Flourishing Business Community Speakers Series: Stories from the Field #34
Flourishing and Leadership – The Practice & Research of Two Sides of the Same Coin with Dr. Clare Sarah Goodridge
| Date: Tuesday, September 29, 2026 |
| Time: 15h00 UTC – 08h00 PST, 11h00 EDT, 16h00 BST, 17h00 CET, 00h00 + 1 day JST. To convert UTC to your timezone, click here |
| Duration: 1 hour |
| Registration: Required via Eventbrite at bit.ly/SFF34-Register |
For our thirty-fourth monthly flourishing business community speaker series: stories from the field, the community is delighted to welcome Dr. Clare Sarah Goodridge (LinkedIn & Flourishing Leadership Coaching Practice), and Founder of The Future of Flourishing, based in Perth, Western Australia. Clare is also a board member of the organization which convenes this community – the Flourishing Enterprise Co-lab.
The Flourishing Enterprise Co-lab is grateful for the support of Social Innovation at Georgian College, Ontario, Canada, to put on our speaker series.
Dr. Clare Sarah Goodridge is a flourishing systems educator, executive leadership Coach, and the founder of The Future of Flourishing. She works at the intersection of leadership science and flow (aka flourishing) research. Her work is animated by a single question: “what does it actually take for all life to flourish?”
Her path has taken her from the Flow Research Collective, where she trained and coached over 200 peak performance coaches, to founding The Future of Flourishing and Hearth Leadership. Through this research informed practice and her recent doctorate she developed the Human Robustness Method. This is an academically grounded approach integrating flow science, nervous system regulation, and behaviour change for this moment of accelerating change – social, environmental, technological, economic.
She is now developing Love Wisdom, a futures school combining the arts, music, science, and sports to enable humans to have the possibility to flourish across all stages of life.
Clare is a pracdemic who brings academic rigour and human warmth to her conviction that developing inner human capacity – individually and collectively – is the most important work of our time. She has partnered with organisations including Accenture, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Disney, and Singularity University, alongside artists, Navy SEALs, politicians, and social entrepreneurs.
The Future of Flourishing is a futures-thinking training, and venture lab dedicated to bridging scientific knowledge and practical application in collective human flourishing, organizational leadership, flow state, human potential, and wellbeing. It operates as a community, live program, and creative space, built around the vision of a future where everyone — and everything — has the opportunity to flourish.
Its core offerings include Deep Flourishing: The Practice, an 8-week embodied program; Collective Flourishing, a global connection space; The Turning, a substack newsletter of curated reflections; The Turning Circle, a co-created virtual village; and The Foundry, a coaching-led space for founders and leaders building meaningful work.
Clare uses the Flourishing Business Canvas as a starting point in conversations with leadership teams – as a way to surface the conditions inside an organisation that either support or quietly erode collective flourishing. She uses it to ask leadership teams the question: is this organisation’s human system viable — psychologically safe, purposeful, and resourced enough for people to actually thrive inside it, not just perform inside it?
Used this way, she finds that the canvas is a powerful diagnosis tool. It gives teams a shared visual language to name what’s currently working against flourishing — misaligned incentives, thin trust, unclear purpose — and to start designing toward an organisation where flourishing employees and a flourishing enterprise are the same design challenge, rather than two competing ones.
Clare believes and experiences that we’re living in increasingly turbulent times – for people, teams, organisations and communities. Most workplaces are built to be efficient: streamlined, optimised, running smoothly when things are calm. But calm isn’t guaranteed anymore. What actually helps people and organisations hold together – and even grow – when things get hard isn’t more efficiency. It’s robustness: having more than one way through, real diversity of thinking, and genuine connection between people.
In her talk, Dr. Clare Sarah Goodridge will share how she uses the Flourishing Business Canvas as a simple starting tool – a way to see clearly what’s helping people thrive inside an organisation, and what’s quietly working against them – before building the strategy to fix it:
- Why being efficient and being robust are two different things – and why robustness matters more right now
- The difference between bouncing back from hard times and building things so you don’t fall apart in the first place
- How the Flourishing Business Canvas helps spot, early and clearly, what’s working and what’s not in the human side of an organisation – before jumping to solutions
- The everyday conditions that help people and teams thrive – safety, purpose, autonomy, the right level of challenge, and visible progress
- Why flourishing has to be collective, not individual, by definition – looking after one person at a time isn’t enough if the system around them is under strain
- How she uses the Flourishing Business Canvas in her coaching work with entrepreneurs
- As a board member of the Flourishing Enterprise Co-lab, her hopes for the future of the canvas, including broader use among institutions and practitioners
- What she hopes to gain from her growing engagement with this community, the benefits she hopes to realize in the future
- What she hopes to contribute back to this community
At the end of her talk, Clare will take questions from members of the community.
After the event, a video of the talk plus slides will be shared in the “Speaker Series” space of the Flourishing Business Community. Please join other flourishing business leaders and become a full member to access.