The Impact toolkit: From Intentions to Impact
As a kick-start for the autumn, Falay Transition Design is publishing open-source transition design resources for everyone already working or willing to work for a more sustainable future. Here we explain some of the main incentives and learning targets for exploring our Impact toolkit. We wish you an inspiring sustainability journey!
Impact past the Triple bottom line
Impact – as a differentiation to effect – is a cause-effect sequence leading to larger and more significant effects. To understand our sustainability impact as a whole, it should be viewed from the perspective of multiple realms of the system. Oftentimes, we might lack the time, resources, or perspectives to do that, or our intention to do good prevents us from seeing the actual outcomes of our work.
The ‘triple bottom line,’ often used in the business context to explore sustainability and justify an impact-driven business case, lacks a variety of perspectives and causality. A more refined idea of sustainability impact is based on the strong sustainability model, where the functions of society and economy are nested within the well-being of the ecosystem.
Thus, our Impact tools are designed to encourage taking a look into various sustainability and systems perspectives, such as global-local systems, generational perspective, life cycle assessment, mental models leverage, multispecies sustainability, and knowledge systems.
Strong Sustainability model (Giddings, 2002) and Multispecies sustainability (Rupprecht, 2020).
The Impact toolkit is for individuals, communities, and organizations to explore their sustainability impact and to maximize their positive handprint while minimizing the negative one. The impact tools offer support for sustainable innovation via multiple perspectives on the systemic nature of our actions and encourage to take an honest look into the possible negative consequences of our efforts. The tools are built for enabling collaboration within a group or a project team but can be used as an individual as well.
Overview of the Impact tools
The tools build impact knowledge in three steps:
Impact chain: Defining the project objectives and understanding what steps lead to creating impact.
Systemic impact mapping: Taking different perspectives into the system and the quality of our possible or realized impact.
Impact gaps: Finding concrete actions to create more positive impact and to minimize the negative impacts.
Start a conversation with us!
The Impact tools are partly based on the work of:
Value mapping: Bocken et al. (2013). A value mapping tool for sustainable business modeling. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/CG-06-2013-0078
Sustainable development impact assessment: Gothenburg Centre for Sustainable Development.
The IOOI method: Bertelsmann Stiftung. 2010. Corporate Citizenship planen und messen mit der iooi-Methode. https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/de/publikationen/publikation/did/corporate-citizenship-planen-und-messen-mit-der-iooi-methode
Sustainable business value mapping: Nancy Bocken, P. Rana & Samuel William Short
Strong sustainability: Giddings, B.; Hopwood, B.; Brien, G.O. Environment, economy and society: Fitting them together into sustainable development. Sustain. Dev. 2002,196, 187–196.
Multispecies sustainability: Rupprecht, C., Vervoort, J., Berthelsen, C., Mangnus, A., Osborne, N., Thompson, K., Kawai, A. (2020). Multispecies sustainability. Global Sustainability, 3, E34. doi:10.1017/sus.2020.28
Leverage points: Meadows, D. (1999). Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Hartland: The Sustainability Institute.
