Most DMAs are done just for compliance. There is a better way.
Since the era of GRI and CSRD, the Double Materiality Assessment has become one of the foundational exercises of corporate sustainability reporting. For most companies, it’s treated as exactly that: a reporting exercise, boxed in as a compliance task, then left aside, sitting idle for months. Given how much time and resources go into a DMA, it’s striking how little practical use companies get out of the results afterward.
This is how we’d fix thatDouble Materiality × Systems Thinking
Looking at the DMA and the organization through a systems thinking lens.
This approach is for you if…
You’ve already run a DMA which you need to update, and you’re sitting on a list of impacts, risks and opportunities that hasn’t been touched in months, with no clear way to pick it back up.
You’re about to start your first DMA and feel overwhelmed, unsure of the first step or the right direction.
You want to map your organization as a system to see your IROs connected visually, helping you understand what decisions need to be made to trigger systematic change.
You see the value in understanding how deeply your company interacts with and depends on external systems, and want to build risk awareness and business resilience from that.
Two ideas that look separate.
We started by exploring two topics that, on the surface, had nothing to do with each other: Double Materiality and Systems Thinking. One is a regulatory exercise most companies approach as an obligation, while the other is a way of understanding how complex things behave. The more we worked through the two together, the clearer it became that looking at a DMA as a systems thinking tool can bring real value to an organization, whether or not it has any reporting obligations.
Figure out the list of IROs per topic and subtopic.
We’d argue that’s like asking someone to put together a puzzle without giving them any physical pieces.
Look at the DMA through a systems thinking lens to understand what is driving your IROs, making it easier to identify what needs to change.
IROs are a derivative of how the system functions, not freestanding items you identify and then try to link together afterward.
Four friction points companies struggle with most
There’s no shared definition of materiality across frameworks
If there’s one thing our research made clear, it’s that “materiality” doesn’t mean one thing. It means whatever the framework you’re reading decided it should mean.
There’s no standard procedure for running a DMA
There’s a pretty unanimous agreement across the research: no one has settled on a standard procedure for completing a DMA.
Impact materiality is harder to engage with than financial materiality
Ask people to identify a company’s impact on society and the environment, and the conversation almost always drifts back to risks and opportunities for the business itself.
Data collection starts without knowing what’s worth collecting
Not all data is relevant, reliable, or able to reveal a pattern worth tracking over time, and most teams find that out after they’ve already started gathering it.
What changes when you apply a systems thinking lens to the DMA?
Once you understand the elements, connections, and feedback loops behind your sustainability system, the value shows up in how the DMA gets used, not just in how it gets built.
You know where to focus
A hundred IROs mapped correctly tend to cluster into a handful of real drivers. Find and act on the driver, and you address everything downstream of it at once, instead of working through a hundred rows one at a time.
The DMA gets used between reporting cycles
A systems-driven DMA produces a map of where your risks and opportunities actually regenerate from, and who holds the levers that could change that pattern.
Colleagues become allies, not obstacles
When people across the business see their own work reflected in the DMA rather than replaced by it, the process gains legitimacy from the inside out.
Resources go where they matter most
Once you understand the connections and feedback loops in your organization, you can identify where to prioritize resources and investment, improving both sustainability practices and long-term profitability.
Let’s run your next DMA this way.
This paper lays out the foundation of the thinking. Putting it into practice, mapping your organization as a system, deriving your IROs from it, building the feedback loops into how you actually use the results, is the work we do with clients directly. Whether you’re running your first DMA or revisiting one that produced an excel nobody’s touched since, we’ll help you build it this way from the start.
Prefer email? esg@julianitz.com