Emerging Findings on Human Flourishing: A Document Born from a Weekly Roundtable

For nearly two years, a small group of us gathered every week for the Heroic Arizona Roundtable. We shared our favorite Plus 1’s. We reported our Hero Bar wins and losses. We showed up for each other, week after week, in a rhythm that became one of the most reliable and meaningful hours of my week.

When Heroic Arizona made the decision to wind down and transition toward what has become Human Flourishing, I assumed the roundtable would quietly end with it. It didn’t. The group kept meeting, with no organizational support behind it, simply because the people in the room wanted to keep showing up for each other.

I want to use this post to say thank you, and to tell the story of how that weekly gathering has become something I never expected.

The people who kept it alive

Rodney Smith was my wingman through the entire Heroic Arizona run. He co-led as often as I did, and the group ran as well on the weeks I couldn’t be there as the weeks I could, because of him.

When the transition happened and I stepped back to work with Angela McIllece on laying the foundation for Human Flourishing, Rodney didn’t skip a beat. Elizabeth Purcell stepped up alongside him, and the two of them carried the group forward, week after week, with no roadmap and no support, simply because they believed the gathering mattered.

A few months ago, I stepped back in. Not to lead the group again, but to bring some of the questions we’d been developing through Human Flourishing into the room, as a supplement to what Rodney and Elizabeth had built, never as a replacement. Around that time the name shifted too, from the Heroic Arizona Weekly Roundtable to a Human Flourishing Circle.

What a Circle is, and why we call this one an Incubator

Human Flourishing is building out Circles as one of the core ways people will engage with the movement, gatherings at different levels designed to give people a place to explore questions of meaning, purpose, growth and contribution together, and eventually to lead circles of their own.

This particular group has become our prototype. We call it a Human Flourishing Incubator Circle because that’s exactly what it is: a place where we test what works, learn what doesn’t, and figure out in practice what a Circle can become before we hand the model to a much wider community. Everyone in that room has been part of building the thing itself, whether they set out to or not.

The conflict that changed the room

A few weeks ago, we had our first real experience of conflict inside the group. Tension surfaced in a way it hadn’t before. It wasn’t comfortable. Apologies were offered, and we worked through it together.

That tension brought a different kind of energy into the room. And it set the stage for what came next.

Alycia Lee’s session, and what the group built from it

Alycia Lee stepped up to lead a session built around a single question: can a person flourish despite the system they’re constrained to live within? She led it with real skill, and the group ran with it in a way none of us anticipated.

I had to step away for a couple of weeks right after that session. What I came back to was the attached document, a synthesis the group produced across two full conversations under Alycia’s leadership. I’m attaching it here in full for anyone in our community who wants to sit with it the way the group did.

How the starting question transformed. The group opened with one question: can a person flourish within a system that does not support their flourishing? By the end of two sessions, that question had expanded into something larger: what capacities and conditions enable people to continue becoming, relating and contributing, and what responsibility do individuals, communities, institutions and systems have for creating conditions in which their own flourishing does not diminish the flourishing of others? Watching a single question grow into that, in real time, in a volunteer-led group with no facilitator training and no script, is the part I still can’t quite get over.

Some of what the group found along the way. A growth mindset appears necessary for flourishing but flourishing itself may not be a destination. Agency matters but doesn’t seem sufficient on its own. Flourishing looks relational rather than individual, which raises an uncomfortable question: can I really call myself flourishing if the way I flourish diminishes someone else’s capacity to do the same? The group also worked through whether contribution is a kind of overflow of personal prosperity onto others, and whether the same virtue can be animated by fear or by love with very different outcomes either way.

The five questions the group chose to carry forward:

1. What distinguishes flourishing from growth, achievement, prosperity or resilience?
2. Can I be flourishing if my flourishing constrains yours?
3. What belongs to individual agency, and what requires supportive relationships, communities, institutions or systems?
4. What would it mean to create conditions for mutual flourishing among people who do not agree about what flourishing means?
5. If growth is essential to flourishing, what role does failure play in flourishing or oppressive systems?

One line from the document has stuck with me more than any other: the tensions themselves may be findings. Agency and system, self and other, growth and direction, virtue and pluralism, fear and love, individual and collective flourishing don’t separate out cleanly. Holding those tensions may matter more than resolving them too fast.

I have permission to share this document more broadly with the Human Flourishing community, and I want to be clear as I do: this is Alycia’s work, and the group’s work. When Angela and I first imagined Circles, our hoped-for outcome was something simple: that people would learn to talk with each other again about things that matter. That alone would have been enough. We never imagined a group would produce something like this.

The full document is attached below. Read it the way the group built it: not as a finished answer, but as a living inquiry still in progress.

What’s changing now

The Circle is moving to rotating leadership. Instead of any one person carrying the group week after week, each person will lead for one, two or maybe three weeks, then hand it to someone else. That means fresh questions, fresh energy, and everyone in the room getting practice at the specific skill of leading a conversation that matters, including the parts where it gets uncomfortable.

My role is shifting to mentor, available to anyone who wants it, sharing what I’ve learned over a lifetime about leading groups through conversations that matter, tensions included.

The larger goal behind all of this: every person in that Circle builds the confidence to start a Circle of their own, and then teaches the people in their Circle to do the same. That’s how the movement grows, one person handing something forward to the next.

Join us October 16th

We’re formally launching Human Flourishing with an event that will include the first public experience of Circles, in person and virtual. If any of this resonates, I’d love to have you there.

Learn more and register

With gratitude to Rodney, Elizabeth, Alycia, and every person who has shown up in that room, week after week.

— Scott