Sustainable Business Model: Primal Accounting

The Primal business accounting system has the functionally accurate name of ‘‘Intrinsically Sustainability Implementation System’’ or ‘‘ISIS’’ for short, after the Egyptian Goddess of healing. This captures something of both the creative antiquity of accounting in the Primal episteme as well as Primal business goals.

However, because of the outline of the stakeholder information flows in the ISIS figure, it has been nick named ‘‘Cloverleaf.’’ A cloverleaf usually has a three-leaf pattern: if you find a  four-leaf pattern that is a rare find indeed and it is said to be very lucky.

ISIS, the four-leaf clover, has four kinds of information flow: Resource Flow, Resource Flow Impact, Stakeholder Participation and Ecological Resilience… see below.

Ref: ISD Book (2011), p. 294.

Resource Flow is an entity’s foundational information stream. It goes from left to right across the figure. It is the material and energy flows driven and caused by an enterprise and it proceeds from sources and suppliers, to process and products and then on to waste and customers’ flows. This information comes from Mass Balance or Material Flow Accounting (MFA).

Resource Flow Impact crosses the figure from bottom to top. It carries information about the impacts that the Resource Flow has on societies, the environment and ecosystems. This information has a cradle-to grave or Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach dealing with significant functions such as material sourcing and inward transportation, distribution, processes, customer-use and product final reuse or disposal.

Principal Stakeholder Participations outline the “Cloverleaf” in the figure. Less well defined, but no less important, stakeholders are represented in the area of the figure labelled “Human Community: Local, Global and Future.” This information is generated by stakeholder management activities.

Ecological Resilience is represented in the figure by the thick black line between the outer, containing ecosystem and the inner human community. Resilience is a measure of the capacity for systems to adapt and change. Information for this flow will typically be obtained from sources external to the entity such as the “Natural Value Initiative” (Fauna & Flora International and UNEP, 2010) or ecological footprint analysis (Footprint, 2012).

References

Fauna & Flora International, and UNEP. (2010). The Natural Value Initiative: Linking Shareholder and Natural Value. Cambridge: Fauna & Flora International. Available at <http://www.naturalvalueinitiative.
org/> [Accessed December 2010].

Footprint. (2012). Global Footprint. Global Footwork Network. <http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/>  [Accessed December 2012].

ISD Book. (2011). Intrinsic Sustainable Development: epistemes, science, business and sustainability. World Scientific Press: Singapore.