Written by Jamie Lunnon (OW)

Organised by Katy Granville-Chapman and Emmie Bidston

Wellington College | University of Oxford

Despite growing up there as the son of two teachers, driving into Wellington College for the first day of the 2024 Leadership for Flourishing Conference left me feeling newly dazzled by the grounds. They were humming with energy and brimming with the heady late-spring smell of flowering rhododendrons. In short, I thought, it was an ecosystem ‘flourishing’. But, like the Wellington grounds, that very word soon took on a new light for me.

In the spirit of honesty espoused by many of the great leaders at the conference, I must admit that these flourishing surroundings stood in stark contrast to the disposition of the bloke witnessing them. Two months into a job hunt which would make Sisyphus look like employee of the year and driving into the college with L-plates on after failing my driving test with a whopping 17 minors and 4 majors, I felt comical entering ‘Great School’ with, I presumed, a bunch of first-pick ‘flourishers’.

Never has imposter syndrome been dispelled so quickly. My first conversation was with an artist who had been asked to illustrate the first day of the conference. She told me that she, too, experienced imposter syndrome. Fat chance, I thought, seeing her wonderful illustration of a flourishing tree. However, that honest human admission and willingness to connect to my feelings set the tone for the rest of the conference, and is a foundational principle of ‘Leadership for Flourishing’.

As a schoolboy, I remember the word ‘flourishing’ being used in report cards – ‘Jamie is flourishing in English, picking up 21/25 in his essay on War Horse’ – or, more often – ‘Jamie is not flourishing in his Mathematics, once again trying to use the Algebra letters to write limericks’. What I quickly learnt was that this understanding of the word, as something which qualifies success or outcome, narrows and misrepresents it.

The first keynote speaker, a formidably impressive Afghan social entrepreneur and human rights advocate, shared the story of her mother only being able to leave Afghanistan because of the generosity of a stranger who leant her a watch to pay border control. She told her that ‘if you can’t pay it back, pay it forward’. That idea of ‘paying forward’, of handing on the kindness of someone before you to someone after you, she used as a springboard to talk about the key principles of her work in human rights advocacy. She states that there is a ‘gender apartheid’ in several countries around the world and that the issue cannot be solved until the concept is recognised in international conventional law. Quoting the Greek Proverb, she suggested that leadership is ‘planting trees in whose shade you will never sit’. Leadership is not a position or a title, but a way of being. It is a commitment to serving others and harnessing suffering as a tool to use for good. These foundational principles are what cut through the alchemy of ideas from thought-leaders across disciplines as the absolute embodiment of ‘leadership for flourishing’. Distilling these ideas from educators, neuroscientists, professors, olympians, police and UN officers (to name a few) is a difficult task. However, I am going to split it into five key lessons I learnt at this conference.

1.  Defining Leadership

To build a flourishing ecosystem, we need good leaders, which means first working out what a good leader is. With such an impressive array of leaders around, all of whom embody the notion of leading by example, we were in good hands. However, it is not a straightforward task. As the Chair and Founder of an International Investment Company pointed out: ‘it’s easier to find the roots of failure than the roots of success’. That’s why there is an ‘art and science to leadership’, but no simple, ready formula.

An academic committed to studying leadership and management, asked us to problematise our understanding of leadership. She, quite brilliantly, suggested that the word ‘leadership’ suffers from a ‘pre-modifier curse’. We talk of ‘authentic leadership’, ‘transformative leadership’ and have lost sight of what leadership actually means, which is ‘beyond position and disposition’. Her CORE model positions leaders as Centred in their impulses and instincts, One with their ecosystem, Reflexive in their thoughts and actions and Energised/Energising. Through this, she says, we realise that ‘leadership is a stance, it is an invitation to rise to the occasion’. This echoed an earlier speaker’s belief that ‘leadership is not a job title or position, it’s a decision to get involved’.

Leadership is also a willingness to get others involved and to draw out the best in them; to listen, to be authentic and to admit when things haven’t gone perfectly and work with others on how to improve. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the keynote speaker’s organisation ‘Onward Network’ which elevates female leaders who seek to make Afghanistan a more equitable place.

