The Hallway
I walked out in the middle of a session to get coffee.
It was not an intellectual decision. I was tired, the session was still underway, and coffee seemed more immediately useful than whatever insight I might miss while finding it.
That is how the Flourishing Performance Indicators™ began.
Not in the room where everyone had gathered to discuss human flourishing, but in the hallway outside it.
It was May 2, 2025, during the Work and Flourishing Summit at Harvard. Inside Loeb House, scholars, executives, and institutional leaders were considering a question both ancient and stubbornly current: What does it mean for a human being to live well?
Aristotle gave the question a vocabulary. Social scientists have given it instruments. Families answer it less formally, through the lives they admire, the sacrifices they make, and the regrets they hope their children will avoid.
I was thinking about none of this as I walked toward the coffee.
Then I heard two words.
Human renaissance.
I stopped.
Two people were speaking in the hallway: Cale Dowell of Arkos Global Advisors and Matthew T. Lee, a social scientist who directs the Flourishing Network at Harvard and serves as a professor at Baylor University.
I turned toward them and asked, “Are you talking about the Human Renaissance project at Oxford?”
They were.
The session continued without us. Fifteen minutes later, we had found a question large enough for all three of our disciplines:
What if families measured not only the wealth they transfer, but the human capacities required to carry it well?
That question became the Flourishing Performance Indicators.
What the Ledger Cannot See
Imagine a family whose wealth has survived every market cycle and whose members can no longer survive dinner together.
The trusts are sound. The taxes have been anticipated. The portfolio is diversified. The children know what they will receive, but not what it is for. One has withdrawn from family decisions. Another has learned to perform agreement. A third suspects that honesty may cost too much.
On paper, the transfer is working.
Around the table, it has already failed.
An estimated $84 trillion will pass from one generation to another by 2045. The figure is almost too large to imagine. It belongs to the strange numerical weather of our age, where trillions drift across headlines until magnitude loses its meaning.
Behind that number are smaller, more private scenes.
A parent deciding what to tell a child. An heir wondering whether the family money has enlarged or erased their identity. Siblings entering a meeting with the same surname and different memories. Advisors preparing structures sophisticated enough to transfer assets, but powerless to transfer trust.
Money can cross generations without meaning surviving the journey.
Families measure returns, taxes, distributions, liquidity, and asset preservation. They should. Financial competence is not the enemy of flourishing. It is one of its conditions.
But a balance sheet cannot tell us whether family members trust one another. A trust document cannot reveal whether an inheritor has developed judgment. A portfolio cannot show whether wealth has given a young person freedom, or quietly relieved that person of the need to form a self.
That is the paradox beneath the framework:
The better families became at measuring their wealth, the easier it became to overlook what wealth was doing to their family.
A widely cited study by Roy Williams and Vic Preisser reported that many affluent families fail to preserve wealth through the third generation, frequently because of failures in communication, preparation, and shared purpose. The exact percentages deserve careful interpretation. The underlying danger does not.
An estate can arrive intact while a family does not.
A Different Kind of Performance
Cale, Matt, and I created the Flourishing Performance Indicators, or FPIs, to help families measure, monitor, and strengthen the conditions that allow people and relationships to flourish across generations.
The framework draws from the interdisciplinary science of flourishing and engages findings from the Global Flourishing Study, a longitudinal investigation of more than 200,000 people across 22 countries. That research examines dimensions of life that economic indicators alone cannot capture, including health, meaning, character, relationships, happiness, and material stability.
Financial statements give us the anatomy of wealth. FPIs ask about the life moving through it.
We translated this growing body of research into six domains:
Psychological
Can family members speak honestly about fear, failure, identity, and expectation, or has wealth made certain truths too expensive to tell?
Physical
Are the bodies carrying the family legacy healthy enough to enjoy it?
Purpose
Does the family understand what its wealth is for, or only how much it is worth?
Principles
Which convictions remain binding when honoring them becomes inconvenient?
People
Do family members experience one another as people to love, or as positions to manage?
Prosperity
Does financial wealth enlarge freedom, contribution, and responsible agency?
Prosperity comes last, not because money is unimportant, but because money must be restored to its proper relationship with everything else.
A family can be prosperous and psychologically fragile. It can profess admirable principles while its relationships quietly deteriorate. It can preserve capital beautifully while leaving the next generation without purpose, voice, or the confidence to use what it has inherited.
FPIs do not replace financial KPIs.
They complete the picture those indicators were never designed to see.
What Measurement Changes
What we measure receives attention.
In business, performance indicators shape budgets, behavior, and executive conversation. They reveal movement that intuition alone might miss. Yet families often leave their deepest aspirations unmeasured, hoping that trust, character, purpose, and belonging will somehow take care of themselves.
Usually, they do not.
A family may sincerely value communication while repeatedly postponing difficult conversations. It may praise responsibility while shielding the next generation from every consequential decision. It may celebrate generosity while treating wealth as a private fortress. It may speak often about legacy without ever asking whether the people expected to carry it actually want the life being prepared for them.
