How to start creating impact?

Sustainability Exercise

Making the biggest impact with your business

Sustainability is a term often casually thrown about and its power is often underestimated. Embracing sustainability can improve your performance as it helps you adapt, build new partnerships, reduce risks, build reputation and grow within changing markets. But where do you begin? What does sustainability mean for your brand, people and products? Where can you make the biggest impact?

Time: 2 hours

Difficulty: medium

What you’ll learn: identify the areas where your business can make the biggest impact

Participants: 5 people from across the organization

Exercise: Impact Analysis

The Impact Analysis is an exercise in stakeholder engagement, designed to gather insights on the sustainability topics that matter most to your business and the world around you. If you’re beginning to embark on your positive impact journey, you will find a simple five-step exercise here, that can help you getting started on the right foot.

Step 1: identify your stakeholders

Compile a list of who might be impacted by your business (both negatively and positively). Then, prioritize and group them. Make sure you include your internal stakeholders too!

Step 2: Identify impact indicators

Identify per group how your business impacts them. You should look at impact indicators: from economic to environmental impact, health and safety, human rights and product responsibility.

Step 3: Conduct a survey

Rank the impact indicators you’ve identified by two criteria: 1) importance and 2) impact. You could value them on a scale from 1 to 10. 

Step 4: Ranking matrix

Now, you can plot the indicators on a two-axis matrix to determine their importance. The X-axis represents the significance of the impact indicator, and the Y-axis represents the influence your stakeholders have over the indicator.

Step 5: From focus to impact

Use the plotted indicators on the matrix as a tool to determine where your business can make the biggest impact. The impact that fall into the top right corner of the matrix should become your focus areas!

Gather enough participants within your organization and start – at least practising – with impact creation with our impact exercises! Let us know what went well or what challenges you are still facing.