Dear Henk — thanks for your feedback! I appreciate your input, and I’ll endeavor to piggyback on Ralph’s responses, with the hope you’ll shift from your opinion that the Strategy Continuum may be “somewhat flawed.”

To answer your first line of questioning, the Strategy Continuum actually addresses all three approaches you propose. It is primarily focused on assessing strategy (see figure 2 — and more on that shortly), but it can also be used to plot performance around the sustainability of impacts (Figure 3), and also can be used to plot maturation pathways (Figures 5 and 6). So it is a flexible tool that can be applied to all 3 of the uses you suggest.

In terms of the single line for the new economy, we acknowledge that this is intended to be more metaphorical than precisely accurate. We intend it to mirror the context-based sustainability line on the horizontal axis, and to suggest that a new economy emerges somewhere along the vertical axis, but we don’t mean to suggest that it necessarily falls in the middle of the meso level.

Finally, on your suggestion that the nano level of the individual should be represented. We do believe that an individual could plot their own personal actions onto the continuum to get a sense of whether their actions are incremental or transformative. But as a generic tool with broad applicability, we created it starting at the micro level, because we believe that’s the level of most leverage. As you acknowledge, we’ve added the nano (individual) level to our thinking more recently, so it may make sense to add that level to the Continuum. But until then, we stand by it as a very strong tool for raising awareness around the level of transformative sustainability of distinct initiatives. I hope this helps you understand our thinking, and potentially to shift your assessment of the usefulness of our tool.

Best,

Bill