Discover the degree to which sustainability is embedded in your strategy, what that means for your impact, risk, and long-term value, and how to embed sustainability into your core business strategy.
Most sustainability strategies fall short: some are reactive, some are pure PR, and many miss real business value.
The PI Strategy Framework helps you design a strategy that avoids pitfalls – one that reduces risks, drives growth, or strengthens your brand, depending on the ambition level that fits your organization.
Built on an analysis of hundreds of strategies, the Framework shows you:
Based on five business drivers and 40 guiding management questions, it gives you a fact-based, consistent framework that turns sustainability into actionable, profitable strategies.
What you get: a transparent read on current position, strategic options, and their business implications.
…provides a clear, objective way to evaluate and benchmark sustainability strategies across the industry
…supports strategic alignment, guiding organizations to set ambitions that match their business model, risk profile, value-creation goals, and desired impact levels
Our framework outlines five ambition levels that represent different strategic imperatives for integrating sustainability beyond legal requirements. In addition, we identify two additional variations – No Ambition and Only PR – which describe organizations that lack a credible sustainability strategy. These are not strategic approaches, and they often create significant reputational and operational risks.
As you move through the ambition levels, you’ll see a clear progression:
Note: On this page, “integration” includes the corresponding investment
(budget, staff, opex/capex) required to achieve it.
Our framework is built around three dimensions that reflect the full spectrum of strategic integration:
The framework maps a company to one of five Strategic Ambition Levels (from Legal/Stakeholder Compliance to Sustainability-Driven). This shows how deeply sustainability is embedded in strategy and whether it is likely to generate competitive advantage.
Measures the consistency and operational embedding of commitments. High ambition with low management quality = engagement focus or value-at-risk. Low ambition with high management quality = deliberate strategy choice.
The five ambition levels of the Strategy Framework are built on insights from 36 leading sustainability standards, and reflect the degree to which sustainability is embedded into the organization.
Our research on major German stock-listed firms reveals a spectrum of sustainability strategies, each with distinct financial implications:
> Applying an “Only PR” approach or remaining at Legal/Stakeholder Compliance often correlates with financial disadvantages (reactive posture)
> By contrast, Pragmatic and Strategic levels—implemented consistently—are more likely to yield advantages
Some B2C leaders at the Sustainability-Driven level have reported 15–40% annual revenue growth. See, e.g., Patagonia and Tony’s Chocolonely.
As ambition levels increase, so do investment requirements. The key question is: Which strategy best suits your organization or investments, and is your management aligned with this goal?
Determine which strategic ambition levels are realistic and relevant to your organization.
Evaluate the financial return and business impact of each sustainability ambition level.
Benchmark your strategy against industry peers and best practices.
Select the ambition level that best supports your organization’s mid- and long-term value creation.
Identify misalignments or missed opportunities (gaps & overshoots) across your current strategy.
Align sustainability efforts with broader business goals to drive consistency and effectiveness.
Enhance communication and reporting by moving beyond surface-level PR to meaningful sustainability action.
Intention: Create a comprehensive, Impacts, Risks & Opportunities-informed sustainability strategy
Challenge: Aligning sustainability goals with business objectives and stakeholder expectations
Solutions:
> Utilize our Strategy Stress test (under Both) to assess if your current management approach fits with your risk/opportunity profile
> Benchmark your sustainability strategy against industry peers and leaders
> Make an informed decision on the Ambition Level that is considered best for your organization
> Identify gaps in current management approaches to the chosen Ambition
> Prioritize areas for improvement in current management approaches and design/plan the implementation following the PI Strategy Framework and integration guide for the chosen Ambition Level
Organizations can benchmark their sustainability strategies against industry peers and leaders, and gain insights into their sustainability strategies . This analysis helps organizations to identify best practices for a chosen Ambition Level and decide upon their competitive positioning.
