Value Translation
Surfacing Polycapital
Value Flows
How we understand and work with value is foundational to every decision we make. This applies at all scales; from our personal interactions to how we organise the global economy. At the same time value perception is a beautifully complex, contextual and dynamic concept. There are simply no easy answers, AI shortcuts or off-the-shelf ‘solutions’. To work meaningfully with value we need to commit to continuous cycles of questioning, listening, learning, analysing, testing and iterating. Value Translation is a process that can help to guide this work.
What is value translation and why do we need it?
There are so many things that need to happen in the world that will never generate a financial profit, or show a positive benefit-cost ratio. Does this mean they shouldn’t go ahead? Or that they should all compete for a tiny pool of philanthropic and charitable capital? Value Translation rejects these narrow options. Instead, it works to surface and present diverse, often invisible value flows in accessible formats. The overall aim is to bridge between different interests, needs and worldviews and to facilitate more informed decision making.
How does it work
Value Translation is a process supported by a flexible toolkit. It has been designed to be contextually respectful and starts from a set of live, place-based questions. The first phase uses conversational design to help us listen and learn from the system. Building on the system insights, the process then moves into respectful quantification and analysis so that we can add numbers as a layer in the story. The learnings are presented in a narrative canvas inviting dialogue and prompting new questions to be explored.
Surfacing Polycapital
Value Flows
Conversational design is a relational design practice. It can also be understood as an embodied research process where intuition and imagination are prioritised over rational objectivity. Using a variety of languages (e.g. visual, linguistic, sensory) it exposes entrenched patterns and supports trans-disciplinary collaboration. By centering curious, reciprocal dialogues it holds space for intuition, allowing emergent ideas to manifest in tangible and actionable forms.
Polycapital accounting recognises that the financial capital shown in our accounting systems has no intrinsic value, but is instead underpinned by a blend of the other more fundamental capitals. These capitals are also a rough shorthand for contextual, multidimensional expressions of value. For example: physical and mental health (Human Capital), shared trust and norms (Social Capital) and air, water, soil and biodiversity (Ecological Capital). We currently use financial capital globally as a synthetic proxy for value and thus as a key input to decision making. Polycapital accounting practices help us to understand and illustrate what this proxy represents in real terms.