2.  Defining Flourishing

With better awareness of what sort of leadership traits contribute to building a flourishing ecosystem, we had to figure out what it actually means to flourish. This meant, as I touched on earlier, having the word defamiliarised and reinvented. One speaker, who works on developing the UN ‘Global Flourishing Goals’, talked about how we can deconstruct and reconstruct words to manoeuvre meaning. For example, how the noun ‘civilisation’ with its connotations to society and its people is radically different to the verb ‘civilising’ with its problematic colonial connotations. He asked us to consider flourishing as a noun, to capitalise the ‘F’ and, in doing so, to reify and embolden it. Flourishing is not something we do, it is something we are.

In our breakout discussions, we talked about images which spring to mind when we hear the word ‘flourishing’. There were, of course, natural images; cultivating gardens, nourishing plants to grow. But when we dug deeper, some more unusual images came out. Someone thought of a ‘musical score’, where flourishing is about arranging voices, parts, rhythms to contribute to a harmonious whole, with the spaces for silence just as important as spaces for noise. Many talked of ‘rainy days’, of being in your yellow raincoat and splashing through puddles; leaning into difficulty as fuel for flourishing. One of the panellists, who runs ‘flourishing cafes’ designed to facilitate open dialogue for different people within communities, built on this beautifully. He argued that ‘suffering is the soil in the ground of flourishing’. Flourishing involves venturing into the unknown and using suffering as a way of connecting with other people to create something bigger than yourself.

So, as we found out, flourishing is hard to define. It is layered and deeply personal. However, perhaps the best way to epitomise what it is to flourish builds on something said in the second keynote speech on day two: ‘we matter’. Flourishing is a way of feeling that you matter. And, in the interest of being semantically nuanced, let’s quickly deconstruct this word. Matter, as a noun, is a tangible, scientific thing. It is a physical part of the constitution of an ecosystem, an assertion of existence. But, as a verb, it means having a purpose and an impact on the wider ecosystem you are part of.

3.  Learning to Flourish

As the second keynote said, the 20th Century was all about quantity over quality. At a societal level, a focus on character, lifestyle, wellness – Flourishing – has been left in the mud. ‘Where is flourishing, passion and quality of life in the current political manifestos?’ He asked. We have not, in recent decades, been programmed to flourish. We have been programmed to ‘succeed’ at all costs, to progress forward (without looking back at where progress has gone wrong in the past). The first step for learning to flourish is deprogramming ourselves from this way of being.

But there are barriers to this. A Head of Department at a school in Witley argued that it is hard to envisage ways of thinking which facilitate flourishing because we are so stuck with the idea of the self, particularly in a high-vanity society. He believes that you cannot divorce the flourishing of the individual from the flourishing of the whole. The Programme Manager at the Oxford Character Project lamented the fact that character is still not a mainstream educational discipline and suggested that it is drowned out by the volume of our busy lives. Her questions:

1. ‘How do we cultivate character when the world is too loud?’
2. ‘How do I prioritise flourishing when there is too much on my plate?’

Her answer: ‘the character is the plate’.

We need to train ourselves into seeing flourishing as the foundational principle of our lives, the ‘plate’ upon which all else gathers. All the speakers had a different approach as to which methods we could use to learn these traits. The Assistant Vice Chancellor for Character and Ethics for the Texas Tech University System encourages practising gratitude, not just as a virtue but as a skill. By making gratitude diaries, for example, one can develop the virtue of humility, redirecting focus away from the self and towards the world and others. Another panellist, who runs ReconnectEd, puts this theory into practise through her work upskilling and recruiting people from estates across the country at risk of school exclusion to flourish. She draws in people who can relate to the kids, people who have perhaps themselves been excluded from education in the past and who understand the challenges the kids face. Through this, the volunteers learn to flourish by connecting with and helping others and the kids learn to flourish by developing role models they can relate to.

