Money as Water
Friday, September 17, 2021
The eighth Future of Investing Community of Practice meeting of 2021 took place on Friday, September 17th, 2021 with Sharon Chang, Jennifer Brandel, Jordan Luftig and Mark Beam in attendance from the CoP. Also present were Oona Eager, Sarah Rulfs and Jennifer Mercado.
As a reminder, our Substack will be used for both capture and discussion. This post includes highlights and action items, in addition to long-form raw notes. As always, please jump in and share your thoughts by providing direct comments.
Meeting Highlights (tl;dr)
We prototyped and discussed quick ‘mappings’ of the money system as compared to the natural water system
We discussed the usefulness of analogies of this kind—how might they serve as pathways to communicate complex systems, generate dialogue and provoke imagination and mindset change?
Additional Links
The Visual Capitalist (money and markets in visualization)
Meeting Capture (raw notes)
This meeting was an invitation to explore an analogy we have been contemplating for some time: in which ways can we draw a comparison between the money system and the water system? How might we map one to the other? In doing so, we were curious to find whether an analogy like this one could provoke deeper thought and imagination in our relationship to the money system and its all pervading nature.
We opened the meeting with a check-in question: what is your favourite body of water? Responses flowed directly from the heart:
“the body of water I’m closest to at any given time”
We then began to explore the comparison of water to money through a simple exercise: each member quietly mapped components of the money system to the water system from their perspective. After 10 minutes, each member walked through their map, then we debriefed the exercise overall.
Map Prototypes
The following are four attempts to map the money system to the water system
Jennifer Brandel
Groundwater. So much of our economy is not “seen”; it isn’t calculated as part of GDP and there isn’t a price tag on it, yet it is incredibly valuable e.g childcare, elder care
Jordan Luftig
Precipitation and storage in the atmosphere. Where does money originate from? Central banks and mints. Also, I thought a lot about how different pots and sources of money have an impact on our lives and the general rule that people in proximity to money tend to end up with the most money.
Mark Beam
Drought. Banks, governments and VCs don’t know or understand what’s necessary on the ground in any given community, especially in a community that is facing a ‘drought’ of capital. What would a Bioregional Infrastructure Bank look like? Can we imagine a new version of the ‘medium’ of money?
Sarah Rulfs, Sharon Chang, Oona Eager and Jenn Mercado
Rivers. Once money flows through the whole system it flows back toward the oceanto ocean through profit and consumer spending.
Is this exercise in mapping and comparison a useful one? In what way?
Members mostly agreed that if one takes a metaphor really far (1:1) then readers tend to become distracted by its accuracy (or inaccuracy), and look to poke holes rather than engage in meaningful dialogue. Sometimes a metaphorical ‘nod’ can be a much more useful tactic to generate emotional involvement rather than overly analytical criticism.
One member raised that because money is a human construct, a more appropriate medium by which to draw comparison to the money system would be ‘information’. We wondered: what are the outcomes of the money system that we want, and what would be the components of a new system that would deliver these effectively?
Overall, we are still very interested in how we might use multiple lenses and/or framings (e.g. water systems, information. . . .) to map learnings and provoke deeper thought, imagination, and dialogue around the notion of Free(d) Money.