
The Four Flows of Good Stewardship
Adaptively Evolving a New Framework for Discussing Prudence
Last week, I had the great honor, privilege and pleasure to participate in the Invest In Peace Investors Conference at the Caux Dialogues on Land and Security organized by the Land, Lives and Peace Initiative of Initiatives of Change.

The focus of this first Invest In Peace Investors Conference was investment in land restoration as a pathway to local security and global peace.
Among the many powerful visionaries working at the creative edge of this important concept who gathered at Caux was Willem Ferwerda of Commonland Foundation. The vision Willem shares is for land restoration that delivers four returns:
Return of Inspiration — gives people hope and a sense of purpose;
Return of Social Capital — brings back jobs, education and safety;
Return of Natural Capital — restores biodiversity, soil and water quality;
Return of Financial Capital — realises sustainable profit in the long term.
I am inspired to replace Willem’s choice of the word “return” with the word “flow”, to construct a paradigm for prudent stewardship of the four flows.
These are not flows of capital. They are flows of peace.
As we replace “capital” with “flow”, we move beyond Willem’s chosen focus on restoration of wasted (by human ways of being prosperous) lands, to a larger framework for empowering civic engagement in adaptively evolving community standards of fiduciary stewardship through which people can recognize value in enterprise that supports investment by stewards of society’s shared surpluses aggregated and maintained to deliver income security for retirement (pensions), for education and for philanthropy (endowments) and for our shared future, forever.
The logical link is financial. Willem’s “return of financial capital through sustainable profit in the long term” is also an evergreen cash flow that is happiness for both enterprise (according to a successful Wall Street venture capitalist) and pensions (according to a former steward of one of the world’s largest pension programs). A natural fit for stewardship investment.
Unlike the currently popular Wall Street social structure for investment decision-making through securities trading, using a framework that reduces all values to one single point of value measured in the market-clearing price, evergreen stewardship investing in enterprise cash flow regeneration, directly, empowers and requires consideration of multiple different values and how they flow through society and the economy.
It is not prudent for a superfiduciary steward of society’s shared savings to deliver income security today through investments that destroy the possibility to continue to deliver income security in the future.
A prudent superfiduciary stewardship flow flows forever into a “forever” that is worth flowing into.
We can adapt Willem’s four returns to construct a new investment decision-making framework that assesses the eligibility of enterprise for investment by stewards of society’s saved surpluses in terms of how that enterprise can be expected regenerate/degenerate these four flows.
The Flow of Inspiration — gives people hope and a sense of purpose.
The Flow of Inclusion — gives people meaningful work, education and safety.
The Flow of Biophysics — maintains biodiversity, soil and water quality.
The Flow of Prosperity — circulates wealth through the community in patterns that are uneven, but not unfair.
An enterprise that regenerates all of these flows is evergreen. An enteprise that degenerates any one of these flows is not.
This feels like a hopeful framework for empowering civic engagement in prudent stewardship. This engagement is essential to keeping pensions and endowments accountable to the people, so it has to be empowered by frameworks of value recognition that are easily accessible by the poeple. It feels like these flows of purpose, participation, place and patterns meet the design requirement of accessibility that is sometimes called affordance. That is, they afford people the ability, directly and correctly, to see the prudence — or recklessness — of stewardship investment in any given enterprise when it is described in terms of its impacts on these four flows.
What do you think?
Would you be comfortable talking about enterprise and investment with stewards in terms of these four flows?

