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Presented by Alexandra de Blas

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The 4th Bottom Line
Saturday 1 May  2004 

Summary
Futurist Sohail Inayatullah argues that spirituality should
be adopted as the "4th bottom line" after economic, social
and environmental elements.

Alexandra de Blas: Like Mary Clark, Professor Sohail Inayatullah works with the deeper stories and worldviews underpinning the way we see the future. He’s a leading political theorist and writer in the field of future studies; and holds positions at Tamkang University in Taiwan, and the University of the Sunshine Coast and the Queensland University of Technology.

An idea he’s explored recently adopts spirituality as the fourth bottom line. You may have heard of the triple bottom line, which values the economic, social and environmental elements. But how would spirituality sit as the fourth?

Sohail Inayatullah: My sense is when I talk to people around the world, there is a sense that there’s something about spirituality and meaningful life, a notion of transcendence that has to be behind the other bottom lines, and there’s also a sense of spirituality even if crudely can be measured, asking OK, that city’s prosperous, that city is environmental, that city is socially inclusive, but what would a city that’s spiritual look like? So those are some of the questions I ask, and people actually are very interested in starting to figure out what would a spiritual country, a spiritual city, a spiritual family look like? What are the indicators, how do we actually create that?

Alexandra de Blas: Well how might it look?

Sohail Inayatullah: Well for one thing, if you look at the centre of cities, they’re all framed around finances. The CBD, the Central Business District, is not the CSD, the Central Spiritual District. So it could be that you might have more meditation centres, you might have more health centres, or the city design needs to be transformed. Even environmentally, to make sure the buildings are really green, but deeper to make sure the type of experience people have for them, at least at some level match or appeal or evoke the spiritual. I mean having at the airport a meditation and a worship centre is of course in the right step, but I think we’re trying to push the barrier beyond that.

Alexandra de Blas: How could we push the barrier?

Sohail Inayatullah: I’m not really sure. Living a healthier life, being in touch with our deeper meanings, those two keep on coming up. Something about inclusion, something about what does it all really mean. Those issues come out both in a society that’s under attack, in the sense that scarcity, so when there’s so much scarcity you go to what’s deepest, but also it’s very true for societies that are post-scarcity; they’ve actually done very well in terms of basic needs, housing and the economy, and the spiritual interest comes out much more. So then it’s asking, OK, you’ve done this project and it did well financially, it’s green, it’s socially inclusive, but was there a spiritual dimension to it, something that really sparked people’s hopes. I know this sounds strange, when I do a lecture or have a workshop, or a meeting, people say, Oh, you look slightly disappointed at the end. I say Well for me, it’s not just that the audience liked it, but I’m happiest when there’s a sense that angels are in the room. And angels for me of course, that’s metaphorical. But something else happens, and there’s different civilisations from the Indian view, something called micro-vita that what is, there’s some energy in the room, in traditional religions there’s some sense of notion of transcendence.

Alexandra de Blas: What are some of the ways in which you could measure spirituality?

Sohail Inayatullah: First it’s contested space. So I’m very happy with that. I don’t want the official measure out there, I want this to be a way for people to talk about it and then eventually to come up with some measures. Positive measures are easy, wellbeing, happiness, we know how to have indicators of that. Negative measures, hate, crime, bullying in schools, cigarette consumption, treatment of animals, that’s I think quite easy. Now the larger categories I would say No.1 is your organisation society, what I would call near-humanistic, going beyond nation, religion and state, and moving towards an expanded sense of the planet. That’s the first measure. And we all know when we’re seeing people as humans on the planet, versus ‘Oh, that person’s part of that religion, race or country.’ That’s measure No.1.
No.2 is, is there a link between highest and lowest? That’s the spiritual, economic link that of course we want an economy that’s dynamic and prospering, but the highest income should be linked to the lowest income. If the highest income is building up, I would want the lowest income to be moving up, too.
Three, is it really socially inclusive beyond just genders and minorities being better represented, but there are ways of thinking about time, significance also being part of how we design society. So I would say deep social inclusion. And fourth, consistently what I see in organisations is the issue of example. Are leaders of the organisation, the country, in the fourth bottom line in fact showing that? If they’re not, then I may as well, so I’ll do what I want. So I would look at those four, the new humanistic issue, the economy being linked, the deep representation and the issue of leadership.

