again, whatsoever you take that to mean) and then yous're not going to exist able to convince others that they should believe in it. In other words, can you lot actually explain, in a credible style, what's motivating the company (or you, the dominate) to have CSR seriously? Is it that you recollect some version of CSR dovetails so well with the visitor'south mission? Or is information technology because you lot meet a win-win outcome that links the good of the community to the company's ain strategic needs (due east.k., the need to foster a salubrious workforce)? Explain the rationale, in order to convince employees that the motility is an accurate one.

A further element of disquisitional-thinking-for-engagement is to aid employees see that active support for your CSR program makes sense given what they already value and believe in, and that information technology'south OK for them to bring those values—their generosity, their sense of community, their passion for the environment—to work with them. In other words, give your employees a pro-CSR argument that is grounded in their own values and beliefs. Doing so requires thinking critically almost the various arguments in favour of social responsibility, agreement their structure, and deciding which ones both work logically and are rooted in starting points your employees can accept.

That, in curt, is the function that critical thinking must play in whatsoever company's try to take corporate social responsibility seriously. This obviously isn't anything remotely like a full and complete recipe for carrying out a CSR agenda. There are lots of people who can give yous better advice about that than I tin. But it's worth giving due credit to the function that disquisitional thinking needs to play. Because while a successful CSR programme does need passion, passion that is not guided past critical thinking might well show fruitless, or worse.

Socrates taught us that the unexamined life is not worth living. One tiny implication of that is that the unexamined CSR initiative is not worth initiating.

Chris MacDonald is founding manager of the Jim Pattison Ethical Leadership Program at the Ted Rogers School of Management, and founding co-editor of the Business concern Ethics Highlights. Follow him at @ethicsblogger.

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