Incite’s VIROS blends five lines of analysis to help practitioners and teams make sense of their organisation’s intersect with society and nature.  It is basic, simple and high-level; it should be adapted to use whatever analysis already exists for your organisation. It has a strategic orientation, by which I mean it is concerned with how an organisation might seek to allocate its effort or attention. We’ve tested it over a decade and we don’t facilitate many processes without running through VIROS first.

Used in reporting processes, it provides insight into the material issues that are likely to inform your stakeholders’ decision-making (i.e. it is a materiality analysis). In strategy processes, it provides a foundation for more granular work needed to inform better sustainability thinking and action. VIROS  analysis typically informs a facilitated process that draws on the collective intelligence of every participant in the room.

Here’s a simple user’s guide:

Value creation

Create an explicit diagram of your organisation’s business model. This is how you create value. If you don’t understand something about that, you have little insight into how to work with impact. Incite’s business model canvas is based on Clayton Christensen’s classic thinking. Use whatever model works for you but avoid the IIRC’s octopus business model which is designed to tie you in knots.

Impacts and dependencies

Think at the value chain level i.e. upstream, midstream, downstream. Use the six capitals (FYI originally five capitals developed by Jonathon Porritt in his 2005 book Capitalism: As If the World Matters) to sketch out:

• Dependencies: Elements drawn from various capital stocks/flows that are needed/relied on for value protection / creation. For example, your company needs access to skills in order to operate. Those skills may be abundant, under threat or in short supply, in which case they may represent a risk.
• Impacts: What happens to capital stocks/flows as a result of what your company or others (including nature) do. For example, skills development might impact a broader whole such as the sector. By targeting your skills development, you might increase your access to skills needed to address the risk.

The important part is getting into an informed discussion on which of them might be considered more important. That requires understanding of both your organisation and society. No one really knows how to do that but many people will sell you a method. The basic approach here: consultants will never enough to tell you. Find a way to tap the experience and expertise that lies within your teams. Leave your impacts and dependency analysis at a messy level; it will never be perfect.

Risks

If you are a large corporate, the risk team has already identified the top risks. Approach that analysis from the perspective of sustainability i.e. considering the organisation’s alignment with society and nature. Sustainability-related risks are often hidden between the lines of the top risks; sometimes the top risks have forgotten to consider this aspect (although since the investors pushed sustainability into the mainstream, this is happening less often).

Opportunities

Here, we typically apply a bespoke line of analysis called Profit-Enabled Impact. This provides insight into areas where your organisation has greater potential for scaling positive impact on society and nature, based on emerging patterns.

Stakeholder perspectives

This is an important element if you are using VIROS to inform your disclosure. It is advisable to avoid firing up Survey Monkey and sending it to all the stakeholders on your database. This is likely to be ineffective for many reasons, not least survey fatigue. To deep dive here, we are open to the distributed ethnography approach of The Cynefin Co called SenseMaker®. If your appetite for stakeholder engagement is limited, we zoom in on the disclosure expectations of the investment community. This is because they are the key target audience for your report.

VILROS may seem a bit overwhelming at first. But with some preparation, you can cover the basics – enjoyably – in a single conversation with an executive team in about two hours. As with most methods, results and enjoyment improve with practice.

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Banner picture (cropped from a photo by John Mark Arnold on Unsplash) refers to being clear about our level of granularity, because it matters.