5.3.3 Developing Place-Sourced Community Intelligence: A Three-Phase Strategy

The regenerative development strategy is based on living systems thinking and employs systemic frameworks and ideas that community members can learn and put into practice. We employ a meta-framework to involve a community in a multi-year regenerative process. Our framework shows an ongoing learning method that allows a society to co-evolve including its environment. This systems change is supported by three overlapping phases of work: strategic thinking, driving systems change, and institutionalizing procedures and patterns. A community will experience a number of state changes during these three phases, allowing it to gradually increase its capacity for regeneration. The framework demonstrates the transition from self-actualizing to system-actualizing, in which people and groups shift their attention from maximizing their own wealth-generating potential to maximizing the wealth-generating power of systems that are greater than themselves.

This framework describes the effort that is required for a community to become capable of regenerating itself and its economy as an unique, self-reinforcing process. The simultaneous growth of inner and exterior capacities is necessary for each phase. Helping others see and develop their own potential—potential that can be articulated as a contribution towards something bigger than themselves—relates to inner work. It also has to do with enhancing their capacity for self-management so that their activities become more systemically efficient, strategic, and meaningful.

Helping individuals recognize the essence and innate potential of the biological systems they inhabit is part of outer work. In other words, it’s about teaching people a method to see their world as a dynamic, living system so they can make decisions that are actually advantageous for everyone who will be impacted.

By balancing one’s inner and outward labor, one may make sure that while one develops, they are also contributing to the health of the social and ecological systems around them, realizing that these systems are the foundation of both one’s current and future wealth. In fact, reaching one’s full potential as a person requires understanding how to deal with complicated systems. Because of this, the connection of self-actualization and system-actualization is emphasized in our strategy.