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GreenMoney Journal - publishing since 1992
Fall 2010 issue
Socially Responsible Investing – Better Companies, Better Communities
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The Strategist, the Citizen, and the Seeker: A new model provides insight into the deep structures of sustainability, and much else as well
Carl Frankel
One of the great things about SRI is that it offers a relatively straightforward and unambiguous
way to try to make a difference in the world.
Obviously, if SRI didn't provide a solid
financial return, it wouldn't have survived long enough to be issued its own acronym-but that's not
its only benefit. Psychologically, SRI makes things feel more, I guess the word is, coherent. When
I took the SRI plunge ten years ago or so, it brought the investment aspect of my life under
control, relatively speaking. In a world where there is a vast gap between one's desire to make a
difference and one's capacity to do so, SRI felt empowering to me. It let me know that I was
actually doing something, not just twiddling my thumbs and thinking, "Ain't it awful." With SRI, I
could feel fairly confident that I was doing the right thing; my choice felt solid and safe,
ethically speaking. I also knew that other people-lots of other people were making the same choice
I was, and that collectively we might even make a difference.
SRI provides a solid return
on investment, plus empowerment and community at no extra charge. That's a pretty powerful pair of
freebies, if you ask me.
It's gratifying when things come together and make sense; much of
the time, they don't. I've been working as a writer, consultant, and entrepreneur in the
business-and-sustainability arena since the late 1980s, and for most of that time, I was plagued by
the sense that the information I was getting, and I was getting lots of it, was not really
answering the questions that were in my heart. Questions like: Is there some sort of strategy, or
meta-strategy, that can enable us to brake the train before it tumbles into the abyss? Why do
progressives have such a talent for tripping over their own feet? Is there a relationship, on the
grand scale, between personal growth and social progress-and if so, what is it? Do spirituality and
activism converge, and if so how, and where? And, last but not least: what the heck is really going
on here, anyway?
In March 1999, I had a passing thought that over the following months
evolved into a model that answered these questions for me, and many more as well. It had the same
clarifying power for me across a very broad range of issues that SRI had for me in the much more
narrow sphere of personal investing.
Five years, four titles, and eight drafts later, that
vision became a book. It's called Out of the Labyrinth: Who We Are, How We Go Wrong, and What We
Can Do About It, and the essence of its thesis is as follows: 1) Each of us
engages in three types of activity during the course of our lives. We pursue end goals, we interact
with other people and the natural world, and we search for meaning. Each of these three activities
constellates into a subpersonality with its own unique values, attitudes and gestalt. These three
subpersonalities are called the "strategist," the "citizen," and the "seeker," and they inhabit the
"objective domain," the "social domain," and the "depth dimension," respectively. (This is the "who
we are" of the subtitle.)
2) The strategist, citizen, and seeker are like children
in a family. Sometimes they quarrel, sometimes they get along. And sometimes the self that
"contains" all these subpersonalities the "parent" in the family, as it were plays favorites. The
self privileges the strategist and devalues the seeker, or vice-versa, or whatever. It's Cinderella
déjà vu: two favored sisters, and a third one in the cellar. (This is "how we go wrong.")
3) These three value systems-identity systems, really are basic design patterns that we
project into our social and political relationships, our institutions, and our broader culture. The
triad, this three-part model, is a "fractal" that shapes our entire created world.
4)
Playing favorites causes dysfunctionality-in ourselves, in our organizations, and in our broader
culture. As people, as managers, as citizens, it thus becomes our challenge to equitably balance
the needs and interests of these "children." I call this the "integral way," and it is, as per the
subtitle, "what we can do about it."
5) Western industrial culture favors the strategic,
objective domain at the expense of the meaning-oriented depth dimension. This is the tyranny of the
objective. It is a tyranny, a dysfunctionality, that a great many people feel in their souls, even
if they're not consciously aware of it. (Think of the movie American Beauty: it's the story of how
a man is emotionally and spiritually restored by journeying into the depth dimension, and then
murdered-sacrificed, really-on account of his transformation.)
