Flourishing Today

There is a lot of talk about flourishing these days, despite the context of a world in trouble from political divisiveness, climate change, various sustainability crises, what is called the sixth great extinction in which many of the world’s creatures are dying off, and growing global inequality. All of these issues are dealt with in depth in many other places. Yet there is a movement afoot by a coalition of thought leaders in an initiative called Leading for Wellbeing, along with others, including Tellus Institute’s Great Transition Initiative and Future Earth’s ‘meta-narrative’ project, to build a new socio-economic framework in the world. At the core of the emerging framework is a new narrative that fosters memes of flourishing, wellbeing, and dignity for all as opposed to the accumulation of wealth by the lucky few.

Changing the narrative is important, as is understanding what flourishing actually means. Flourishing means growing vigorously, thriving, and being prosperous. Flourishing is associated with success and productive activity, and can mean reaching a height of development. It can also mean making sweeping or dramatic gestures. Derived from the Latin word florere from flos, flourishing etymologically is associated with flowers as adornments, implicitly reflecting notions of abundance, generativity, and diversity that are often associated with different types of flourishing.

For positive psychologist Martin Seligman flourishing is at the center of what it means for people to be ‘authentically happy,’ generative, and functioning optimally. For Seligman, flourishing and wellbeing happen largely for individuals. Flourishing in the individual person context has to do with the ability for people to develop whatever talents they have, build lasting relationships with other people, and meaningfully contribute to the world around them, activities he associates with wellbeing through five attributes: positive emption, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment or what he calls PERMA.

Although the idea of flourishing certainly is associated with individual and psychological human flourishing as a result of the rapid emergence of Seligman’s ideas about positive psychology (and positive organizational studies or POS), there is another more systemic sense of flourishing. Flourishing at the system level relates to the sustainability and health of human and ecological systems, e.g., as articulated by John Ehrenfeld and Andrew Hoffman in their book Flourishing. Ehrenfeld and Hoffman argue that humans and their ecosystems need to radically shift to create human flourishing at the system level,. They build into the idea of flourishing what they term ‘being and caring,’ rather than today’s emphases on ‘needing and having. That is, Ehrenfeld and Hoffman would shift us away from materialism, consumption, and ever greater production of economic goods and services. These things seem to truly satisfy few, and, from an ecological perspective, are destroying humanity’s capacity to live successfully on Earth over the long term.

The sustainability take on flourishing offered by Ehrenfeld and Hoffman is complemented by work on Flourishing Enterprise by Chris Laszlo and Judy Sorum Brown with a number of others, who relatedly argue that ideas about flourishing, responsibility (or, better perhaps, stewardship), and sustainability need to be driven into enterprises of all sorts so that humanity can continue to thrive on the planet. Flourishing enterprises go well beyond many companies notions today about corporate (social) responsibility to work towards enterprises that are actually sustainable because they integrate new, more sustainable (not simply less unsustainable, as Ehernfeld might argue) practices, and thereby help to bring about a ‘necessary transition’ towards a sustainable enterprise economy—or flourishing for all.

The idea of flourishing also finds expression in a new set of awards called Aim2Flourish offered by the Fowler Center for Business as An agent of World Benefit at Case Western Reserve University, which recognizes global innovations aligned with the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Basically, the SDGs themselves provide a framework for numerous self-organizing initiatives from businesses, NGOs, and governments at multiple levels and in numerous places globally. Crucially, the SDGS also provide a new narrative about how people and their institutions can and should operate in societies and on the Earth. The SDGs focus on intractable issues like complete eradication of poverty and hunger, good health and wellbeing for all, gender equality, and reduced inequality, among other laudable and exceedingly challenging goals. With explicit goals of ending poverty, protecting the planet, and ensuring prosperity for all, the SDGs provide a helpful roadmap for anyone interested in working to build a more flourishing world.

Even in our politically-charged and divisive context today, we can probably all agree that we want to leave the world better for our grandchildren. The idea of flourishing, supported by these emerging initiatives, along with the many efforts to work towards implementing the SDGs, can help push us in that direction.