Intention: Effectively execute sustainability initiatives across the organization
Challenge: Translating high-level strategy into governance structures, processes, actionable plans, and measurable outcomes that are consistent with your chosen Ambition Level
Solutions:
> Implement governance structures and processes following the PI Strategy Framework and integration guide for the chosen Ambition Level
> Align your sustainability initiatives with core business objectives
> Implement our tracking tools to monitor progress both on sustainability strategy KPIs, such as Management Quality, and Impacts-Level in % and $ or €
Intention: Effectively communicate sustainability strategy, management, and Impacts to stakeholders
Challenge: Presenting sustainability strategy and impacts in a clear, compelling manner
Solutions:
> Effectively communicate your strategic positioning, your Impacts-Level and Desired Impacts-Level to stakeholders
> Create comprehensive, stakeholder-friendly sustainability reports with the insights from the Strategy Assessment and Impacts-Level Assessment
> Use our benchmarking tools to highlight your Impacts (performance) or even strategy relative to industry peers
> Utilize our Impacts Assessment to quantify and communicate the added societal value of your sustainability initiatives
Once you’ve assessed your sustainability strategy, the next step is to act on it.
We’ve developed a flexible, evidence-based process to help you move from insight to integration – tailored to your ambition level, your sector, and your current position. Not every step is needed for every organization, and the order can vary depending on where you are in your journey.
Our frameworks and tools identify areas for improvement and provide a clear roadmap for implementation. Our process facilitates this transition through:
> Clear Recommendations: Tailored recommendations based on assessment findings to advance strategic positioning
> Detailed Roadmap Development: Comprehensive plans addressing identified gaps and overshoots in sustainability strategy
> Management Buy-In: Workshops to secure buy-in for proposed strategies and define the highest feasible ambition level
> Implementation Support: Ongoing support to effectively integrate sustainability into core operations > Progress Monitoring: Regular assessments against defined targets & sustainability goals
By leveraging these tools and insights, organizations can move beyond compliance to truly integrate sustainability into their core strategy in a way that fits, driving long-term value creation and resilience in an ever-changing business landscape.
Our frameworks and tools have undergone extensive pilot-testing on a diverse sample of companies, including SMEs. This rigorous process aimed to:
> Evaluate sustainability management based solely on public information
> Validate the effectiveness of our assessment questions and answers
> Uncover new insights through our innovative approach
Our unique methodology separately assesses Strategy, Quality, and Sustainability Performance. This approach, pioneering in its field, has yielded groundbreaking results, which were published in our “Demystifying the links between sustainability/ESG and performance” paper series. Notably, these findings hold true across sectors, years, company sizes, and prior financial performance, as confirmed by back-testing from 2019 to 2022.
We uniquely balance societal impacts with business impacts (financial materiality) as those are interconnected. Impacts on society, where we take a clear societal perspective and avoid impact washing, and impacts on business (i.e., financial materiality), where we take a clear business perspective, are interconnected. Any guide for integrating sustainability into strategy, governance, and processes must have a business perspective in mind. This dual perspective is crucial for effectively integrating sustainability into strategy, governance, and processes.
the PI Strategy Framework:
> Provides a non-binary, nuanced view of strategy implementation (as strategy is not a tick-the-box-exercise)
> Bases recommendations on logic and facts, not PR or political preferences
> Aims for financial gains when applied correctly (to avoid financial losses when not applied correctly; scientifically proven on a sample of companies)
Materiality assessments form the backbone of any sustainability strategy and governance. We combine quantitative impact analysis with stakeholder and expert insights to determine both your organization’s impacts on society and the environment and the financial relevance of these impacts. This ensures a clear view of how sustainability topics shape your financial performance.
Our methodology includes:
This ensures that your materiality assessment is not just compliant (if relevant), but meaningful. It helps you prioritize actions, allocate resources, and communicate with confidence.
> Are you affected? If yes, how can you prevent doing the same mistake as NFRD-compliant firms that created losses by poor ESG management?
> We check your current sustainability/ESG strategy against the CSRD and the requirements of 30 other frameworks.
> Does your sustainability management make sense for your business strategy? We defined five different ways to comply with the CSRD and at the same time offer a strategic fit to different business imperatives
More on the CSRD Readiness check
