Post Matereality Marathon Recap: Who won?

A brief regroup on what’s where and what now

B. Lorraine Smith
5 min readNov 15, 2022

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I call slide #13 “the other money slide” as themes emerge from a life-like view of the business — as opposed to the more typical “summary” slide #6 which is the other kind of “money slide” (different currencies…).

Alright folks, it’s a wrap. Here’s the tail end of the Matereality Marathon (launched here), exploring global food company Danone through the lens of Matereality.

I confess it’s a bit peculiar “publishing” something that one has built in public. It’s not like I submitted it anywhere. It’s just more there I guess?

Late last night I dropped the video version of the letter to Danone’s executive committee into slide two of the deck, moved the marathon progress tracking slide to the Appendix, and called it job done.

I’ve made a few tweaks since — such as adding the navigational video in which I hand over the keys to the slide-deck car so anyone who wants to can drive it around. But I consider it pretty much done, unless someone highlights an error or something that needs to be changed (and by all means do highlight if you see anything).

Art is unpredicatably hard but worth it

Now, although I’m very tired* (it was really a 7-day marathon… glork!) I’m also bursting with ideas about what’s next. For now I’ll capture a few things that feel noteworthy and let the rest of the ideas marinate.

  • The process of creating the assessment this way was much more than “editing slides”. It felt like I was making art. Not pretty art, mind you, and not necessarily great art either (although I did tidy up** that scruffy diagram—it was bugging me — that was a fun Saturday night…). I mean art in the sense of interpreting the world around me and creating something to reflect it back out.
  • With so much hunching and crunching over my laptop I had flashbacks to the days when I was a (sort of) more conventional consultant, churning out slide decks all the time. I realized I had been a bit cavalier the other day — “I’ll just bang this little sucker out in a few days…” — when actually there is a reason regular materiality is conducted by teams, with…

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B. Lorraine Smith

Recovering ESG "expert"; yarn spinner; distance runner; magical realist. Sensing a path to an economy serving life. also at https://blorrainesmith.substack.com/

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