In an increasingly polarized world, we aim to foster conversations across silos and to help bridge partisan divides. A flourishing society needs healthy, thriving institutions. We have suffered a tremendous loss of public trust in our institutions—government, religion, business, science, the criminal justice system, and more. A good deal of this mistrust is warranted by ethical scandals, corruption, and abuse in these institutions. While we certainly need policies to improve governance and compliance, we also need to better understand and change the factors that corrode the functioning of these institutions and systems. Moving from critique to viable solutions requires developing a robust vision for the good—including a thicker conception of what flourishing organizations are and a better understanding of the causal mechanisms that contribute to such flourishing.

Our Focus

Our focus is not simply on the flourishing of individuals (though it certainly includes considerations of workplace well-being, resilience, burnout, and so on), but on understanding what it means for institutions to thrive. This will require conversations and debates on what it means to consider any particular institution as flourishing, how to measure flourishing across various levels: for instance, intra-organizational, inter-organizational, and inter-systemic relationships; measuring the impact of organizations and institutions on broader society and the alignment of institutions to truth, goodness, beauty, and justice. We are also concerned with identifying and examining hidden assumptions about what good or healthy institutions and social systems look like. In an increasingly polarized world, we aim to foster conversations across silos and to help bridge partisan divides.