This article, written by Peter Jones and published on the FEI Perspectives blog on December 10, 2023, forms the basis for this fireside chat with John Ehrenfeld and is reposted here in its entirety.
We gave the Flourishing Enterprise Institute a name that we often have to explain—the idea of flourishing as “beyond sustainability” is not yet widely known, even after 25 years. Our use of flourishing is based on John Ehrenfeld’s concept developed through years of new thinking since leaving MIT as a founder of industrial ecology. John was in attendance at our special C4FE relaunch event on November 15 for the presentations on systemic management innovations. His participation revitalized my own thinking, as I’ll explain.
I first met John Ehrenfeld when he accepted the invitation to keynote at RSD6 in 2017 in Oslo. He had been working with Chris Laszlo’s CWRU team—on flourishing enterprises—and it emerged that we were working in parallel on similar ideas but at different levels of action. We are working with organizations and leaders on their practices while learning together on this path. John’s books have enlightened the individuals in companies and groups.
John’s keynote video is preceded by a brief manifesto:
The modernist bundle of beliefs and norms, which has powered Western societies for centuries, has begun to misfire badly in both the human and natural domains.
“Sustainability” is not the answer. To return to a positive trajectory, the critical first move is to choose to flourish as the normative design objective for artefacts and institutions. Flourishing, as an existential feature of living systems, is a valid indicator of achievement of human and non-human potential, as contrasted to current economic and psychological metrics.”
John’s latest book, The Right Way to Flourish, from 2019, reinforces the idea of “Flourishing Lives in Another World.” We will enter that new world as we learn and choose to live with care and attention to the complexity of our real natural world.
Following our engaging conversation in one of the break-out sessions during a recent C4FE (Community for Flourishing Enterprise) session, we discussed the language of the new systemic management frame. The FEI has developed an entire category with the SMI concept that is still in R&D. John suggested the SMI category can sound like control-based management tools and innovations, as there is a long history ranging from TQM to re-engineering, from value engineering to digital transformation. He has critiqued that the left-brain, managerial-control mindset would not enable flourishing but only “sustain” business as usual. The SMI is a new category, so we don’t want to start by making a category error; so we might say the main idea of the SMI category is to classify highly-validated “complete systems” of organizational learning and systemic processes that offer the potential to adapt any strategy toward flourishing. None of the SMI systems are by themselves a “flourishing toolkit”—and that’s not the intention. But these are not simple concepts, and we have a task in better framing and connecting to the aims of flourishing.
The Strongly Sustainable Business Model program that preceded the FEI was centred on the concept of flourishing, since its inception in 2014. We named the FEI to make that connection so salient that we would have to explain it until everyone understood its meaning. When we share the real intent of flourishing, which is moving human relations with nature and our societies toward a future that doesn’t exist today, it demands we refresh that stand on John’s vision almost every time.
Profiles
John R. Ehrenfeld returned to his alma mater, MIT, in 1985 after a long career in the environmental field and retired in 2000 as the Director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment. Following that, he served until 2009 as Executive Director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology, guiding its development from its founding in 2000. He is well-known for his book The Right Way to Flourish: Reconnecting with the Real World, published by Routledge in 2019. He is also the author of Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming our Consumer Culture and Flourish: A Frank Conversion about Sustainability (with Andrew Hoffman). He served from 2008 to 2012 on the adjunct faculty at the Marlboro College Graduate Center where he taught “Exploring Sustainability” in the MBA for Managing Sustainability program. He is currently a trustee of the Viridis Graduate Institute and also an adjunct faculty. He has taken up writing poetry in his 80’s and had several poems published.
In October 1999, the World Resources Institute honoured him with their first-lifetime achievement award for his academic accomplishments in the field of business and environment. He received the Founders’ Award for Distinguished Service from the Academy of Management’s Organization and Natural Environment Division in August 2000. He spent part of the 1998-1999 academic year at the Technical University of Lisbon as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar and was Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Delft during the 2000-1 academic year. He is an editor (Emeritus) of the Journal of Industrial Ecology. He holds a BS and ScD in Chemical Engineering from MIT and is the author or co-author of over 200 papers, books, reports, and other publications.
Adapted from https://www.johnehrenfeld.com/about-john/
Peter Jones is an SDA co-founder and Editor in Chief of the SDA journal Contexts. Dr. Jones is the Distinguished University Professor of Systemic Design at Tec de Monterrey, Mexico City. He continues to advise and teach at OCAD University, Toronto, in the Design for Health and other graduate programs. Peter leads systemic design research in new economies, healthcare, media, community governance, social systems and policy design through collaboration in international networks. He connects research and practice through founding commitments with the Flourishing Enterprise Institute, the Circulate Health program, and other organizations. His books and publications can be found at designdialogues.com.