Values stated in the abstract are easy to admire. Indicators ask whether those values have entered the life of the family.
FPIs give families a shared vocabulary for conditions they may sense but struggle to name. They make it possible to ask not only, “How is the portfolio performing?” but also, “How are we performing as stewards, relatives, and human beings?”
Flourishing is not a mood. It is not a luxury purchased after financial security has been achieved. It is a multidimensional pattern of life that can be examined, cultivated, and strengthened.
What money cannot buy, it may still help us build.
A Metric Has a Shadow
Measurement is powerful precisely because it is not innocent.
A metric can illuminate. It can also intimidate.
The moment a family ties financial distributions to flourishing scores, honesty becomes expensive. People learn to perform wellness, conceal conflict, and provide the answers the system rewards.
No one speaks freely when the truth might reduce an inheritance.
FPIs must therefore be used as mirrors, not verdicts. They are intended to invite reflection, not rank relatives. They can reveal where conversation is needed, but they cannot conduct the conversation for us. They can measure reported trust, but they cannot manufacture trust. They can identify a fragile sense of purpose, but they cannot hand someone a reason to live.
No family should turn flourishing into an audition for belonging.
The spirit in which the framework is used matters as much as the framework itself. Safety, goodwill, care, and a genuine commitment to continued relationship must come first. Without them, even an excellent instrument becomes another elegant method of control.
The purpose of an FPI is not to produce a perfect score.
It is to make a more truthful conversation possible.
Why Three Disciplines Met in One Hallway
The framework could not have emerged from one field because the problem does not belong to one field.
Cale understands the architecture of wealth. He works with the trusts, structures, succession decisions, and family dynamics through which assets move from one generation to another. He knows that flawless documents cannot repair a family that has forgotten how to speak honestly.
Matt understands the science of flourishing. His work connects rigorous social research with humanity’s oldest questions about meaning, character, relationships, and the good life. He helped shape the intellectual foundations behind the Global Flourishing Study.
My own work has long occupied the crossings between philosophy and performance, scholarship and strategy, human development and institutional design. My contribution was to integrate these worlds and help translate an immense body of thought into a coherent framework that families, advisors, and organizations could understand and use.
Cale brought the realities of wealth. Matt brought the science of flourishing. I helped build the bridge between them.
We did not collaborate because we already possessed the same answer. We collaborated because none of us could answer the question alone.
Interdisciplinary work begins with a particular kind of humility: the recognition that intelligence becomes more useful when it discovers its limits.
Begin Around a Table
A family does not need to begin with a dashboard.
It can begin with six words placed on a table:
Psychological. Physical. Purpose. Principles. People. Prosperity.
Then come the questions.
Where are we strong?
Where are we fragile?
What are we avoiding because the conversation may become uncomfortable?
Do our financial decisions enlarge the agency of family members, or make them more dependent?
What do we hope will pass to the next generation besides money?
The first conversation may not require a score at all. It may require only enough courage to remain at the table after the easy answers have been exhausted.
From there, families may use assessments, facilitated conversations, coaching, scorecards, or regular reviews. The framework is deliberately flexible because families are not standardized systems. Every family carries its own history, language, wounds, loyalties, and hopes.
The objective is not to force human life into six boxes. It is to keep six essential dimensions of life from disappearing behind a single financial number.
The complete report includes the intellectual foundations of FPIs, sample survey questions, cautions for responsible use, and practical guidance for families and advisors. It is available through the Institute for Global Flourishing at Baylor University.
What a Hallway Can Hold
I still think about that hallway.
Rooms divide knowledge. One room belongs to finance, another to philosophy, another to psychology, another to leadership. A hallway performs a quieter service. It connects what architecture has separated.
Perhaps it is fitting that FPIs began there.
The framework itself is a passage between worlds: from capital to character, from inheritance to identity, from what a family preserves to what a family makes possible.
I walked out for coffee. I returned with a question.
We spent months giving that question form.
Now it belongs where its real work must happen: around the tables where families decide not only what they will leave behind, but what they hope will remain alive.
Bibliography
Cerulli Associates. “Cerulli Anticipates $84 Trillion in Wealth Transfers Through 2045.” 2022. Read the research announcement.
Dowell, Cale, Beniamin Pascut, and Matthew T. Lee. Flourishing Performance Indicators: A New Framework for Wealth and Legacy. Institute for Global Flourishing at Baylor University, 2025. Read the complete report.
Global Flourishing Study. “A Landmark Global Study of What Makes Life Go Well.” Harvard University, Baylor University, Gallup, and the Center for Open Science. Explore the study and its findings.
Harvard Human Flourishing Program. “Our Flourishing Measure.” Harvard University. Explore the flourishing measure.
VanderWeele, Tyler J. “On the Promotion of Human Flourishing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, volume 114, number 31, 2017, pages 8148 to 8156. Read the article.
Williams, Roy O., and Vic Preisser. Preparing Heirs: Five Steps to a Successful Transition of Family Wealth and Values. Robert D. Reed Publishers, 2003.