The VISIS Pyramid: From Complexity to Collective Action

Sep 23

7 min read

Updated: Sep 29

Building stronger sustainability teams, shared understanding and actionable roadmaps for transformative change

A proven collaborative process for sustainability teams, systems thinking and strategic action

*Building more than a Pyramid. Participants progressively turn diverse perspectives, indicators and systems insights into innovations, strategies and a shared commitment to action.*

For more than two decades, the Sustainability Accelerator has helped organizations, governments, universities and communities turn complex sustainability challenges into shared understanding, practical strategies and coordinated action.

Sustainability strategies often begin with good intentions but struggle when different departments, stakeholders and priorities have to work together. Environmental teams may focus on emissions and resources, finance on costs and investment, HR on people and culture, while leadership looks for measurable results and strategic direction.

The Sustainability Accelerator was designed to help bridge those divides. Its four complementary tools - Compass, Pyramid, Amoeba and StrateSphere - help groups see the whole system, align perspectives, develop strategy, introduce innovations and monitor progress. At the heart of the approach is the VISIS Method: Vision > Indicators > Systems > Innovation > Strategy.

The origins of the VISIS Pyramid

The VISIS Pyramid was developed by sustainability pioneer Alan AtKisson in the 1990s as a practical way to guide groups from shared vision and indicators through systems understanding, innovation and strategy toward coordinated action. It sits within the wider Sustainability Accelerator toolkit, alongside the Sustainability Compass, the Amoeba for understanding how innovations spread through organizations and cultures, and strategic tools such as StrateSphere. Together, these tools were designed to help people move beyond fragmented sustainability thinking toward a more integrated, systems-based process for learning, planning and change. Alan gifted the tools to Compass Education in 2020, helping ensure that the Compass, Pyramid and related methods could continue to evolve and be shared widely with educators and learners around the world. Compass Education has since adapted and disseminated them internationally as practical tools for systems thinking and sustainability learning.

Building the Pyramid - and building shared ownership

Among these tools, the VISIS Pyramid provides a particularly powerful collaborative process for organizations that want to build a sustainability team and develop a practical sustainability roadmap or blueprint.

*Figure 1. The VISIS Pyramid turns shared vision into action—guiding groups from indicators and systems understanding to innovation, strategy, and lasting impact.*

The process normally begins with the Sustainability Compass, which looks at the system through four interconnected perspectives: Nature, Economy, Society and Wellbeing. Participants then establish a shared vision and definition of success, identify meaningful indicators and trends, map relationships and leverage points, develop and evaluate innovations, create implementation and adoption strategies, and finish with a Capstone Agreement that brings different perspectives into a shared commitment to action.

Level 0 – Vision & Principles: The process begins by defining a shared vision of the preferred future, clarifying guiding principles, priorities and the overall purpose of the change effort.

Level 1 – Indicators: Participants then identify the indicators and trends that show what is happening now, helping the group build a common understanding of current conditions and where the system may be heading.

Level 2 – Systems: Next, the group explores why those trends are occurring by mapping relationships, feedback loops and root causes, and identifying the most important leverage points where intervention could have the greatest effect.

Level 3 – Innovations: With those leverage points in view, participants generate and prioritize practical ideas, initiatives or interventions that could shift the system toward the shared sustainability vision.

Level 4 – Strategy & Action: The selected innovations are then translated into implementation strategies, including how to build support, reduce barriers, align resources and move ideas into practice.

Level 5 – Capstone Agreement: The process culminates in a shared agreement on priority actions, responsibilities and next steps, creating a collective commitment to move forward.

Taken together, the Pyramid turns the VISIS sequence — Vision, Indicators, Systems, Innovation and Strategy — into a collaborative journey from shared understanding to coordinated action and sustained impact

The physical Pyramid used in many workshops is more than an engaging facilitation device. As teams build each level, they are also constructing a visible record of their collective thinking. Many perspectives gradually converge into a smaller number of strategic choices and, ultimately, an agreed direction.

*Hands-on collaboration makes systems thinking visible: teams build, test, combine and refine ideas as the Pyramid grows.*

Tested across sectors and cultures

That basic architecture has proved remarkably adaptable. Over more than two decades, the Pyramid and wider Sustainability Accelerator have been used with businesses, governments, universities, schools, international organizations, community groups and emerging leaders. Applications have ranged from community sustainability planning in Sweden and the United States and regional policy processes in Europe, to corporate transformation in Indonesia, water planning in Botswana, sustainability leadership across Asia-Pacific, Eco-School development in Thailand, government capacity building across Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, and integrated SDG planning in Afghanistan.

Indonesia provides an especially strong example of organizational application. Between 2006 and 2009, Systainability Asia worked with YPB–LEAD Indonesia on a multi-year business sustainability programme designed to help major Indonesian companies integrate sustainability as a whole-of-organization strategy rather than a stand-alone CSR activity.

Using the Sustainability Accelerator’s Compass and VISIS and Pyramid, participating companies assessed their sustainability performance, developed company-specific indicators, built internal management capacity and translated findings into sustainability strategies and action plans. Outcomes included stronger cross-departmental planning, new sustainability governance structures, mine-closure and land-restoration strategies, community development initiatives, green tourism and reforestation programmes, and strengthened sustainability reporting.

