Established model

The triple bottom line

John Elkington · 1994

Also known as People, planet, profit, TBL

Account for a company’s social and environmental results as seriously as its financial ones.

Its place in the frameworkVision Core›Responsibility

What it does

The phrase asks that performance be judged on three lines rather than one. Elkington’s own later reflection is the most useful part: he argued that it had been reduced to an accounting exercise for balancing trade-offs, when it was meant to provoke a deeper rethink of what business is for.

Reach for it when: When responsibility is reported as a set of good deeds unconnected to how the business actually operates.
Where it stops: There is no common unit across the three lines, so they cannot be netted against one another, and the framework invites reporting without change. Its originator has said as much.

John Elkington, “Towards the Sustainable Corporation”, California Management Review, 1994; Cannibals with Forks, Capstone, 1997; “25 Years Ago I Coined the Phrase ‘Triple Bottom Line.’ Here’s Why It’s Time to Rethink It”, Harvard Business Review, 2018.

Why it sits at Responsibility

The organisation’s effect on people, society and the environment, and what it is prepared to commit to about that effect — stated plainly enough for someone outside to check.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

Impact and materialityEuropean Commission, Guidelines on non-financial reporting: supplement on reporting climate-related information (2019), which set out double materiality; EFRAG, ESRS 1 General Requirements (2023); UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011) on severity as scale, scope and irremediability.
Commitments and targetsWRI & WBCSD, The GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard (revised edition, 2004) on base years and recalculation; Science Based Targets initiative, Corporate Net-Zero Standard (2021).
EthicsLynn Sharp Paine, “Managing for Organizational Integrity”, Harvard Business Review (1994), on integrity-based as distinct from compliance-based programmes; Rushworth Kidder, How Good People Make Tough Choices (1995), on right-versus-right dilemmas.
DisclosureGRI, GRI Standards (2016 onward); ISSB, IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 (2023); Lyon & Maxwell, “Greenwash: Corporate Environmental Disclosure under Threat of Audit”, Journal of Economics & Management Strategy (2011).

All of Responsibility

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Responsibility lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

PurposeStakeholder rationale in Purpose names whom the organisation exists to serve, and core values hold what it has declared it will not trade. This object covers everyone its activity affects and turns those values into conduct standards.
ComplianceCompliance holds the legal minimum and the controls around it, including any legal duty to report on sustainability. Ethics here starts where the law stops asking.
GovernanceThe board’s oversight and the enterprise risk register sit in Governance. Climate and other sustainability risks found by the materiality assessment are registered there, not here.
Supply ChainSourcing owns how suppliers are chosen and managed. The conduct expected of them is set in Ethics, and their impacts are assessed within the value-chain boundary here.
StakeholdersStakeholder reporting covers what each group is told in general. Disclosure here is limited to the sustainability statement and the claims made within it.
FinanceFinancial reporting owns the statutory accounts. The sustainability statement sits beside them and has to reconcile with them where the two touch the same numbers.
Brand CoreEnvironmental and social claims in marketing draw on the claim substantiation file here; the brand narrative carries them, it does not originate them.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at Responsibility too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

Doughnut economicsA good economy stays above a social foundation of basic needs and below an ecological ceiling set by the planet.
Theory of changeSpell out, step by step, why the things you do should lead to the change you want to see.
Double materialityA sustainability matter is material if it affects the company’s finances, or if the company significantly affects people and the environment — either is enough.
Right-versus-right dilemmasThe hardest ethical choices are not between right and wrong but between two things that are both right.
The GRI StandardsA widely used common structure for reporting an organisation’s impacts on the economy, the environment and people.
Science-based targetsSet emissions targets by what climate science says is needed, not by what seems achievable from where the company stands.

Elsewhere in Vision Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

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