There can be little doubt that “business and sustainability” is a movement. But what if it’s a movement that’s moving in the wrong direction? What if the business community hasn’t quite figured out what sustainability is really all about? That would be like heading toward Wyoming when we should be headed toward, say, Arkansas. And this, I believe, is our current situation.

To understand why this is so, we need to do two quick fly-overs.

The first is of the model that forms the basis of my recently published book, Out of the Labyrinth: Who We Are, How We Go Wrong, and What We Can Do About It. In that work, I propose that each of us engages in three types of activity during our lives. We pursue end goals, we interact with other people and the natural world, and we search for meaning. Each of these three activities constellates into a subpersonality with its own unique values and feeling-tone. These three subpersonalities are the “strategist,” the “citizen,” and the “seeker,” and they inhabit what I call the “objective domain,” the “social domain,” and the “meaning domain,” respectively.

These three value systems -- identity systems, really are design patterns that we project into our social and political relationships, our institutions, and our broader culture. In fact, the triad is a “fractal” that shapes our entire created world!

As people, as managers in organizations, and as citizens, we need to equitably balance the needs and interests of these value systems. That’s what sustainability is about, in the end -- balancing the strategist, the citizen, and the seeker, inside ourselves and in our institutions.

Western industrial culture favors the strategic, objective domain at the expense of the meaning-oriented depth dimension. To the extent that sustainability calls for a healthier balance -- and it does -- it’s subversive.

Now for the second fly-over -- this time, of the recent history of environmentalism.

Modern environmentalism is generally agreed to have been launched with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. For the next quarter-century or so, environmental challenges were generally viewed as being mostly susceptible to technical solutions. If a factory was emitting too much pollution, you put a filter on the pipe, and that was that. This was Sustainability, Stage 1: it was a linear, analytical, “objective-domain” approach to environmental challenges.

During the latter half of the 1980s, another view took hold -- “sustainable development.” The challenge came to be seen as having a social as well as environmental dimension. Terms like “social equity” and “triple bottom line” came into use. This was Sustainability, Stage 2: the objective domain plus the social domain. The strategist plus the citizen.

With this new insight, it was now assumed that the conversation about sustainability had come to an end. We now “knew” what sustainability was all about. Or did we? Actually, I don’t think so. The seeker and the meaning dimension were nowhere in this conversation. The technical and social legs of the sustainability stool were present, but the third leg -- the “soulful” leg, as it were -- was completely neglected.

Someday we may arrive at a Sustainability, Stage 3 that integrates the seeker’s “depth dimension” into its vision and strategies, but we haven’t gotten there yet. In what ways can people be supported to have a deep and authentic experience of meaning, and to do so in ways that not only do not interfere with, but actively support, the transition to a just and sustainable world? This is one of the critically important design challenges of our time, and it is one that urgently needs to be integrated into the collective conversation about sustainability.

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Carl Frankel’s most recent book is Out of the Labyrinth: Who We Are, How We Go Wrong, and What We Can Do About It.