5 Ways to Turn Double Materiality Into Better Business Decisions
published 6.3.26
We love a win, especially when it comes with:
“We’ve selected qb. as our partner for our double materiality assessment. Your strength in stakeholder engagement and ability to translate insights into a clear, actionable roadmap really stood out, along with your experience and approach driving adoption.”
Before the selection was made, the team asked all bidding firms a series of questions:
How will you ensure the materiality process leads us to an actionable roadmap that can be leveraged by leadership and across functions to bring business value?
How will you ensure the assessment prioritizes topics most relevant to our unique business?
How will we collaborate to maximize the value of the stakeholder engagement portion of the assessment?
At qb., we design rigorous and right-sized double materiality assessments (DMAs) and we especially enjoy doing this for companies that use the results to shape strategy, pressure-test priorities, align leadership and build stronger long-term positioning.
This article is adapted from the responses we shared before winning our latest DMA engagement
1. What Makes a Double Materiality Assessment Useful?
A good DMA should help a company answer questions like:
Where are our biggest operational and reputational risks?
What issues are becoming strategically important to customers, regulators or employees?
Where are we exposed in our value chain?
Which sustainability topics connect most directly to business performance?
What deserves investment, ownership and executive attention?
Where are we already doing meaningful work that isn’t being fully leveraged?
The best assessments create alignment across functions, from legal, finance, operations and procurement to HR, communications, sustainability and leadership. And importantly, they create shared language.
That’s one of the biggest reasons materiality work often fails. The findings are written in sustainability jargon rather than the language cross-functional leadership uses to make decisions. So from the start, we frame potentially material topics as:
Operational risks
Ethical responsibilities
Innovation opportunities
Market differentiators
Drivers of resilience and long-term value
2. How To Build A Materiality Assessment That Reflects The Business?
Every company evaluates risk, value and impact differently, so we tailor our materiality framework with internal decision-makers. There is no dropping companies into a prebuilt, rigid scoring system and calling it strategy.
Recent changes and simplifications to ESRS requirements only reinforce why that flexibility matters. Regulatory expectations, disclosure priorities and business conditions are evolving quickly. A materiality process designed too narrowly around a fixed framework can become outdated too soon or fail to reflect how leadership makes decisions.
That means we spend time building the criteria with clients from the beginning:
Defining financial materiality criteria together in alignment with existing enterprise risk management (ERM) structures
Aligning impact materiality criteria to the realities of the business model and value chain
Mapping topics to operational realities, strategic priorities and functional ownership
Designing around how leadership already evaluates tradeoffs, investment decisions and long-term risk
3. How To Turn Stakeholder Engagement Into Business Intelligence?
We believe stakeholder engagement is one of the most strategic parts of a DMA. Done well, it sharpens:
Risk identification
Commercial positioning
Organizational trust
Decision quality
To do that, we co-develop stakeholder maps with clients to identify internal and external perspectives most relevant to the business and industry based on:
Influence
Expertise
Proximity to impacts
Diversity of perspective
Existing relationships
Orientation toward the business and industry
Internally, interviews and surveys are tailored to the business functions most connected to operational realities, company culture, strategic priorities and emerging risks. Externally, stakeholder selection is informed by value chain mapping, industry dynamics and key strategic growth decisions.
And very relevant (especially right now), we push clients beyond leadership echo chambers.
One of the biggest risks in materiality work is over-indexing on executive perspectives while overlooking the people closest to the impact, friction points, implementation challenges or emerging reputational risks. Leadership perspectives matter deeply, but they are only one layer of organizational intelligence.
Part of our role is helping companies widen the aperture thoughtfully across both internal and external stakeholder groups. That often means encouraging participation from teams, functions and perspectives that may not traditionally be included in sustainability conversations but that materially shape how risks, impacts and opportunities are identified, experienced and evaluated.
This is what ultimately makes the findings usable later. Teams see themselves in the results because the process reflects their operational realities and decision-making environments from the beginning.
4. What Makes a Topic List Useful?
Generic topic lists are one of the fastest ways to dilute a materiality assessment. Our process starts with research. We review:
Company strategy
Existing reporting
Customer and market positioning
Industry dynamics
Parent company or owner commitments (when relevant)
Regulatory exposure
Stakeholder expectations
Competitive positioning
From there, we build an initial topic list specific to the company, industry and operating environment. Those topics anchor the assessment from the beginning, while topics irrelevant to the business simply don’t make the list.
5. How To Turn DMA Results Into Action?
One of the most important parts of a DMA happens after the scoring exercise: leadership alignment around what the findings actually mean for the business.
The prioritization workshop is where leadership debates topic relevance, risk, opportunity and business implications together. That discussion creates:
Alignment
Ownership
Shared context
Better decision-making afterward
Which is why we care so much about facilitation design. The quality of the conversation shapes the quality of the outcomes.
Our final deliverables translate the assessment into practical next steps for leadership, sustainability and cross-functional teams. Depending on the scope and needs of the organization, that may include:
Strategic recommendations
Organizational implications
Priority areas
Near-term actions
Longer-term roadmap considerations
Reporting and disclosure implications, including alignment with ESRS and other evolving regulatory expectations
Recommendations for governance, ownership and cross-functional implementation
Organizations are flooded with information….decks and pdfs. The harder work (the work we love doing with you!) is deciding what matters, what deserves action and how to move forward.
We’d Love To Work With You!
Whether you are looking for a partner to support you with your first double materiality assessment or revisit work completed a few years ago in light of ESRS simplification, evolving regulations or changing business conditions, we’d love to support your team.
Reach out to Britt (britt@consultqb.com) + Sam (sam@conslutqb.com), our Double Materiality Assessment practice leads, for more information.
by Sam Hartsock
Strategy Lead + Cofounder
by Britt Boza
Senior Consultant
