Proceedings of the IFSR Conversation 2010, Pernegg, Austria
Discussion Paper (Team 3): Integral Sustainovation™ Model
Regina Rowland
Integral Sustainovation™ is a system (theory and praxis) for envisioning and innovating sustainable futures in order to help individuals and organizations move toward sustainable stewardship.
This is a theory about thrivability informed by multiple disciplines. Four dimensions of reality are addressed and interrelated: person, planet, people, and prosperity — including concepts of being & becoming, and doing & the infrastructure for acting. This particular way of slicing reality into its subjective and objective aspects on the individual and collective planes is unique to the discipline of integral theory (an emerging field of scholarly research synthesizing various ways of knowing, and is situated within integral studies, an emerging interdisciplinary field of discourse).
Integral models consider stage development (growth in stages leading to more complexity) as fundamental to the theory. The Integral Sustainovation™ Model describes five stages for each of the four dimensions.
Integral Sustainovation™ Model, Developmental Stages shown as concentric circles growing outwards, Proceedings of the IFSR Conversations 2010, Pernegg, Austria
In the personal dimension (individual subjective reality) individuals evolve from self to other to others to world to consciousness. The stages in the environmental dimension of the planet as a closed system (objective reality, singular) expand from organism to habitat to bioregion to biosphere to cosmos. In the socio-cultural dimension of cocreated and shared meaning (collective subjective reality) movement can be noticed through the dominant mode of discourse: monologue to dialogue to collaboration (across diverse perspectives) to coopearation (peers immersed in creative engagement across meshworks) to emergence. In the socio-economic, socio-technological, socio-political dimension of systems and psychological/tangible artifacts created by the collective for the expression of joy, health, and abundance (collective objective reality), we measure stage development through the form these creations take: simplex to complex to multiplex to omniplex to uniplex.
Integral Sustainovation™ Praxis—ROIn (return on innovation) was developed for individuals, communities, and organizations of all kinds (institutions, governments, corporations/ businesses/enterprises) interested in transforming themselves into sustainable learning organizations that participate, consciously, in practicing new behaviors, innovating new products & services, and systems & structures through (re-)generative design from which new consumption patterns (from consumerism to coproduction), and the new economy (from profit orientation to value creation) will emerge.
Sustainovating means to stimulate creative flow within the individual and in groups engaged in creative play to innovate by following nature’s blueprint from the future that wants to emerge.
The Integral Sustainovation™ Wheel serves as a map to a) define the current state of consciousness in individuals and the current location of organizations on their sustainability learning curve — which reveal the immediate opportunities offered from those perspectives, b) (co-)design an intervention, and/or next steps, and re-pattern behavior, and c) analyze & measure success of action(s) taken and/or personal growth.