This section covers the current context of your business. Most of it will be pre-populated through the setup process.
Mission
Mission and vision statements set the direction for an organization. This is a key starting point for uncovering the long-term impacts you most want to achieve and building out your Pathways.
Building Your Company's Vision
Mission 101: Creating a Mission Statement That Inspires
Pathway
This is a summary statement that describes your pathway to achieving your mission. The dedicated PATHWAYS section provides additional resources for developing your overarching thesis.
Contributing Catalysts
These are the external forces, trends, and changes that are catalytic to the change you are trying to achieve. They can include technological, social, economic, environmental, or political changes emerging and underway. These help you pay attention to external, systemic dynamics that could introduce risk and unlock opportunities. They are important to consider in your PATHWAYS.
Catalytic Contributions
These are the key drivers of the knock-on effects that might arise from the change you are introducing. They could include new capabilities, behaviours, beliefs, value chains that could influence risks and opportunities in the ecosystem around you. These also help you pay attention to the systemic impacts you may be creating. They are important to consider in your PATHWAYS.
Places
Where we operate and where our customers are can influence the kinds of outcomes that a company and its products and services can and do have. Maintaining an inventory of those locations helps to provide a reminder that we should pay attention to it.
Products and Services
This is a primary source of the impact a company can have on the world. In order to get a fuller picture however of how those products and services impact and are impacted by the world around you, we flesh out a little more context. These additional components will be particularly useful as you build out your PATHWAYS and Use Cases, and monitor and analyze IMPLICATIONS.
Description: Simple description of what your product does today. Helps to clarify what you product actually does. Contrasts with Use Cases and helps to separate the idea of 'outputs' from 'outcomes' in your PATHWAYS.
Types: The types of solutions your create help to call out and categorized the range of different products and services your company offers.
Use Cases: Use cases help explore ways in which the solution is and could be used. This is helpful for considering how outcomes and impact might differ between use cases, which in turn can shape product development pathways. This is interesting to explore in relation to the PATHWAYS and IMPLICATIONS.
Enabling Technologies: Uncovers the underlying technologies that make your solution possible. This helps to consider any potential impacts that may be introduced through those technologies. (e.g. using a 3rd party algorithm can influence your outcomes based on intentional or unintentional biases it carries).
Business Models: This section draws out the business model patterns in use in the company. These patterns can have significant influence on the impacts a company has. Their impacts can also change over time (e.g. advertising based business models helped many new service we depend on today come to market without having to charge users directly. Over time however, these same business models have led to addictive behaviours and misinformation wars that have had a negative consequence for democracy).
References for exploring business models and business model patterns further: