Academic paper in The Journal of Positive Psychology - Systems informed positive psychology

Systems informed positive psychology
Cass Spong, Margaret L. Kern, Paige Williams, Rachel Colla, Kesh Sharma, Andrea Downie, Jessica A. Taylor, Sonia Sharp, Christine Siokou & Lindsay G. Oades

Received 12 Jun 2019, Accepted 21 Jun 2019, Published online: 12 Jul 2019

Link to full article Download

ABSTRACT

Despite the rapid growth and uptake of the positive psychological perspective by researchers and general audiences, hype regarding the field’s potential can lead to exaggerated claims, over-inflated expectations, disillusionment, dismissal, and unintentional harms. To help mature the field, we propose Systems Informed Positive Psychology (SIPP), which explicitly incorporates principles and concepts from the systems sciences into positive psychology theory, methodologies, practices, and discourse to optimize human social systems and the individuals within them. We describe historical underpinnings of SIPP, outline the SIPP perspective, clarify epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions, and highlight implications for research and practice. We suggest that SIPP can generate possibilities for creating sustainable unimagined futures.

Systems of Wellbeing – A deeper dive

Following our first article Wellbeing-taking a new perspective, we now dive deeper into Systems of Wellbeing; how we define them, some critical components required for the experience of wellbeing to emerge, and some steps you can take to move your team and organisation towards optimising your individual and collective potential.

To cultivate Systems of Wellbeing, we need to think like farmers. Farmers can’t force their crops to grow. They focus on cultivating the right conditions to enable their crops to thrive. Through constant monitoring, adapting, attention and care, the farmer learns and adjusts the conditions throughout the seasons and to different crops. To be a great farmer, you need to know what to look for, what to measure and monitor, and how to intervene in the system to ensure an optimum yield.

To cultivate Systems of Wellbeing for people and organisations, we need to know what to look for and what to do.

Existing definitions of wellbeing are insufficient.

In our first article, we positioned the need to move beyond tokenistic notions of wellbeing and look at wellbeing through a systems lens. Taking a systems view highlights the inadequacies in the current definitions of wellbeing. 

Let’s start with what we believe “wellbeing” is not:

What wellbeing is not:

1.      Wellbeing is not only happiness (hedonic wellbeing)

Why not:  A focus limited to subjective well-being or happiness neglects important aspects of positive functioning (eudemonic well-being).

What wellbeing is not:

2.     Wellbeing does not reside solely in the individual.

Why not:  While we agree that individual wellbeing is an important part of the overall system, for most of us, our individual wellbeing occurs within a broader context of working within an organisation and living in communities. Research shows the results from ‘resilience’ training programs focused only at the individual level do not work. For example, meta-analysis results of the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) (based on Martin Seligman’s work) in the study of nine trials across Australia, the Netherlands and the US conclude “no evidence of PRP in reducing depression or anxiety…the large-scale rollout of PRP cannot be recommended.” There is also a suggestion that gym memberships, individual mindfulness training and self-help apps may even undermine workplace well-being. Extending the farmer analogy, the focus is on the plants, not on their environment.

What wellbeing is not:

3.     Wellbeing is not the endless pursuit of growth, an inherently positive state or always ‘blooming’.

Why not:  To thrive requires sufficient recovery and rest. A longitudinal study investigating the variance within individuals showed that on a weekly basis relaxation is the most highly correlated with well-being. Low levels of switching off from work on the other hand predicted ill-being such as tension and stress. Just like farmers allow fields time to fallow, and the seasons allow plants time to rejuvenate, humans also need time to rest and recover.

What wellbeing is not:

4.     Wellbeing is more than just the absence of illness or harm.

Why not:  There is a bias in the workplace wellbeing literature of preventing illness rather than creating a workplace environment where people can thrive. Strategies aimed at preventing and addressing illness will not necessarily lead to thriving. Similarly, strategies for managing burnout in the workplace will not necessarily lead to thriving.

So then, what is wellbeing?

Wellbeing is an emergent property.

Taking a systems view, we define wellbeing as an emergent property and a dynamic state that arises from the interaction between our way of being in the world (human thriving) and the enabling conditions of the environment and context we live within and co-create (regenerative environment). The outcome of a system of wellbeing is optimised potential for all components of the system (figure 1).

Figure 1

When we have a system of wellbeing, all components (individuals, teams, organisations, eco-systems, and the planet) of the system can perform to their optimum potential.

To better understand this let’s unpack these two core constructs of wellbeing: Human Thriving, and Regenerative Environment.

