The brilliance of the BALLE experiment
We all share the desire to shape our economic future for the better. Many of us want to address the peril of not giving some people access to opportunity, or to reimagine and reinvent a more sustainable future that balances growth and planet. What shape should our better future take? How can we include more people and surface more ideas within the system we’ve got, and in that of tomorrow?
BALLE — The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies — gathered some of the most brilliant minds in the world, both urban and rural, who practice macro ideas at the micro level. While the scope and scale of everyone’s individual work runs the gamut, everyone at BALLE gatherings shared one thing in common: they root their impact in real-life, beyond the conceptual or academic.
While there’s always value in like minds no matter what shape it takes, BALLE was never a convening of talking heads, and never a rah-rah rally. It was always an organization working for new economies in part, by being a platform for discourse that makes space for different perspectives and disagreement on how to build a better tomorrow. Space for divergent thinking and points of view is strangely rare these days — we talk more than ever, but too often, we come to the table with ready-made assumptions we’re motivated to protect.
Since 2016, I’ve facilitated two cohorts with BALLE, gathering with a circle of leaders to forward the thinking and practice of the new economies field, from conscious capitalism to solidarity and gift economies and many other new forms. Brilliant leaders come together in the cohort and work on transformation of the self and of their connection to others and apply that jet fuel to imagining new regenerative and sustainable economies that include everyone. As one of the facilitators, it’s my job to protect and advance the coming-together by giving structure to the openness.
It’s been incredibly rejuvenating to work for an organization that gives us the explicit mandate to challenge everyone to their highest level. But phew! It’s tiring, too. It demands as much energy as it generates. And from the moment it wraps and we all disperse to our homebases around the world, I’m always left feeling stimulated and fascinated by the experience.
Reflections after an immersion:
how big, beautiful work feels on the way home
1. I returned home exhausted, but wildly grateful for the influx of so much spirit — from the fellows as well as from my fellow facilitators. This facilitation team is my people. We’ve worked through a lot of tough moments together, all of us with very different orientations to the work. Our working-through is a mirror, on a smaller scale, of the working-through we’re convening.
It’s events like this that remind me of the biggest revelation about what makes success in facilitation: a mix of competence and responsiveness. I rely on my ‘ride-or-die’ people to push me and to push themselves — we know what we’re doing, and we’ll figure out what to do next when it all changes.
2. At The Outside, we’ve seen so many cohorts gather over the years. Teams within organizations and across organizations, or networks of dispersed collaborators challenged by shared jurisdictions, concerns, or mandates. The BALLE cohort gatherings were a great reminder of one of the most important ingredients to all good shared work: while it’s in our nature as motivated, productive (and under-pressure!) people beholden to an organization’s expectations, we should never rush into the ‘IT’ work (solving problems or meeting challenges) without addressing the ‘I’ (one’s own capacity for openness as an individual) and the ‘WE’ (the capacity of a community to connect).
3. In a passionately divided and sometimes tribal world, it’s profoundly important that we keep talking and listening to diverse points of view. When we do this with the people at the top of their field, we soak up the best ways to operate. In any other venue, we expect people to turf-protect, and to come into discourse saying “My way is THE way.” But at these kinds of gatherings, visionaries welcome input. Even challenging input. They’re fundamentally curious and open in a way that inspires curiosity and openness in all of us.
This work has always reminded me that no matter what the complexity, it will always serve us to continue turning toward each other. We are what we’ve got. We can lock arms, knowing we can depend on each other to stay open and focused on the change we all want to see.
BALLE is in transition, readying to go in a new direction called Common Future. It’s all very exciting with big vision and audacious goals, and we wish them well. And I know all of us — facilitators and participants — will take the extraordinary lessons of the BALLE experiment into our own better futures as we practice how to be in change.
