Designing for impact: three frameworks to embed sustainability in decision-making
Sustainability is no longer optional—it’s essential to long-term business relevance and resilience. As Paul Polman puts it, it’s the future of modern business. And yet, despite growing commitments, sustainability efforts often fall short. They're sidelined, fragmented, or reduced to surface-level gestures. Why? Because sustainability is rarely embedded in decision-making from the outset. As a result, even well-executed projects can miss the mark in delivering the value we urgently need. So, how can organizations design for real impact?
To me, for sustainability to drive true business relevance, it must be built into the way decisions are made and work is done. This requires two things: clarity of intention and structure. Clarity of intention aligns teams around the ultimate ambition, while structure provides the pathway to get there. Over the years, I’ve found that impact frameworks are a powerful tool to provide both.
In this article, I share three frameworks that have helped organizations and project teams stay focused on desired value creation and drive real, measurable impact. But first, let’s explore why anchoring work in value is key—and how frameworks help make it actionable.
Value: the cornerstone of impact
Value is the bedrock upon which all impactful work must be built. It is the compass that drives decisions, actions, and ultimately, success. Without clarity on what value means, even the best efforts risk becoming busywork. Today, organizations must not only be intentional about defining their desired value but also do so holistically—including economic, social, and environmental dimensions. That’s how sustainability becomes an operational imperative and the basis for delivering real impact. Once this clarity is achieved, the next step is aligning activities around it. This is where frameworks help.
Three frameworks for practice
The three impact frameworks I share come from different domains—development, business, and design—but they all help you do the same thing: clarify value and align action accordingly.
No1: Theory of Change
Originating in the international development sector, Theory of Change (ToC) is a framework used to define and visualize how an intervention (or strategy) leads to impact. It forces teams to articulate assumptions, define desired outcomes, and map the steps needed to achieve meaningful change. It’s structured around four key components:
Inputs: the resources and activities put into an initiative (or strategy).
Outputs: the immediate results generated from those activities.
Outcomes: the short and mid-term changes or benefits resulting from the outputs.
Impact: the long-term, sustainable change the initiative (or strategy) aims to create.
The Theory of Change from ShelterBox is a great example of this in action. While I have mostly seen it used in nonprofits, ToC is a powerful tool for anyone who wants to anchor their work into value. It helps clarify assumptions about what needs to happen for impact to be realized—and ensures efforts are strategically aligned from the start.
No2: OGSM
Widely adopted in the business world instead, OGSM provides a structured way to connect vision to strategy execution. The acronym stands for:
Objectives: the overarching ambition or what you want to achieve.
Goals: specific, measurable outcomes that define success.
Strategies: key choices or actions that will help achieve the goals.
Measures: indicators used to track progress and performance.
This sample OGSM from Procter & Gamble, which spearheaded OGSM amongst corporates during the 50-60s, gives a sense of how this framework can be used in practice. By linking ambition to action, OGSM helps teams focus, foster alignment, and deliver valuable work with clarity and accountability. Similar to Theory of Change, although originating from the business world, OGSM is universally applicable—across sectors, contexts, and value pursuits.
No3: Business Value
The third and final framework—the Business Value Framework—was presented by Slalom at the recent 2024 Service Design Global Conference. It provides a simple and actionable way for leaders and teams to connect the dots from vision to value. It works through three components:
Layers: eight sequential layers that link vision to value realization.
Questions: eight value-aligned prompts to guide decision-making.
Visual Map: an intuitive decision tree to visualize the full value story.
Together, these components build a logical model that aligns teams around a value ambition and the execution pathways that can support its realization. The example on page 5 of their white paper illustrates this well. Although it's the only one of the three frameworks I haven’t yet used in practice, I’m particularly drawn to how its visual map clearly highlights the experiments teams can run to validate their assumptions—encouraging a test-and-learn mindset within an organization’s culture. Like ToC and OGSM, this framework adapts well to any context.
Making design for impact a habit
As stated at the beginning of this piece, designing for impact starts with clarity of intention and structure. The three impact frameworks shared offer practical ways to anchor teams’ work in value and drive outcomes that matter—giving organizations the opportunity to systematically integrate sustainability into their core operations for long-term success.
Too often, teams focus on outputs instead of outcomes. But real progress comes when we prioritize value over activity and align efforts around what truly matters. Frameworks help make that possible—they turn good intentions into focused, effective action.
So here’s the invitation: choose one framework, define value for people, planet and profit, test it on a real project, and see how it shifts the conversation. I wholeheartedly believe that when sustainability is designed into the core of how we work and make decisions, it stops being performative—and becomes a source of strategic clarity, value, and lasting impact.
