By David Cooperrider, Spring | Summer 2016

The purpose of this article is to join with what I’m now sensing as the most important business-for-good movement in the world today. Its message, paradoxically, is to declare that it’s time to abandon the language, the cultural meme, and the vision of a ‘sustainable’ economy. Just at the historic inflection moment when it seems like the whole world united in common cause in Paris around the call for sustainability, recent thinkers and researchers of pioneering stature are casting doubts. There is the very real possibility, says the evidence base, that the incrementalism involved in sustainability-as-less-harm is going to wear itself down to a trickle of energy, deplete our intrinsic motivation, and ultimately, result in too little too late. Our frames are like eyes and if we want a quantum leap in society we need the gift of new eyes.

That Humans and All of Life Will Flourish on Earth Forever

In the rest of this article I will reflect on the gift of new eyes offered by recent volumes such as The Flourishing Enterprise: The New Spirit of Business¹ and a special issue of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship where my colleagues and I explore the positive psychology of sustainability and the idea of ‘full-spectrum flourishing’² together with John Erhenfeld’s bold redefinition of sustainability as “the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on Earth forever.”³ In many ways this clarion call to ‘sustainability-as-flourishing’ might prove to be more important to the flaring forth of our social potential than the Brundtland Commission’s introduction of the term sustainable development in 1987.

For example, after every executive and stakeholder at The Clarke Group, Inc. recently read the Stanford University book The Flourishing Enterprise by Chris Laszlo and the research fellows at the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit they, the whole Clarke company, along with hundreds of stakeholders in the room, experienced an epiphany. It was a collective experience that allowed them to elevate their minds, hearts, and imaginations way beyond sustainability as less harm, less waste, less … less, less, less. When the CEO Lyell Clarke talked about the ‘heart of Clarke’ bringing regeneration, healing, and a net-positive fingerprint to every utterance, relationship, and community, and action of the company, he spoke about ‘project greater purpose’ with tears in his eyes—because of the sheer privilege to serve. The driving force of their success, in our view, was a shift in consciousness, what Ervin Laszlo has called the experience of ‘the whispering pond’ and what Chris Laszlo and his team of research fellows have called ‘the consciousness of connection.’

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