Did you ever hear the story of ‘Stone Soup’? How a charismatic fellow walks into a village carrying nothing but an empty pot. Filling it with water, he drops in a large stone and starts to heat and stir the water, telling anyone who will listen that he is making the most delicious soup. He keeps tasting it and telling them it is nearly ready – it just needs a little garnish, perhaps a carrot, then a potato, then a ham bone – until, little by little the villagers bring together all the ingredients they need for a pot of soup to share.

Organisations are a bit like stone soup. They start off as nothing more than an idea, dropped into the bottom of a readymade pot of governance boundaries. What transforms water into dinner is the ability of the stirrer to gain the confidence of people – the stakeholders, in the jargon, and to get them to drop their contributions – of ideas, of investment, of endorsement, of hard work, and of custom into the bubbling stock.

OK, enough of Fairy Tales. I am thinking of a particular organisation here; AccountAbility.

It was a small organisation but one that has made a lot of soup over the years – setting standards for sustainability assurance, and for quality in stakeholder engagement, researching and championing the idea of national responsible competitiveness and investigating what works in the governance of multi-stakeholder partnerships.

Simon Zadek was the Soup-Stirrer-in-Chief, since he first dropped the stone into the pot in 1995. As the founding chair, and later CEO of the organisation he helped to drive forward the leading edge of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) agenda.

Many others have contributed to the soup. Amongst them Anita Roddick, David Wheeler, Ed Mayo, Maria Sillanpaa, Chris Tuppen, John Elkington, John Pearce, Alan Parker,  Simone de Colle, Gavin Anderson, Edwin Richken, Jane Nelson, Harry Hummels, Lise Kingo, Paul Monaghan, Mark Lee, Richard Evans, Peter Pruzan, Coro Strandberg, Claudia Gonella, Katherine Howard, Peter Raynard (Reader, I married him..), Robert McGregor, Mike Pierce , Jeanette Oleschlagel, Vicky McAllister, John Sabapathy, Claire Nacamuli, Els Reynaert, Mira Merme, Mirav Joseph, Nicole Dando,  Jonathon Cohen, Aneen Blackmore, Claudette John, Guy Morgan, Sasha Radovich, Alan Knight, Alex Macgillivray, Thomas Krick, Phillip Monaghan, Kelly Yu, Yi Shi, Fernanda Polacow, Geoff Lane, Kumi Naidoo, Aris Vrettos, Tania Gobena, Joe Sellwood, Miriam Neale, David Bonbright, Jenifer Iansen Rogers, Maggie Burns, Rob Cameron, David Simpson, Vernon Jennings, Ingrid Srinath, Isabel Hilton, Adrian Henriques,  Mairead Cahill, Margaret Flaherty, Paul Kapelus, Danielle Cohen, Erika Collinson, Giulia Cosilich, James Farrar, Sam Huddle, Maneto, Anita Househam, Alejandro Litofsky, Tim Kitchin, Jeremy Nichols, Daniela Nordmeyer, Fabian Pattberg, , Hannah Thornem, Anna Tyrell, Elena Zayakova, Ricardo Melendez, Joshua Wickerham and Nina Inahmahoro. (Plus many more I’ve failed to mention).

Like me they contributed to AccountAbility’s work because they thought it was on to something, in the business of change.

Some pretty serious institutions also invested their trust and confidence in AccountAbility, from the big auditors to China’s Development Research Center, from Oxfam to Nike and from the World Bank to CIVICUS. Anwar Ibrahim, Al Gore, Nick Stern and Pacal Lamy recognised and contributed to AccountAbility’s work.
Whatever success and influence AccountAbility had, depended on its ability to support and catalyze action amongst a web of stakeholders. This recognition was built into its governance structure through a multi-stakeholder Board, which later developed into a Governing Council and a separate Standards Board, and through the annual publication of AccountAbility Accounts.

This week, AccountAbility’s Standards Board resigned. Their letter cited loss of trust, lack of responsiveness and concerns about the governance, credibility and independence of the AA1000 Standards (you can read their letter here). Their resignation follows on from a year of departures, starting with Simon Zadek’s ousting, followed by the departure of all of the Governing Council members and most of the international Country Representatives. Some of the staff, and long-term collaborators with the organisation (myself included) quit, most of the others were moved on.

What is left is an organisation with second hand set of tools and reputational capital, built up by Simon, by all the people I’ve name checked, and by many others. But this is the same organisation in name only. They may have the pot and the stone, but they aren’t making any soup.

I’m not usually one for big gestures, and as a consultant I didn’t write a public letter of resignation. This I regret, not because I think my leaving was so important in the grand scheme of things, but because it became part of a pattern in which people left quietly and without a trace. This allowed others to be fooled, or perhaps to fool themselves, that this was still the same organisation, that it was still motivated by the public good, and that they could be a part of it in good conscience.

So this belatedly, is my letter of resignation as a stakeholder of AccountAbility. If anyone else feels proud of what they contributed through working with AccountAbility, and ashamed of where the organisation is heading please feel free to write your own.