4.  Teaching to Flourish

Like leadership, there is an art and science to flourishing which needs to be planned and carried out carefully and deliberately. The leader of Brainomics Venture at Center for BrainHealth and UT Dallas talked about the relationship between competition and flourishing and how we see this in our real-world systems. For example, the difference between league structures in English football and American football, the former mirroring a more stratified capitalist system and the latter, with no relegation or promotion and the redistributive draft system, mirroring a more socialist system. His point was that the way we design systems and structures can actively determine how easy it is for people to flourish within them. This idea was built on by an Associate Fellow of the Oxford Character Project, who argued that we need to carefully plan how to create the conditions necessary for flourishing at a systemic level. Like the road network, he said, we need to create systems which allow people to do quite difficult, specialised things without even really having to think about it. In other words, to create ‘systems which are wiser than we are’.

We also need to communicate flourishing properly to those we teach it to. This means being aware of the nuances of differing perspectives. As the panellist who works on the Global Flourishing Goals mentioned, flourishing, like anything, is subject to the forces of culture and narrative. Each community and culture will have its own take on what flourishing means and what it is to flourish. We need to understand this on a semantic level. How we write and speak makes a huge difference. This means creating a lexicon for flourishing which is globally inclusive and accommodating. What does ‘flourishing’ mean when translated into different languages and cultures? He claims that, like all words, the word ‘flourishing’ gets ‘seeded’, starts to mean something, to grow and to spread (like an ecosystem) but that this requires cultivation and nurturing. The only way to ensure inclusivity is to make the teaching and communication of flourishing a collaborative task. There was an emphasis, amongst many of the speakers, on co-creation and the idea of flourishing being an invitation. To teach it properly, we need to have the humility to go on a journey with those we are teaching it to, to really understand what it means to different people in different contexts. We need to build inclusivity into the very design of the discipline, rather than, as is sadly a too-common feature of the 21st Century, trying to retrofit it into inherently exclusionary systems.

5.  Measuring flourishing

So, having discussed how we want to define leadership and flourishing and then how we want to go about learning and teaching it, we need to think about how to measure it. Our conversations suggested that we can only measure flourishing by changing the way we measure success. A TV commentator who was forced to retire from racecar driving due to a broken back, a Detective Sergeant at City of London Police and a retired Olympic rower turned senior diplomat were united in their belief that success should not be outcome-oriented.

Working with professional racing drivers, it is critical that we focus on process rather than outcome. Not on how to win a race, but how to be the best you can be on any given day. Working in and around the Olympic gymnastic team, the ex-Olympic rower argues that we have to redefine success by thinking of it as something which lasts beyond the temporary moment. Rather than showcasing medals, ‘Olympians should role-model joy’. The Detective Sergeant believes we need to humanise discipline institutions by being better at commending positive actions and less focused on criticising failure. As luck would have it, if we do all of these things, ‘outcomes’ take care of themselves. As an author, researcher and teacher illustrated to us with data-driven examples, prioritising love, character and flourishing in an organisation is not just nice, it is useful. Love and leadership for flourishing generate value for shareholders.

Final thoughts

If we learn how to flourish, think carefully about how to create the right conditions for flourishing and communicate it openly, inclusively and effectively to those we are teaching it to, it is ‘only a matter of time before there is a global flourishing movement’. To bring this into the room I found myself nervously entering on Thursday morning, I truly do not think I have ever been in an environment flourishing quite as powerfully as the 2024 Leadership for Flourishing Conference. Of course, that is unsurprising because it is literally a room packed with people whose life-work is connected with the idea of flourishing and leading. However, to create an atmosphere in which everyone felt appreciated, valued and heard is a testament to the characters of the conference coordinators and leaders Emmie Biston and Katy Granville-Chapman. The illustrator’s tree, which started the day as a black and white, skeletal structure had, when I came back to look at it at the end, taken on a vibrancy and vitality reflective of all those flourishing leaders who so generously and openly shared their ideas over the two days. Her tree was a tree we were all lucky enough to sit under!