Human Thriving is the result of where each of us direct our flow.

Thriving is a result of the relationship between a person’s self-care and development (the traditional focus of wellbeing) and their regenerative participation in the world (figure 2). Thriving is a way of being in the world, a way of relating to and caring for self, others, and our environment.  Thriving is only possible where there is a mutually beneficial exchange, where humans are directing their energy to cultivate universal wellbeing. In a system, everything is interconnected and interdependent, therefore we have a shared responsibility for wellbeing of each other and the whole.

Figure 2

a.     Self-care and development are an important part of the overall system.

Thriving is directly related to the available energy we have and how we use that energy. Optimising our available energy is achieved when we consider all aspects of the whole person - mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational. To do this we need to consider strategies that address our foundational energy driven by exercise, sleep, nutrition, and mindfulness. We also need to consider our emotional energy that comes from our relationships, connections, and mental approach to difficult situations. And we need to consider our spiritual needs that address the ‘why’ of our lives. The ‘why’ of well-being is connected to purpose and meaning, which establishes achievable goals leading to well-being. Meaning matters. In 10 sociocultural regions around the world, and across the whole lifespan, individuals who felt that their life had a purpose or meaning had higher levels of subjective well-being than those without a life meaning.

b.     To fully thrive you need to participate in life with collective responsibility for the wellbeing of all.
The World Health Organization (2004) specifically incorporates societal and work dimensions rather than a focus confined to the individual: “a state of well-being in which the individual realises his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.”

Recent research illustrated that languishing people tended to have a self-focus motivated by their own hedonic needs (pleasure seeking), whereas flourishers exhibited higher levels of other-focus coupled with eudaemonic values (striving to do what is meaningful) and a greater good. For example, languishers viewed social support in terms of supporting themselves, whilst flourishers perceived the reciprocal nature of social support. The study concludes that high levels of well-being require a eudaemonic dimension that transcends the self. Numerous studies have shown that people who place a high value on personal growth, close relationships, and community exhibited higher levels of well-being compared with those who focus on wealth.

Regenerative participation is deeply collaborative, it is active and inclusive and needs to involve a diversity of people and perspectives.  Regenerative actions create conditions where people feel belonging and support each other to learn together and enable everyone to contribute their unique gifts for the benefit of all. Our becoming cannot be separated from our belonging. This means choosing kindness and compassion, listening to others to understand, finding commonality and linkages whilst also appreciating, valuing and respecting difference in others and encouraging and supporting those around you to contribute their unique gifts.

Expanding further, this means choosing to tread lightly on the earth, growing your connections to place, and recognising your role within eco-systems as not separate or above them. Michael Dowd (author and theologian) looked at the commonly held traits of long surviving, sustainable indigenous societies and found they all measured their wellbeing by the health of the living world around them, they cultivated sacred relationships with the natural world and made decisions with future generations in mind.

Regenerative participation brings vitality and new growth to our teams, organisations, communities, and our eco-systems.  In order to transform our systems, we need to transform our relationships – with self, with others and with our planet and eco systems.

Human Thriving goes hand in hand with the enabling conditions of the environment and context.

Returning to our farming analogy, the farmer is focused on creating the conditions for the crop to thrive. If the analogy was extended to a forest, we are now understanding that rather than individual trees competing for sunlight, trees are part of a social system sharing nutrients, communicating, and helping to protect each other

The WHO (2010) defines a healthy workplace as ‘one in which workers and managers collaborate to use a continual improvement process to protect and promote the health, safety and well-being of all workers and the sustainability of the workplace’.

Research tells us that humans have three universal needs of autonomy, competence and positive-relatedness for psychological well-being, and that satisfaction of these needs in the workplace is fundamental to our overall wellness and performance. So, if our organisational environments undermine any of these needs, we will have higher levels of stress, exhaustion, turnover and burnout, irrelevant of how much self-care we practice.

In June 2022 Safe Work Australia announced changes to the Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) laws with express obligations for managing psychosocial risks, including identifying psychosocial hazards and eliminating or minimizing psychosocial risks. This growing momentum in legislative focus on psychosocial hazards is reinforcing the business case to invest in cultivating Systems of Wellbeing. 

Extending beyond the workplace to think even more broadly about the environment, we believe there is a need for business to play a new role, coming together with competitors, across sectors and with Government and Community in the pursuit of optimum outcomes for all.

The relationship between thriving and a regenerative environment result in the emergence of wellbeing.