Alexandra de Blas: When you start working in this way, you have actually pioneered a model which is called Causal Layered Analysis, which is a way of looking to the future, and working out what possible future one may wish to have. Tell me about this process, how does it work?

Sohail Inayatullah: Causal Layered is a method and theory of futures that I use as part of the futures workshop, and the idea with CLA, is that you want to unpack the future. So if someone says, Here’s the future, you want to say, Well what’s the systems behind that? So the future we give, the image, the newspaper headline, that’s the future we normally think of as the future, so that’s to me the litany. If you think about icebergs, that’s the superficial part. Underneath the iceberg is the system, the politics, the economics, the environment, the technology. So most people want to convince you that the litany, which is isolated to individuals, actually connected to community to a system. That’s a huge jump in thinking. And the environmental movement has been very strong in that. Don’t see yourself as isolated, don’t see your actions as isolated, they’re part of a larger system. So your pollution in one city actually impacts pollution somewhere else. But underneath the systemic level of world views are deeply held positions of the nature of life, of time, of society, or love, of what the city looks like, or what a country looks like. So that’s where most people stop it, they don’t get to that worldview level. And the last part is the myth of metaphor, the story. So underneath that even is an unconscious story. If you’re in a company, ask What story are you living? Someone might say, Well I’m living Cinderella. Then who’s your Prince Charming? And do you want to live that story? Who’s the stepsister? So what it’s identifying, what unconscious story are you living? And each culture has its own stories. Some cultures, the way you say Hello is to say My back hurts, and you say My back also hurts, that’s how you make friends. Does that friendship making in fact impact your health? So that’s one that was to challenge the story. The second level is to look at what are the alternative worldviews.

Alexandra de Blas: If we look at an issue like climate change in Australia, how would you attack that one?

Sohail Inayatullah: In terms of greenhouse one, now that’s become a litany, right, that’s on the newspaper all the time, then I would look at the system that creates that knowledge. Who were the scientists doing it, research institutes, and how that knowledge is circulated throughout the world. Now underneath that, we know there’s a big debate and there are real worldviews here. We have at most scientists saying it is a problem and here’s the research, then we have conservative think-tanks saying It’s not a problem, that in fact it’s too costly to actually have greenhouse cuts etc. And so here you actually have a struggle foundation of different world views, it comes across as meaning it’s a struggle about science, we don’t know the full data, but my sense that’s what’s going on, it’s actually a foundational perspective on science, nature, technology, population. And to get sides to have a conversation about that, it’s not easy. So what tends to happen then is one worldview ends up dominating. And that may be the right way to go, that you actually develop a preferred vision and move towards that, and in this sense though, CLA is mapping out what the problem is, what the system is, what the competing sciences are, and what the stories are, because underneath is, they are different stories, right. Story No.1 is the world is ending because corporations are evil, so we have to change. Story No.2 is these are just green whingers all the time, and we just have to stay with the progress forever. And there’s also some third, fourth, other stories. But the first step for me as a researcher interested in the futures of what are is to actually map it out. Once you can map it out, then you can say OK, here’s the preferred future, or Here’s my preferred future, and here’s what I need to do.

Guests on this program:

Professor Sohail Inayatullah
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of the Sunshine Coast

Further information:

Metafuture.org
http://www.metafuture.org/
Publications:

Questioning the Future: Futures Studies, Action Learning and Organizational Transformation
Author: Sohail Inayatullah
Publisher: Tamkang University Press, 2002

Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social and Civilizational Change
Author: Sohail Inayatullah and Johan Galtung
Publisher: Praeger Publishing, 1997
Presenter: Alexandra de Blas
Producer: Jackie May
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