We invite you to join the Center for Positive Organizations’ working group on virtuousness, organizational flourishing, and positive organizing in the age of AI.

For two decades, our community has built a rigorous account of what helps organizations excel and thrive. We now face a moment of technology-driven disruption that is reshaping how organizations decide, relate, allocate, and learn, yet most of the rhetoric is being shaped by a logic of efficiency alone, treating people as cost and setting aside essential questions of virtue, dignity, and organizational flourishing.

Here is our guiding question: What will it take to design, deploy, and govern AI systems that are not merely unharmful or compliant, but actively generative of human virtuousness and organizational flourishing?

As a working group, we are hands-on and diverse. Rather than leading with expertise, we seek to foreground what we don’t yet know and design our way toward the future we want. CPO hosts monthly 90-minute working sessions where we will engage together toward tangible outputs, including position papers, research collaborations, practice guides, leadership applications, and policy ideas. Both scholars and practitioners stand to gain from participating, as both have indispensable parts to play in gathering and framing the evidence about transforming organizations and what they do for flourishing in the age of AI.

Launch Resources

Many of us, even those who study and build with AI every day, did not have ready examples of AI being used to help organizations and humanity thrive. The paucity of examples to fuel positive imagination is part of what this working group can change. We’ve gathered the examples you shared at the live launch session into a living, collective library that we hope to expand. Housed in an Airtable that can expand as we grow, this is a start on a searchable collection of real and imagined uses of AI for positive deviance: the outlier practices that lift people, teams, organizations, and society toward our best.

• A Shared Library of Examples of AI and Positive Deviance
  • The library gets richer as more of us contribute. If you have an example to share, we’d love to include it. Add an Example. Our team will add new examples each week as we receive them.
• The Questions You Posed & Developing a Shared Agenda
  • We asked those who attended the working group launch to name the questions that matter most to them now. If you have a question to share, we’d love to include it. Pose a Question. Our team will moderate and add new suggestions each week.

What’s Next? Join us on July 23

Our next meeting is slated for July 23, at 11:00 a.m. E.T. We will begin turning these questions into collective products. Among the things we hope to work toward together:

• a statement of principles — putting what we already know about human and organizational flourishing to work in the domain of AI;
• a set of researchable questions — a shared research agenda, drawn from the questions above, that invites scholars into the intersection of AI and positive organizational scholarship;
• and the beginnings of subgroups around the themes with the most energy — trust, research, practice, and more.

Please come ready to share ideas in progress, name the real tensions, and learn from one another’s experiences. Your presence will meaningfully shape what this group creates and becomes.

Warmly,
Kim Cameron, Jim Mallozzi, Maureen Norton, Amy Young & Monica Worline
Center for Positive Organization Convening Committee

Questions? Email positiveorg@umich.edu.