Our level of thriving influences and shapes the environment and context in which we operate, and this environment can then influence where and how we source and direct our energy. 

Thriving is a verb, it is active, and we can develop to increase our thriving. The more we thrive, the more we contribute to the liveability and regenerative conditions of our environment.

And the reverse is also true. In environments where livability is low, there are additional challenges for humans to thrive. We struggle to find flow in our lives, and increasingly focus the direction of our energy on ourselves to ensure our survival. Further reinforcing this system away from wellbeing and optimised potential for all.

What are you doing to create Systems of Wellbeing in your organisation?

Organisational Wellbeing is a System of Wellbeing. Human thriving combined with a regenerative environment resulting in optimised potential for all the components of the system: the individuals, teams, organisation, community, society, and environment. Healthy workplaces require balanced investment at the individual, group, leader, and organisational level.

The results from the experience of companies who introduce well-being programmes indicates that a range of complementary interventions are more effective than a single approach. There needs to be a combination of top-down (such as job re-design) and bottom-up (team support) practices.

Well-being is part of a complex social system, and everyone and every context is unique. There is no single magic bullet. 

When you think about wellbeing in your organisation, what balance do you have at the individual, team, group, organisational level?

A series on wellbeing.

This is the second in a series of articles we are writing on Systems of Wellbeing. One of our aims in this series is to challenge thinking and perspectives through which workplace wellbeing is viewed. We’d like to move the way we think and talk about wellbeing from “we need to invest in our people” to “we need to work with our people as we invest in systems and resources to create workplaces and communities where we can all flourish”. Each of the articles will explore the concept of ‘Systems of Wellbeing’ in more detail.

Contact Katie and Cass to learn more about Systems of Wellbeing and how to optimise performance and thrive.

About the authors

Cass Spong Founder, ENTHEOS Consulting Senior Advisor   Leadership & People cass@entheos.com.au

Over 10 years ago I founded ENTHEOS Consulting to support clients’ in building their ability to see and sense more of the systems in which they operate, to support effective purposeful action.  With over 2 decades of international consulting experience, I have partnered with organisations and leaders across multiple industries and geographies including Asia-pacific, Europe and South America. I love supporting leaders to build Systems Leadership capacities and working with individuals and teams as a Lego®️ Serious Play ®️ facilitator and Flow Game host, creating space for wisdom, creativity, connection, and collaboration. I am passionate about the need to transform relationships to transform the Systems we live within.  I am an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Wellbeing Science and a Senior Industry Fellow with RMITs FORWARD Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.  

Katie O’Keeffe Co-Founder, Structured Creative
Senior Advisor Leadership & People
katie@structuredcreative.com.au

Over the last 20 years I have developed my craft in leadership, high performing teams, and organisational development. I have worked with many of Australia’s largest and most iconic institutions and organisations to impact transformational change through their leaders and teams. I have extended my background as an elite triathlete and coach with formal research and study in neuroscience and team development and combined all of this into a unique approach to developing high performing leaders and teams.

Wellbeing – taking a new perspective

Wellbeing is a hot topic. It gained momentum during the pandemic and is now front and centre as we navigate into a new future of work. There are over 99 measures of workplace well-being and the academics have yet to agree on what it is and how to measure it. For individuals, organisations and communities to thrive, let’s move beyond tokenistic notions of wellbeing and nurture the critical relationships and systems that support us. Wellbeing is a collective challenge that requires collective solutions.

The problem with ‘hot topics’ is they are treated in isolation while we look for a silver bullet solution. People produce pithy thought pieces in less than 800 words for a LinkedIn post or article to give you the answer to your ‘xyz’ problem. We’ve seen this pattern with topics like Diversity & Inclusion, Employee Engagement, Authentic Leadership (or whatever type of leadership is trending at a point in time), Agile, Digital Transformation, Customer Experience and Culture, and the list goes on.

It is natural to want to find quick solutions to problems. Our business approach to short term earnings over long term value creation puts pressure on leaders to implement quick fixes.  The reality of complex systems like organisations is that these silver bullet solutions don’t exist. We know this because if they did, these challenges would be solved by now.  And often the silver bullet solution has an unintended consequence of reinforcing the problem it is trying to solve.  For example, it has been shown that unconscious bias training delivered to improve diversity and inclusion outcomes in organisations is ineffective at best and can backfire at worst. (Chang et al. 2019, Forscher et al. 2019, Kalev et al. 2007)

We’ve become conditioned to look for quick and simple solutions to challenges that are symptoms of deeper, more complex issues.  Symptoms like burnout, turnover, bullying, disengagement, lack of diversity in leadership roles, and declining innovation are not separate problems that can be addressed through isolated initiatives or strategies. They are interdependent and indicators of organisational systems that are definitely not thriving.