So that's the
model, in a very, very small nutshell. Its value, in my experience, lies in its capacity to provide
insight into the unarticulated "deep structures" underlying sustainability and-hey, why stop
there?-some of the most basic issues in our lives. For example (and it must be added that the
descriptions of the triad and integral way have been so condensed here that their explanatory power
must, to some extent, be taken on faith):
Q. Why are corporations so widely distrusted
and, in some quarters, reviled? A. In fairness, it must be said that over the years, many
corporations have done their share to earn people's animosity. But the explanation does not stop
there. Corporations are the quintessential "objective domain" institution-they are all about
strategy, all about achieving their goals as quickly and effectively as possible. To some extent,
they are on the receiving end of all that hostility because they are proxies for people's rage at
the tyranny of the objective, which unduly favors the strategist's domain.
Q. Does the
conventional understanding of sustainability accurately capture its true dimensions? A. No.
Sustainable development is generally understood to be the state that is achieved once economic
development, environmental protection, and social equity have been harmonized. There's much merit
to this view, but it misses an essential point.
Modern environmentalism is generally
agreed to have been born with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. For the next
twenty years or more, environmental challenges were generally viewed as being mostly susceptible to
technical solutions. If a factory was emitting too much pollution, you put a filter on the pipe,
and that was that. This was Sustainability, Stage 1: it was essentially a linear, analytical,
objective-domain approach to environmental challenges.
During the latter half of the
1980s, another view took hold-"sustainable development." Under this view, the challenge was seen as
a system problem that had a social as well as environmental dimension. Terms like "social equity"
and "triple bottom line" came into widespread use. It was now understood that the "problematique,"
as it was called, included such issues as the income gap between rich and poor and the social
empowerment of women. This was Sustainability, Stage 2: it included the social domain.
With this new insight, it was assumed that the discourse about sustainability had come to an
end. We now "knew" what sustainability was all about. Or did we? Actually, no. Virtually the entire
focus was on external structures techno-economic, social, and ecological. The depth dimension
the internal meaning dimension was, and continues to be, almost completely neglected.
From one perspective, this comes as no surprise: it recapitulates the tyranny of the objective,
which is tyrannical precisely because it devalues the depth dimension. But something critically
important has been left out of a conversation when meaning, and the related subjects of
consciousness and mental models, are not on the agenda.
Q. Why did the chicken cross the
road? A. Well, actually, the triad does not provide insight into this most basic of philosophical
questions. But it does illuminate many other issues of relevance to our lives, including ones
relating to self-knowledge, organizational strategy and development, national (and progressive)
politics, spirituality and activism, and leadership.
A couple of years ago, I spoke about
the triad at a corporate conference on sustainability. At the end of my remarks, Nicholas
Eisenberger of Ecos Technologies raised his hand and commented that he found my views "orthogonal."
I smiled benignly and said I agreed, and then went home and looked up the word in the dictionary.
It turned out that orthogonal meant "having to do with right angles": Eisenberger was saying that
my view was ninety degrees skewed relative to the usual one.
It was a fair observation.
Once you bring meaning and consciousness into the equation-and once, beyond that, you propose that
our institutions and culture are a function of consciousness, which it is within our power, within
limits, to change then that has enormous implications not only for issues of selfhood and social
responsibility, but also for issues of strategy. (It suggests something else as well: social
institutions as art forms, and sustainability as having an esthetic dimension-but that's another
article.)
We live in a fragmented world, and we do so as fragmented individuals. Many of
us, perhaps all of us, long to tie things together, to make things somehow cohere. We all long for
integrity, which my dictionary defines as the quality of being whole or complete. That's the
feeling we get from socially responsible investing; it resolves, if only briefly, the fragmented
nature of our lives and helps us feel, in this one way, "whole" and "complete." But SRI is, in the
end, a subset of a larger challenge-how to bring integrity into the entire length and breadth of
our lives. That's what Out of the Labyrinth is about. It explores the triple worlds of the seeker,
the citizen, and the strategist, and how they can birth a better world a more integral and
high-integrity world by dancing beautifully together.
For more information:
http://www.outofthelabyrinth.com
Article written exclusively for GreenMoney.com by Carl
Frankel, nationally-known author, speaker and consultant.
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