Week 4 - Impact Business Models: Raising the Ceiling (or… are we just building a better floor?)
I’ve been sitting with Impact Business Models for a while now. Partly through the lens of the new B Corp standards starting to land, and partly through what we’re building at Beauty Kitchen and if I’m honest, I feel like I’m still walking around it rather than looking straight at it.
This isn’t a finished thought. It’s more like catching something out of the corner of your eye and trying to turn your head fast enough to see it properly. What I keep coming back to is this:
As the standards quite rightly strengthen what good looks like… how do we make sure we don’t accidentally build a very good system for responsible business that stops just short of changing the system itself?
Context (or the tension underneath)
The new standards feel like they are doing something important.
They create a stronger, more consistent baseline across all areas of a business not just allowing companies to excel in one place, but asking them to show up responsibly everywhere. That feels necessary. It raises the floor.
But under the previous standards, the scoring system inevitably shaped behaviour. Businesses were trying to optimise their own performance quite understandably because that’s what the system rewarded.
You could hear it in the language: our score, our position, our badge and I think that mindset is still sitting there.
The question is whether that way of thinking can take us where we now want to go, because system change doesn’t really respond to individual optimisation.
A model that’s been helping me think
I keep coming back to something quite simple:
Standards raise the floor Impact Business Models raise the ceiling Collective action is what connects the two
The standards create a level, stable foundation but IBMs feel like they’re asking: what are we actually building in the space above that floor?
Where IBMs feel different
For me, an Impact Business Model is where a business chooses to go narrow and deep on a specific systemic problem and organises itself around contributing to solving it. Not alone, but as part of something bigger.
They move a company from:
reducing harm → creating solutions operating responsibly → redesigning systems
And importantly, they don’t sit neatly inside the same structures as the standards. There’s something quite important about them not being accredited. Not because rigour doesn’t matter it does.
But because the moment you standardise something too early, you risk freezing it & system change doesn’t behave very well when it’s boxed in too quickly.
At the same time, I keep coming back to whether there is a place for a different kind of recognition.
Not formal accreditation in the traditional sense but something more like being acknowledged by the movement itself.
Almost like how some tech communities work, where problems are surfaced collectively, and energy gathers around the ones that matter most. The work that gains traction, that brings others in, that starts to shift something that’s what gets built on.
I wonder if IBMs could work in a similar way.
Not “accredited” through a fixed framework, but recognised through participation, collaboration, and momentum, where this becomes a shift
I think we’re still largely operating in a mindset of: “How do I perform well?”
Whereas IBMs are asking: “What are we trying to change together?”
Those are not the same thing.
Standards (particularly in their previous form) rewarded individual performance. IBMs start to point toward something more interdependent.
Choosing problems too big to solve alone and working beyond organisational boundaries.
That’s a different kind of progress.
The work that now needs to happen
At the same time, we don’t yet know what IBMs will become in this next phase.
The five IBMs in the previous standards were a starting point but they were shaped within a different system, and likely need to be revisited rather than carried forward as they are.
This feels like the work now.
A process of deconstruction understanding what drove meaningful change, what shaped behaviour in unintended ways, and what needs to evolve for the world we’re moving into.
Because the risk isn’t that IBMs exist it’s that they become too fixed too easy to “achieve” & then we’re back to optimising for a badge.
What feels important to hold onto if IBMs are to play a meaningful role, they need to hold something different. Not just innovation but collectiveness, not just what one company is doing but how it contributes to something bigger than itself, that’s harder to define but much closer to what system change actually looks like.
Final thought (for now)
I don’t think IBMs are the answer on their own but they might be part of how this becomes a movement that actually shifts systems rather than one that simply defines responsible business more clearly.
Still figuring this out.
Would really value other perspectives from people sitting in and around this space.
Jo x
