From Stabilising to Flourishing: reframing the consultant’s mandate
Historically, most organisations bring in consultants when something is broken. A team is faltering, a system has failed, leadership is stuck, or culture is fraying. The brief is often urgent, and the ask is clear: stabilise what’s not working. More recently it’s been for shorter arrangements coaching specific leaders or to deliver training to a wider group in the hope things overall get better.
It’s time to reframe the consultant’s role.
What if the true mandate of a consultant isn’t just to stabilise organisations, but to enable the organisation with capabilities that support it towards flourishing? What if consultants were also supporting internal practitioners of flourishing – the people and culture teams, change managers, leaders, and transformation project teams?
Drawing on research from Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, Baylor University and SHAPE Global’s measurement tools, we’re starting to see that organisational health is not just about the absence of dysfunction. It’s about the presence of vitality.
This week we were delighted to attend the launch of the first round of results from Gallup/Harvard Global Flourishing Study. Eleanor Allen from the World Flourishing Org shared the WFO goal of helping 1 billion people flourish by 2035.
We are excited about collaborating with the WFO and will have more to share on that soon.
Flourishing is defined not only by wellbeing and resilience, but also by a deeper integration of meaning, strong relationships, moral integrity, and the ability to thrive over time. These aren’t luxuries. They are the bedrock of truly adaptive, high-functioning organisations.
Consultants—both internal and external—can play a catalytic role in making this shift. But to do so, we must embrace a new mindset: from fixer to steward, from expert to facilitator, from stabiliser to curator of flourishing.
This means:
Holding space for reflection and sense-making, not just diagnosis.
Building cultures of connection, not just compliance.
Anchoring strategic change in purpose and character, not just performance.
Flourishing takes time. It needs the right conditions. And it starts with practitioners who are willing to hold the longer view.
At DISCO, we believe the most transformative consultants are those who help organisations build stability not as an end, but as the ground from which something richer can grow.
Katy Cooper is an experienced Futurist, trained through The Institute for the Future, POLI-Design at Milan POLI.technic and Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. She has also studied Disruptive Innovation with INSEAD. She holds a Graduate Diploma of Management (GradDipMgt) from Australian Institute of Business. Katy is an exceptional Experience Designer and Facilitator. She helps organisations and communities build strategic plans and leadership capability for a future they can’t see yet through her foresight-driven, whole systems design practice.