Some Key Takeaways from the Research
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Over the course of seven years, Beloved Economies’ research and insights were co-created with a community of co-learners and research team members who all contributed unique expertise, talents and insights. Joanna Cea and Jess Rimington served as co-facilitators of the co-learning community and co-directors of the research. At times the research was sustained as a labor of love, and key phases were supported by grant funding from philanthropic partners.
The research journey included:
60 co-learners from a diverse array of teams and enterprises
Feature article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR)
A start in collaboration with Stanford University and evolving into a grassroots research initiative
Independent team of evaluators validating initial research findings
The book Beloved Economies: Transforming how we work explores many key themes, findings, and implications of the research. Some highlights and take-aways include:
There is a case for changing how we work
Because work isn’t working.
The current way of work is neither sustainable nor worth it. The societal damage created by business as usual in the current extractive economy can’t be repaired by the latest innovations in tech.
We have to change something deeper: how we work.
Everyone can contribute to practicing a beloved economy — reorienting how we work to share power and unlocking well-being, meaning, and connection.
We can break out of business as usual and into breakout innovation
Success can mean far more than profit for a few.
Early in the research process, Cea and Rimington noticed a unique form of success, which they termed breakout innovation. When teams and groups break out of business as usual and achieve this form of success, they create transformative change that is far-reaching, enduring, and imaginative in its departure from the lovelessness of the status quo.
The key to achieving breakout innovation? Broadly distributed rights to design. Our rights to design are what we exercise when we imagine, decide, and build together — we hold the designer’s pen to sketch out our futures. Beloved Economies shares seven practices to deconsolidate rights to design, so organizations and teams are able to mend the damage of business as usual.
Imagination is something with real teeth—a powerful tool.
Because–as Lucille Clifton says, we cannot create what we can’t imagine.
Deconsolidated rights to design nourish the inherent diversity of imagination as more people can contribute their visionary insights with ease. That imagination is essential to transforming how we work. When groups boldly imagine what’s possible with work—what we call economic imagination—they can affect the bedrock constructs upon which business as usual is continually recreated.
Groups achieving breakout innovation tend to follow seven underlying practices in how they work
To transform how we work, we have to try things we haven't before. The seven practices are a framework to cultivate economic imagination, and they offer a start on reimagining work. Read more about the seven practices here —>
Beloved economies are already being imagined and built.
A wide array of groups are working in ways that are bringing to life economies that all of us can love.
As just two examples:
RUNWAY
Capital investment reimagined
Since its founding, financial innovation firm RUNWAY has turned heads across the startup investment field with its commitment to reimagining a “friends and family” approach to capital investment, rooted in love for Black entrepreneurs and communities.
In the throes of the pandemic, the firm placed decision-making power in the hands of their community of entrepreneurs to determine how the firm could best leverage funds to support their businesses. The Universal Basic Income program that emerged had a powerful impact: 100% of RUNWAY’s business partners are still operating after two years of pandemic life, and 87% received a forgivable loan from the government's Paycheck Protection Program, compared to only 1.9% of Black-owned businesses nationally.
“RUNWAY does far more than write checks; their investment is about ‘people really showing up for you, being there for you in a deep way, around the success of your business and your life.’ ”
Concordia Rebuilding New Orleans, reimagined
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, several disaster recovery plans failed to win city-wide approval. Concordia, a planning, design, and architecture company, facilitated an alternative approach — one where residents were decision-makers in every step of the process, from ideation to voting to administration.
The resulting Unified New Orleans Plan directly engaged over 9,000 residents in its creation and was the only recovery plan to gain the widespread support and official approval required to unlock urgently needed federal relief funds.
The seven practices are a way to start a practice and commitment to reimagining how we work.
To break out of "business as usual," organizations need to embrace transformative change across all of the seven practices, simultaneously and continuously. The practices aren’t a step-by-step manual, but a framework to cultivate economic imagination.
While the research found these seven practices to be an effective foundation for teams to achieve breakout innovation, the researchers do not see these practices as all-encompassing. Instead, they recognize that these seven are likely a subset within a wider universe of possible practices that can support teams to build beloved economies by embodying wise ways of work.
The seven practices are not activities you can do once and consider them done—like a checked box. Instead, they are about continual commitment to trying, learning, and growing.
Finally, while breakout innovation is about the possible and emergent not yet, it is crucial to note that the seven practices are not new. Elements of these practices have long been an important part of many Indigenous Peoples’ lifeways and the work of grassroots social movements around the globe.
Changing how we work affects the economy. (Really.)
As individuals and enterprises change what they value and prioritize in their work, everyday decisions in our workplaces accumulate and contribute toward upholding or reconstructing the economy. Consider the ripple effect of breakout innovation: When multiple members of a team experienced working with the seven practices, entire enterprises often changed their strategic approach, focus, and day-to-day work processes, as well as their governance and financial structures, toward deconsolidating rights to design.
Breakout innovation can spark change in widening circles—from individuals to teams to whole enterprises to industries and geographies. The process of working together in breakout ways instills in those involved a permanently different sense of what is possible in how we work, in what we can imagine and build. Ultimately, experiencing breakout innovation begets more breakout innovation.
“An economy is created by the everyday decisions we make in the places where we work....Striving toward a different economy is about creating a little piece of it today and focusing our attention there, so that we may begin to live and work in beloved ways right now.”