6.2 Lesson-2: Investing from a Regenerative Mind

The idea of impact investment, which aims to use financial wealth as a vehicle for bringing about betterment in the world, is one that banks, institutions, corporations, and people are increasingly adopting. Impact investors typically invest in projects or companies that they believe can have a leveraged impact on a particular need, such as environmental restoration, poverty alleviation, or atmospheric carbon reduction. This strategy varies from traditional philanthropy because it aims to make money. Impact investors think that this is the greatest method to promote initiative and the spirit of entrepreneurship while ensuring that funding is available for more investments.

Impact investing was born out of a sincere desire to change the world and bring about a significant transformation in how people live on the planet. Generally speaking, it aims to either ameliorate socio-ecological harm (using the arrest disorder paradigm) or advance both human and natural systems.

We wish to present an alternative strategy for impact investing that is based on the regenerative paradigm and aims to go beyond making minor adjustments to actualize whole systems.

A paradigm shift to the regeneration level entails much more than just a simple adjustment to an investor’s approach. It essentially calls for a shift in the way individuals perceive and comprehend their interaction with the outside environment. Because regeneration calls for people to invest themselves as well as their material assets, it also necessitates a change in aspiration and direction toward the activity of investment. Together, this means that it necessitates creating a regenerative mind.

The term “mind” refers to all conscious and unconscious mental activity and processes, such as emotion, habit, reasoning, sensory perception, and so forth. Regeneration is the process of drawing out something’s essence and allowing it to evolve so that it can manifest in a new way and add fresh value to a new environment. Seeing the intrinsic completeness, agency, and potentiality in living phenomena, a regenerative mind actively engages with their innate capacity for regeneration.

Company owners and entrepreneurs who are looking for ways to boost their positive impacts on social and ecological systems. They almost always show a sincere desire to make the world a better place: “We want to make a difference,” they declare. These noble intentions, however, are rarely matched by knowledge and procedures sophisticated enough to bring about lasting change. This is typically the case because the desire to do good is anchored in an outmoded paradigm that has an anthropocentric view of the universe. Those who want to improve the world will naturally define and work toward what they regard as right and good. The same concerns are raised in relation to investment, which has recently seen its definition change. For instance, it is becoming increasingly clear that the phrase need not just refer to traditional financial instruments that offer the promise of a financial return. Moreover, the term “investment” can be used to describe the commitment (or “self-investment”) that involves something besides money, with the hope of receiving positive results.

Impact investing, on the other hand, is concentrated on making it possible for whole-systems actualization to occur. The process through which a system’s innate potential manifests or becomes actual is known as actualization. As a result, it can be inferred that an impact effort is regenerative if it results in systemic changes or evolutionary processes that reveal potential new for a system as a whole. This is very different from assessing consequences in terms of changes in a desired but constrained metric, such the number of homeless individuals who have received housing.

A different investment orientation is necessary to redefine impact in terms of systems actualization. For starters, it necessitates understanding how systems are layered within one another and viewing systems as wholes as opposed to bits and pieces. Additionally, it begins with a system’s nature and questions how it will evolve rather than starting with what we wish to change about it.

When viewed from a regenerative perspective, investment is no longer seen as something that is brought in to bring about change (do-good paradigm), but rather as something that a System calls in to facilitate its own evolution (regenerate life paradigm.) Moving beyond conventional understanding and accepted practice is necessary in order to develop thinking that is truly novel in order to make higher order discoveries to life on Earth. To do this, one must have an understanding of the underlying movements and energies that serve as the foundation for innovative tactics that allow systems to change to higher degrees of expression and realize their own potential.

The mind of a regenerative investor must also be regenerative. To do this, one must be prepared to go beyond education and experience in to understand and interact with the environment in novel ways. That is a lengthy, difficult procedure. After all, letting go of one’s certainties and the things that have historically worked is never an easy task. But at this pivotal time in history, this kind of course correction is required. The framework that follows provides an overview of the extent of a process for developing fresh perspectives that make it possible to identify and realize the inherent potential of living systems.

• The phrase “essence-to-essence link” describes the mentality one must adopt: one that recognizes and respects the unique qualities and untapped potential of every living system. We must learn to relate to them as autonomous beings if we are to transition from acting on to working with the natural systems, raw resources, local cultures, and people that our investments and enterprises influence.
• The term “systems evolution” refers to the capacity to see a world of process, dynamism, and flow in which life develops to its full potential and becomes richer, more structured, and more complicated. This applies to the evolution of economies, animals, and ecosystems, as well as societies, and it necessitates accepting ambiguity and uncertainty as the building blocks of original ideas.
• Living systems thinking is the process through which the mind can model its actions after the way that living systems function. Living systems theory, for instance, places more emphasis on wholes than on fragments, on potential than on reality, on essence than on general categories, and so forth.
• Self-managing and self-determining systems must be capable of managing themselves and making decisions for themselves. This is crucial to shifting relationships with biological systems from extractive or authoritarian to regenerative. At the regenerative level, investing always aims to increase communities’, individuals’, and ecosystems’ capacity to successfully shape their own futures. When this is the case, businesses and investors are appropriately viewed as allies as opposed to predators.
• The ability to keep track of one’s own thoughts and determine which paradigm is influencing it is referred to as discernment levels. Because to ingrained habits and social constraints, working at a regeneration level is impossible without this skill. Instead, one will automatically shift to a lower order of paradigm.