Investing from a Regenerative Mind
By: Sidney Cano
Tags: Impact, Impact Investing, Regeneration, Regenerative Economy

We use the term mind to refer to the totality of conscious and unconscious mental processes and activities, including emotion, reasoning, habit, sensory perception and so on. Regeneration has to do with tapping into the essence of something, enabling its evolution as a result of manifesting itself in a new way that brings new value to a new context. A regenerative mind consciously engages with the inherent regenerative potential of living phenomena, recognizing in them their inherent wholeness, agency, and potentiality.

A Different Approach to Investment

Sidney Cano is part of DUIT, a company dedicated to the creation of guidelines and platforms for transformational investments within a Latin American business ecosystem. The corporate group has built some understanding about the levels of effects that are possible from its efforts and has intentionally directed investments toward projects and businesses with the potential to serve as instruments for socio-ecological change. It has also found it worthwhile to share what it has learned with others who wish to use investment as a way to make a difference in the world.

For almost six years now, Duit has encountered a diverse range of entrepreneurs and business-owners who are seeking ways to increase the beneficial influences they can have on social and natural systems. They nearly always exhibit a genuine desire to do good in the world: “We want to make a difference,” they say. However, these good intentions are rarely matched by an understanding and a process that is sophisticated enough to effect deep change. As a rule, this is because the desire to do good is rooted in an outdated paradigm, one that sees the world anthropocentrically. People who wish to make the world a better place will naturally define and then pursue what they believe to be right and good. But does a forest, or a pod of whales, or a village in some other part of the world define what is “right and good” in the same way?

The same questions arise regarding investment, which in recent years has been undergoing an evolution in how it is conceived. For example, there is a growing understanding that the term need not be applied only to conventional financial instruments that carry an expectation of financial return. Investment can also refer to the commitment (investing oneself) of something other than money (time, energy, effort) with the expectation of worthwhile outcomes. Antony Bugg-Levine and Jed Emerson, leading thinkers in the field of impact investment, point out that: “If impact investing is what we do, blended value is what we produce. Value is what gets created when investors invest, and the recipient organizations pursue their mission. All organizations, for-profit and nonprofit alike, create value that has economic, social, and environmental components.”[i]

This concept of investment is depicted in the following diagram, which shows a variety of beneficial outcomes that can arise as a result of well-designed business activity. Although accurate from one point of view, this way of describing investment impacts is inherently fragmented, acting as if social, economic, and environmental arenas were separable and could operate independently of one another.

Fig. 1 Do-good level of difference

By contrast, impact investment that seeks to work from a Regenerative paradigm is focused on enabling whole-systems actualization. Actualization refers to the process by which the inherent potential within a system becomes manifest or actual. This implies that an impact investment is regenerative when it produces systemic changes or evolution that express new potential for a system as a whole. This is quite different from measuring impacts in terms of shifts in some desirable but narrowly defined metric, such as the number of homeless people who have been provided with shelter.

Redefining impact in terms of systems actualization requires a different orientation to investment. For one thing, it requires looking at systems as wholes rather than as pieces and parts, and it requires understanding the ways that systems are nested one within another. Also, it starts from the nature of a system and asks how it is to evolve, rather than starting from what we want to do to it.