I'm not sure I want to dredge up the whole "relevance" debate, but this post from CV Harquail makes some really good points that I think better explains some of what I was trying to say by moving "beyond relevance." Here's a quote:

Organization leaders, advocates and members spend a lot of energy trying to prevent withering. We try to make organizations ‘better’ by addressing specific dimensions of improvement. We advocate and work towards everything from employee engagement to diversity to sustainability to enterprise 2.0.

The problems addressed by each one of these initiatives are root causes of organizational withering. Fixing, improving, changing and even transforming the organization on any one of these dimensions does make an organization genuinely better.

But ‘better’ isn’t the same as flourishing.

We will always have ways to make things better, but the sad twist here is that if we do nothing but work on that, we end up fighting off the withering, but never really drive towards flourishing. It's not necessarily easy to tell the difference when you're choosing what to work on. I suppose whenever we find somethign that we want to make better, we'll try to convince ourselves that THIS one is really about flourishing. THIS one is about the "next generation" organization. I'm not sure we're always honest with ourselves. Maybe this is a bit of what Jeff De Cagna is talking about when he criticizes the association community for overly optimizing the status quo. 

But as Jeff points out, if you ask people to start working on flourishing, they'll throw up their hands and say "but I don't have time." It's all we can do to work on better, and now you add flourishing to my plate?! I think we need to find ways to do them at the same time. To have our energy go into initiatives that make the organization better AND flourishing at the same time. If we can set our minds to understanding what flourishing really is, and then marry that thinking with our improvement efforts, I think we could make some progress.

And I think we need to prepare ourselves for organizations to look very different than they do today. As Joe Gerstandt said:

Nearly everything about business has changed, except "the business."