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If you were to stand on a street corner just about anywhere in America today and ask ten strangers whether they trust Congress, big business, the media, or the church, seven of them—according to statistics—would laugh. But it wasn’t always thus. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government “just about always” or “most of the time,” and 64 percent believed it was “run for the benefit of all the people.”
But we’re in a doom loop now, and we’re not alone. Across the developed world, fewer than four in ten citizens say they trust their national governments to do what’s best for them and the society in which they live.
Most of us know at some subliminal level that institutional decay fuels social fragmentation and threatens not just the peace of our societies but their viability. But when pressed, a lot of us have trouble succinctly defining what an institution is and is for; there are so many kinds—does the same word really encompass something as intimate as marriage and as transactional as the IRS?
Let me try to provide a baseline. Sociologically speaking, you can think of an institution as any durable form of our common life—bundles of rules, roles, and shared practices that give shape to families, schools, businesses, churches, and governments. At their best, institutions order human freedom toward a common purpose. At their worst, they buckle from corruption, incompetence, and irrelevance.
But for all the elite hand-wringing about institutional precarity today, few have studied what it actually looks like for an institution to flourish. This scholastic vacuum intrigued me, so in 2023 I founded the Institutional Flourishing Lab at the Catholic University of America to organize research on and spotlight the positive conditions required for an institution to go the distance. Thus far, my colleagues and I have discovered four criteria—two internal and two external—that seem to mark the difference between thriving and failure. They are stewardship, coherence, generativity, and beneficence.
Internal Criteria for Thriving
Stewardship
If institutions are the durable forms of our common life, they need to skilfully and faithfully manage what has been entrusted to them. Thus they need:
- Capability: the competence—both technical and moral—to fulfill core promises. Catastrophic failures like Enron’s collapse or the Catholic Church’s mishandling of clergy abuse reveal what happens when governance, fiduciary responsibility, and the safeguarding of the vulnerable all break down.
- Accountability: clear mechanisms that hold leaders and members answerable to the standards of their role. As Yuval Levin argues, institutions should constrain members to faithfully perform their roles. Today, many institutions have become performative rather than formative, as members use institutions as platforms for personal gain (e.g., politicians chasing media followings rather than serving the common good).
- Inclusivity: demonstrated care for all stakeholders, especially the marginalized. Minority groups often distrust science and medicine because they lack representation in those fields and do not experience them as attentive to their needs or concerns.
- Viability: the basic structural health—balanced budgets, demographic stability, sustainable governance—that allows continuity across generations. Without it, even visionary missions sputter.
Stewardship can be cultivated by forms of substantive disclosure (e.g., commissioning independent audits) paired with systems that keep power accountable (e.g., rotating leadership, term limits). Institutions must also keep in mind that excessive or simplistic transparency regimes can erode rather than build trust.
Coherence
For institutions to flourish, their internal elements need to hang together. This entails:
- Alignment: when values, responsibilities, and incentives pull in the same direction. In the National Study of Catholic Priests, most bishops claimed they would help priests who approached them with personal struggles, but very few priests believed their bishop would. That gap shows misalignment in values of care. Similarly, corporate “stack ranking” systems tell employees to collaborate but reward them for competition, undermining mission.
- Cohesion: the combination of stories, role models, and daily habits that bind members to a shared purpose. In medicine and corporations alike, a “hidden curriculum” often develops that contradicts the stated mission. Competitive workplaces elevate the wrong mimetic models, breeding rivalry and scapegoating. By contrast, when institutions ritualize patience, mentorship, and craft, they form virtue.
- Adaptability: the ability to innovate without losing one’s core. Kodak had perfect internal alignment—until the digital age exposed its inability to adapt to external change. Flourishing institutions experiment, learn, and adjust while staying true to mission.
Fostering psychological safety to surface problems early can improve institutional coherence. Mission-reinforcing routines (e.g., opening meetings with stories that connect decisions to core purpose) can be especially helpful, though such rituals avoid becoming empty ceremony only if they are genuinely tethered to concrete practices and a clear telos.
External Criteria for Thriving
Generativity
In psychology, generativity refers to the capacity to care for and guide future generations; social generativity similarly names the ways institutions generate long-term benefits that extend beyond their boundaries. This entails:
- Empowerment: using institutional power to strengthen others rather than dominate. Italy’s Loccioni Group encourages employee spinoffs rather than binding talent with non-compete clauses, expanding innovation across its sector. In science, generativity often looks like senior researchers mentoring students and launching them into new careers, often at the expense of their own career momentum.
- Future-mindedness: innovating with long horizons while being rooted in tradition. Fashion house Brunello Cucinelli explicitly runs on a two-hundred-year horizon—restoring the medieval village of Solomeo, sustaining artisan craft, and reinvesting 20 percent of profits into the local community.
- Public validation: inspiring imitation that multiplies good. Mondragon’s worker-owned cooperatives in Spain have been studied and copied worldwide, and Aravind Eye Care in India—pioneering radically affordable cataract surgeries—has seeded new approaches to accessible health care.
Other forms of cultivating generativity include mentorship ladders, where experienced members guide juniors into progressively greater responsibility, and governance that rewards long-term horizons. However, poorly designed mentoring programs can backfire, and safeguards (e.g., rainy-day reserves) need to be built to ensure that long-term goals aren’t sacrificed when short-term pressures mount.
Beneficence
Finally, flourishing institutions are ordered toward the common good, serving a higher purpose than their own survival. This entails:
- Dignity: treating every person as an end, not a means. That may mean compensating employees fairly for the time that excellence requires—even if profits shrink—while safeguarding institutional viability, since an organization that collapses can no longer uphold its members’ dignity.
- Solidarity: acting out of recognition of our shared humanity, especially in defence of the vulnerable. Faith communities that mobilize funds to support struggling families in their neighbourhood—regardless of membership—demonstrate this.
- Subsidiarity: placing decisions as close as possible to those directly affected. Governments and firms flourish when they empower local ownership and responsiveness rather than centralize control.
- Higher-order purpose: orientating work to transcendent or civic horizons beyond self-interest. Science, for example, flourishes when researchers see their work as part of humanity’s ongoing search for truth rather than merely a route to prestige.
Beneficence can be cultivated through procedures that signal respect (e.g., fair pay) and guarantee voice (e.g., grievance channels). However, adequate safeguards are needed, since voice without protection risks retaliation.
These four criteria—stewardship, coherence, generativity, beneficence—apply to governments and firms as much as to schools, parishes, or families, though their applications can look different across institutions. In a family, capability looks like attentive care; accountability like mutual responsibility; viability like intergenerational stability.
From boardrooms to dinner tables, institutions are the trellises of our common life, quietly shaping the conditions for human flourishing. They thrive not by chance but through habits that build trust, align purpose, and renew hope in service of the common good. On their strength rests the future of our shared life.