We find it particularly disturbing when wellbeing initiatives are only focused on supporting individual employee ‘self-care’. This approach may actually undermine employee wellbeing because it sends the message, “We have given you all the resources to be well, so if you are not thriving, this is your failure and yours alone”.  Self-care is obviously important, but effective wellbeing initiatives also take into account elements such as feeling connected, trusted relationships, a sense of purpose and identity, feeling valued and agency and efficacy to pursue our goals. These are some essential elements to a “well” organisation and they are interdependent. If we miss one, it undermines and erodes the others.

We believe there’s a viable – and perhaps radical – alternative.

We could aspire to Well organisations that cultivate environments for all stakeholders to thrive – employees, customers, investors, partners, suppliers, the communities they operate within, and even the planet we inhabit.  We refer to these organisations as Systems of Wellbeing. 

Thinking about organisations as ‘living systems’ provides a comprehensive and holistic picture of what’s really happening inside an enterprise. A systems view of wellbeing (sometimes referred to as an ecological view) will provide insights that enable decision makers to address the root cause issues to symptomatic problems like those we’ve listed. 

It is time to move from wellbeing as self-care to wellbeing as a shared responsibility – we are all responsible for each other’s wellbeing. We need to get better at taking care of each other and the spaces we live in.  Wellbeing is a collective challenge that requires collective solutions.

To cultivate Systems of Wellbeing we need to think like farmers. Farmers can’t force their crops to grow. They focus on cultivating the right conditions to enable their crops to thrive. Through constant monitoring, adapting, attention and care, the farmer learns and adjusts the conditions throughout the seasons and to different crops.

This is no pipe dream. The global experience of the pandemic over the last two years has caused a shift in the energy to see, and engage in, the world in different ways. There is a growing recognition of the networked complexity of our challenges, an increase in our confidence to adapt and a reprioritisation of what is important.  Along with a realisation that purpose and profit can go hand in hand.  We hope this shift in energy also means people are willing to consider ‘wellbeing’ in a more complex and systemic way, not just as the latest hot topic.

We appreciate that thinking about the whole system can be overwhelming, so start with what you can influence - your own mindset, your team practices, and organisational structures within your control.  Experiment and observe the dynamics shift and share your experience. 

In the words of the poet David Whyte:

“Start close in,

don’t take

the second step

or the third,

start with the first

thing

close in,

the step

you don’t want to take.”

It is time for innovative action now and if not you, then who?

A series on wellbeing

This is the first in a series of articles we are writing on Systems of Wellbeing. One of our aims in this series is to challenge your thinking and the perspective through which you view workplace wellbeing. We’d like to move the way we think and talk about wellbeing from “we need to invest in our people” to “we need to work with our people as we invest in systems and resources to create a workplace where we can flourish”. Each of the articles will explore the concept of ‘Systems of Wellbeing’ in more detail, starting with diving deeper into a definition.

Contact Cass or Katie to learn more about Systems of Wellbeing and how to optimise performance and thrive.

About the authors

Cass Spong

Founder, ENTHEOS Consulting

Systems Informed People & Leadership Specialist                cass@entheos.com.au

Over 10 years ago I founded ENTHEOS Consulting to support clients’ in building their ability to see and sense more of the systems in which they operate, to support effective purposeful action.  With over 2 decades of international consulting experience, I have partnered with organisations and leaders across multiple industries and geographies including Australia, London, Japan, Greece, Brazil, United Kingdom, The Netherlands and China. I enjoy contributing as an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Wellbeing Science, and love working with individuals, teams and groups as a Lego®️ Serious Play ®️ facilitator or Flow Game host, creating space for wisdom, creativity, connection and collaboration. I am passionate about the need to transform relationships to transform the Systems we live within. 

Katie O’Keeffe

Co-Founder, Structured Creative
Senior Advisor Leadership & People                       katie@structuredcreative.com.au

Over the last 20 years I have developed my craft in leadership, high performing teams and organisational development. I have worked with many of Australia’s largest and most iconic institutions and organisations to impact transformational change through their leaders and teams. I have extended my background as an elite triathlete and coach with formal research and study in neuroscience and team development and combined all of this into a unique approach to developing high performing leaders and teams.