The Pyramid has also proved valuable as a synthesis tool for leadership development. From 2004 to 2019, it formed a recurring part of the UNEP–Tongji University Asia-Pacific Leadership Programme on Environment for Sustainable Development. At the conclusion of each intensive programme, participants used the Pyramid to bring together the week’s diverse learning around a specific sustainability challenge. Through the VISIS sequence, they converted lectures, field experiences, discussions and specialist inputs into a shared vision, systems understanding, innovations and an integrated blueprint for action. Across its lifetime, the programme reached more than 450 emerging and mid-career leaders from 23 countries.

A similarly sustained application took place in Singapore through the National Environment Agency’s Youth Environment Envoy programme from 2005 to 2017. Here, the Pyramid served as a core training process within a long-term youth sustainability leadership programme. Rather than simply teaching environmental knowledge, participants learned to examine challenges systemically, identify leverage points, develop sustainability initiatives and think strategically about how those ideas could be implemented. Systainability Asia facilitated two workshops each year and provided continuing mentoring as participants translated their learning into independent environmental projects. Over the programme’s 13 years, more than 600 youth leaders participated, making it one of the longest-running applications of Accelerator-based sustainability leadership training. The Accelerator case materials similarly describe the programme as using sustainability, systems thinking, innovation diffusion and project-development methods as a foundation for Youth Environmental Envoys to design their own projects.

At Auburn University, the process was applied to institutional sustainability. Twenty-four students, academics and administrators worked through the complete Pyramid sequence to identify sustainability indicators, map system relationships, locate leverage points and develop initiatives ranging from energy monitoring and sustainable buildings to sustainability alliances, incentives and communication strategies. The result was not simply a training exercise, but the beginnings of an integrated sustainability action framework for the university.

In Afghanistan in 2018, Systainability Asia designed and delivered a UNDP-supported capacity-building programme for the national SDG process involving representatives of 28 ministries, civil society, the private sector and UN agencies. The wider programme reached approximately 130 participants, while the intensive multi-stakeholder planning component used multiple Pyramids simultaneously to explore how the SDGs could be approached as an interconnected system rather than as separate goals.

Other applications reinforce the same adaptability.

In Thailand, Accelerator methods supported 41 pilot Eco-Schools in developing whole-school sustainability approaches. In Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, government officials used VISIS-based approaches to develop resource-efficiency and Green Office strategies. Across these very different settings, the Pyramid has provided a common structure without imposing a standard answer.

That is one of the Pyramid’s most important strengths. The method supplies the collaborative architecture, while participants bring the local knowledge, priorities and decisions. It can therefore function as a corporate sustainability roadmap process, a leadership-development experience, a team-building framework, a strategic planning tool, or a synthesis exercise that turns learning into action. Whether the objective is transforming a company, developing young sustainability leaders, integrating a week of executive learning, designing public policy or coordinating institutions around the SDGs, the VISIS Pyramid helps groups move from fragmented perspectives toward shared understanding, strategic choices, collective ownership and coordinated action.

From workshop to organizational sustainability blueprint

A particularly useful example comes from Daya Lima, an Indonesian leadership and human-resources consultancy.

Rather than treating sustainability as a short workshop exercise, Daya Lima undertook a three-phase Sustainability Accelerator process in 2019 to support its “Leaders for a New Planet” strategy. The process included stakeholder analysis, materiality assessment, development of sustainability indicators, systems mapping, identification of leverage points, innovation design, Theory of Change development and Capstone agreements.

The results moved well beyond a simple sustainability capacity building for the management team. Daya Lima developed 22 Compass-framed materiality indicators, established a Sustainability Leadership structure, mapped relationships between indicators, designed four leverage-point innovations and linked its sustainability indicators to relevant SDG targets. The process demonstrates what organizational adoption can look like when a Pyramid engagement becomes a structured pathway from shared vision to governance, metrics, innovation and implementation.

For organizations, this is the deeper value of the VISIS Pyramid: not simply a sustainability workshop, but a process for creating an in-sync sustainability team with a shared language, systems understanding and the strategic blueprint needed to make sustainability an integral part of organizational decision-making and there future forward business model.

Figure 2. From workshop to organizational roadmap: Daya Lima used the VISIS Pyramid across multiple phases to move from Vision and Indicators through Systems, Innovation and Strategy to integrated action.

What could your organization build with the VISIS Pyramid?

A VISIS Pyramid process can be adapted for any company, government agency, university, NGO, network or multi-stakeholder initiative. Depending on the need, it can support a focused workshop, leadership retreat, sustainability strategy process or a longer organizational transformation programme.

Since 2002, Systainability Asia has facilitated Sustainability Accelerator processes with organizations and stakeholder groups across business, government, education, civil society and international development.

If your organization is asking: Where are we trying to go? What really matters? How are our materiality issues connected in a dynamic system? Where can we make the greatest difference both inside the company and outside with the community? And how do we bring people together behind a practical roadmap for action?, the VISIS Pyramid provides a proven way to work through those questions together.