The Salaam Matrix is a simple but insightful tool first developed in 2005 by writer, teacher, thinker and climate worker, Ramala Hubb’Allah under her then name, since altered. This tool, first called “People-Centered Model of Business” (now, more correctly, people-centering would be the name!) was spontaneously sketched in the last session of a class on entrepreneurship, in response to the question, “Why do we do business?”.
To give an insight into the life of markets to be served, Ramala sketched a diagram that represented the “busy-ness of life”—what is a business’s intended market or client doing in their daily life? The resulting sketch was then refined and activities classified in four categories: Spiritual, Personal-Familial, Socioeconomic, and Ecological-Political, called the Four Life Zones.
(Click here to read a legacy version of The Salaam Matrix, then titled ‘The People-Centered Model of Business’— on slideshare.)
Initially thought to be a product development tool, it was clear by 2006 when a fuller paper was written and published online (before being picked up by a journal in 2008) that this tool had immense potential beyond business, and could be used by community, political leaders, governments and such to study their constituencies. Ramala asserts that the model enforces a grounded and embedded view of “busy-ness of life” as an essential, sacred activity. The model has not been reworked since—until now. Reincarnated as The Salaam Matrix, this model is used to teach especially leaders about their markets, constituencies, eco-villages and communities. Applications as a community and sustainability tool are potentially vast. So vast, that a recent reflection upon the model led to this conclusion:
The Salaam Matrix, it is now evident, shows us the building blocks of a civilization.
This map is no longer limited to its humble origins of being a tool for product development. The Salaam Matrix is a tool for much more–it reveals the building blocks of a functioning, caring, cohesive civilization, active and thriving in various realms of life identified in the model as four ‘Life Zones’. This is an outlook that is of outstanding value in our world today, as of 2024, when we are witnessing old economies and ways of being disappearing, and we are in search of ways of holistically developing a new future that is not lopsided or blind-sided, a real risk with implications so vast, it has its own place in the scriptures (aka the apocalypse!).
In this stage of the 21st century, as the world communities are organizing around ecological and political motives and identities, The Salaam Matrix serves to ‘read’ and map a community, a market, a polity and constituencies. I am here to help aspiring leaders understand how to use this immensely-powerful tool. My aim is to make The Salaam Matrix a common reference tool for media people, teachers, politicians, designers, teachers, organizers and guides. Amen!
RH