Social License (SLO)

When we see the acronym “SLO,” maybe we think of San Luis Obispo, that lovely spot near the California coast where Hearst Castle lives. Rosebud.

But “SLO” can also stand for Social License to Operate, or, if we’re being casual about it, just plain old social license. In a nutshell, “social license” basically means that society in general (and certain groups of society in specific) approves of what is going on within a company and is going to allow it to continue. The company has a “social license” to continue its operations as per usual. No one’s staging huge protests outside their HQ, no one’s filing class action lawsuits to get them shut down, no one’s lambasting them on cable news for all the horrible things they’ve done.

There’s no clear or mathematical way to determine whether an organization has social license, because there are no permits, applications, indexes, formulas, or anything else that can tell us “yes, we have it” or “no, we do not have it.” It’s more of an intangible thing that we can sorta kinda get to by answering questions like these:

Does the organization have a good reputation in the community?

Does the organization do good things for the community?

Do the employees working there like it?

Do they get treated well?

Is this organization diverse/environmentally responsible/fair/honest/scrupulous?

And how about the board of directors and company leadership...are they diverse/environmentally responsible/fair/scrupulous?

The more of those questions we answer in the affirmative, the more likely that organization is to have social license.