Kearney Group chief executive Paul Kearney met Tyson Yunkaporta, a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University, six years ago. Having read his book Sand Talk, he found inspiration and lessons in the deep understanding and country of nature that the First Nations people possess.
The concepts and thinking pioneered by Indigenous peoples have since influenced Kearney’s philosophy about investment today and advisers can learn from some of his views.
At the Responsible Investment Association Australasia conference in Sydney on Wednesday, Kearney said most investing is “inert”.
Instead, the influence from indigenous thinking is to take our understanding of natural systems and apply that to portfolio construction.
“Instead of thinking about ourselves as being apparatus of the financial system, we think of ourselves as custodians of different parts of the system where our role is to create increase, rather than growth.”
“If we took that mindset, then we would get healthy portfolio outcomes. We wouldn’t just see that our portfolio return was the thing that was going to sustain us.”
Kearney emphasised the importance of creating health in “local and natural systems”, as all investors are “part of a healthy ecosystem”.
Kearney said understanding how the natural systems are connected in the relations between things is key when constructing a portfolio.
This is because the portfolio should be “mapping onto the land” and mapping into place.
Part of the philosophy he has adopted from the First Nations people is members of the financial system – product manufacturers, advisers and investors – are all custodians of the system.
Kearney said it was important to remember to consider personal relationships in order to understand the health of an investment as well as financial metrics.
“We get caught in the vortex of having to explain things through static measurement,” Kearney warned.
“There are other ways of understanding what you’re doing than just the ROI [return on investment] that comes through – the statistic that comes through from a financial perspective.”
