Systems thinkers don’t leave home without their slide decks.
At last week’s SOCAP gathering in San Francisco, the quickest way to capture some of the abundance of innovative thinking on offer in plenaries and panels was simply to snap pictures of the slides. We’ve selected a few of them below. Share your own.
Transcap Initiative’s Dominic Hofstetter, for example, diagrammed the interconnected systems of food production to illuminate the practice of systems thinking more broadly. Our portfolios may be successful, even as planetary systems deteriorate.
“Arguably, what we’re doing is creating islands of sustainability in a sea of the polycrisis,” he said. “What gives me hope is that we essentially have all the solutions we need to build the future we want… The key question is, How will it all come together?”
Business strategist Salim Ismail traced the declining cost curves of everything from human genome sequencing to electric lighting and urged entrepreneurs to decentralize their solutions as much as possible.
“You can now do very disruptive innovation at almost zero cost and that, I think, gives us unbelievable potential for the future,” he said. “When you think about the potential for taking technologies and using them disruptively in a democratized, decentralized way, the world quickly becomes very, very amazing.”
Abundance and archetypes
Salim Ismail, founder of OpenExO Inc and author of “Exponential Organizations.”
Moore’s Law — which originally held that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years – now applies to a range of technologies that are getting ever-cheaper as they get exponentially more efficient.
“Today we’re seeing Moore’s Law apply across a dozen technologies,” says Ismail, founder of OpenExO and author of “Exponential Organizations.” “Never before have we seen this many technologies all accelerate at the same time throughout history. We have 20 Gutenberg moments at the same time.”
Our healthcare systems, legal systems, intellectual property were can’t stand up to the pace of change, he says. “As leaders, we’ll spend the next 20 years trying to deal with this.”
That will require a different mindset. “We’re running the world on a set of very male type archetypal pattern,” says Ismail.
“The male archetype, when it meets abundance, relates to it as power, and wants to hoard it. The female archetype meets abundance and shares it around. As we move to abundance and we get more and more technology and more and more democratization, you really want a female archetype running the world.”
Islands of sustainability
Dominic Hofstetter, Transcap Initiative
“Moving from a systems optimization to systems transformation objective has profound implications for the practice of purpose driven capital deployment,” says Dominic Hofstetter of the Transcap Initiative.
Take the food system as an example. Many impact investors believe we need a deep and structural change to the way we grow, process, consume and dispose of food. Such investors may actually be ill-positioned to catalyze this kind of change, because they are working from the perspective of a single type of the capital, such as venture capital, growth capital or private debt.
That’s why investors can feel good about the impact of their portfolio, even as bigger planetary and social systems are deteriorating. The financial system is fully able to create what Hofstetter calls “islands of sustainability in a sea of polycrisis.”
An AI’s vision of a sustainable, healthy and equitable food system.
“If we want to change systems, we have to intervene at different nodes of that system at the same time, and the interventions that need to happen across technology, business models, policy, social norms and values narratives, etc, tend to have their own funding needs.”
Lifecycle thinking
Jennifer Harper, Cheekbone Beauty Cosmetics
Ontario-based Indigenous beauty brand Cheekbone Beauty has created the indigenous Beauty Collective, which founder Jenn Harper says “is about changing the way beauty products are made.”
“We’ve taken this concept, which is called lifecycle thinking, or lifecycle analysis, and we’ve embedded it in everything that we do.”
Cheekbone Beauty’s mission “is to help not only every indigenous person on the planet see and feel their value in this world where we craft these sustainable cosmetics, but we don’t want anything to end up in the landfill.” That means sustainable packaging and ‘green chemistry” formulations that are produced in the B Corp.’s Indigenous Innovation Lab.
Funding urban nature
Open Earth Foundation’s Martin Wainstein and Ombrello Solutions’ Anastasia Mourogova Millin
Cities are on the front lines of sustainability, but they often lack the data, tools and funding to pursue climate and nature-related projects. Wainstein and Mourogova Millin sketched new models and mechanisms to finance urban nature and biodiversity.
Open Earth, a California-based non-profit working on digital innovations and open collaborations around planetary-scale projects, supports cities around the world — including 50 Brazilian cities ahead of COP30 next year — with advanced data and AI tools for climate action planning.
A key part of the urban transition: place based transition funds that convert city climate plans into investable portfolios, including models for how urban sustainability projects, backed by data, can be structured for financial investment, promoting scalable low-carbon development.
Ombrello Solutions is developing financial instruments, such as Civic Innovation Bonds, to help cities pay for nature restoration. Mourogova Millin’s big idea: tapping the value of nature-adjacent assets to pay for parks and other restoration efforts.
The Civic Infrastructure Bond is envisioned as 30-year, 8% fixed-income mechanisms that pool private and institutional capital to finance biodiversity preservation, flood mitigation, nature parks and other “urban natural assets” across Canada.
