Thriving Is a Verb, Not a Destination: What the Research Says About Sustained High Performance
Most conversations about performance treat thriving as a destination. Get the right conditions in place, develop the right capabilities, build the right culture — and then you will be thriving. Maintain that state. Protect it from disruption.
The research on resilience, learning and sustained high performance tells a different story. Thriving is not a state to be achieved and protected. It is a practice to be sustained through deliberate, specific, ongoing engagement with the conditions that produce it. It is a verb, not a noun. Something you do, consistently, rather than something you arrive at.
This distinction matters enormously for how leaders invest in their own development and how organisations design their resilience strategies. If thriving is a destination, the goal is to get there and stay. If thriving is a practice, the goal is to build the habits, relationships and frameworks that make it sustainable over the long run — particularly when conditions are most difficult.
What the Research Says Thriving Actually Requires
The systematic review of 59 studies on organisational learning and resilience (Evenseth et al., 2022) found that sustained resilient performance depends on four specific conditions. The first is a continuous, embedded learning practice — not episodic learning events, but structured reflection and knowledge transfer woven into how the organisation operates day to day. The second is the ability to unlearn — to release established patterns that are no longer fit for purpose, proactively rather than reactively. The third is a supportive context — specifically leadership that creates psychological safety, empowerment and genuine curiosity rather than risk-aversion and self-protection. The fourth is inter-organisational learning — the capacity to draw on the experience of others rather than being limited to the range of your own disruptions.
The Resilience Engine’s research on adaptability establishes the individual-level equivalent: sustained thriving requires consistent, deliberate engagement with developing adaptability — not just exercising it, but actively building it. The consistency of engagement is what produces the compounding effect over time.
Gallup’s research across 2.7 million employees found that managers drive at least 70% of the variance in how engaged and well their teams feel. The implication for sustained thriving at organisational level is direct: the quality of leadership behaviour — specifically the six resilient leader behaviours — is the primary upstream variable. Invest in those behaviours consistently, and the downstream outcomes follow.
“The leaders who sustain high performance through difficulty are not the ones who happened to face less of it. They are the ones who built the practice of thriving before they needed it.”
The measure of Thriving is being able to say - “There’s a lot going on, and I am good.” Photo Getty Images Unsplash
The Resilience Wheel as a Thriving Framework
The seven dimensions of The Resilience Wheel — Attitude, Purpose, Confidence, Adaptability, Support Network, Meaning and Energy — map directly onto what the research identifies as the components of sustained high performance.
Attitude provides the settled foundation. When the Attitude dimension is well-developed, the leader has a stable platform from which to engage with change and difficulty without being destabilised by it. Purpose provides the direction. Leaders with clear Purpose make better decisions faster, because they have a consistent north star. Confidence — built through Bandura’s five pathways of mastery experience, role modelling, social persuasion, physiological state and imagery — provides the self-efficacy that sustains effort through difficulty.
Adaptability is the dimension most directly connected to sustained thriving: the willingness to remain curious and open rather than defensive and fixed, particularly when the environment is most demanding. Support Network provides the relational infrastructure that makes development sustainable: the relationships that nurture rather than deplete, that challenge as well as support. Meaning provides the narrative: the story a leader tells about what is happening and what it means, which determines whether difficulty becomes learning or damage. Energy provides the resource: the capacity to sustain high performance without borrowing from a future that will eventually come due.
Springing Forward With Learning: The Practice in Full
My definition of resilience — "Springing Forward with Learning" — describes thriving as a practice, not a destination. Springing forward is the direction: not backwards to who you were, not sideways into avoidance, but forward into more capability and more clarity. With Learning is the mechanism: not effortful persistence or natural talent, but the deliberate, structured extraction of insight from experience.
The three Resilience Wheel reflective questions are the daily practice of this. The Strengthscope psychometric is the precision tool that makes development strength-based and therefore more sustainable. Resilient Leader Coaching is the accountability structure that keeps the practice consistent when pressure peaks. The Leadership, Team and Organisational Resilience Diagnostics are the measurement architecture that tracks whether thriving is genuinely compounding over time.
Taken together, these are not a programme. They are a practice — designed for the permanent conditions of a VUCA world, built to compound rather than plateau, and grounded in the specific research that makes the case for every element.
The question is not whether you want to thrive. The question is whether you are practising it.
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