Day 4 Matereality Marathon

Sausage making: diagrams, themes, and an urge to talk to cows

B. Lorraine Smith
5 min readNov 11, 2022
A rudimentary diagram informing the Danone assessment. Video recap is here or read all about it below.

Hello again! Here’s a look at Day #4 of the Matereality Marathon (launched here), exploring global food company Danone through the lens of Matereality.

In today’s recap I take us into the kitchen where the sausages are made — decisions around what goes where to make the information useful. We also take a quick tour through non-human stakeholder engagement, in which I notice Danone’s leadership seriously needs to talk to cows.

Here’s the video version of what is written below — probably easier to watch than read as a lot of this is explaining what’s on the screen.

The deck is only good if it’s useful

One of the things that happens with mainstream materiality, or frankly any consulting where the deck is “the deliverable,” is there’s this expectation of a big, “Ta-da!”

But they’re just slides. And they need to be truly useful.

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B. Lorraine Smith

Former sustainability consultant replacing ESG with reality-based insights about corporate purpose and impact. https://www.blorrainesmith.com/