Last Friday we held the fourteenth meeting of the Corporate Sustainability Mastermind Group at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. The topic was sustainability strategy and I’ll post a summary later in the week, but as usual a couple of important tangential issues arose.

And the one that sticks in my mind was the need for a tough ‘critical friend’ to keep sustainability practitioners on their toes. Often senior sustainability directors are given a remarkable amount of autonomy, other senior managers rarely have sufficient technical knowledge challenge them, and they have to rely on their own ethics and drive to keep them honest and going in the right direction.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” as the Roman poet Juvenal put it (and yes, I had to google that…).

The Mastermind members concurred that, no matter how virtuous we think we are, we  should always have somebody to hold us to account. We need scrutiny and challenge to avoid complacency and drift.

An experienced and tough non-executive director is ideal. An external mentor is another alternative. But we need somebody.