Lineage and Field
We work in a credible intellectual neighbourhood.
Methodological lineage
EFO does not invent the field. It draws on four traditions of work that have prepared the ground for the moment we are in, and brings them into productive contact with frontier AI capability and the living-systems frame that older modelling traditions have not adequately served.
System Dynamics
Developed by Jay Forrester and extended by Donella Meadows, John Sterman and others. An approach to understanding the nonlinear behaviour of complex systems over time using stocks, flows, internal feedback loops, and time delays. The most operationally mature framework available for thinking about systemic change at the scale family-office capital actually moves.
Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science
Developed by Buckminster Fuller. A problem-solving methodology that applies whole-systems thinking and the anticipation of future needs to create solutions that do more with less. Captured most usefully in the Trimtab Principle: the observation that small, intentional, well-placed interventions can move very large systems.
Integral Theory and the MetaImpact Framework
Developed in lineage from Ken Wilber and brought into multi-capital measurement form by Sean Esbjörn-Hargens and MetaIntegral. The MetaImpact Framework integrates four types of impact, ten types of capital, three types of data and four bottom lines into the most theoretically integrated multi-capital model in the public domain. EFO draws particularly on the data-types triad (first-person, second-person, third-person) as a discipline for honest observation across the seven capitals. MetaIntegral and EFO have, working independently, converged on Wisdom Economy as a name for the destination toward which Whole Wealth and Wisdom Capital point.
Contextual sustainability and the GTAC Commons
Developed by r3.0 and the wider community of practitioners working from planetary-boundaries science (Stockholm Resilience Centre) and Doughnut Economics (Kate Raworth). The Global Thresholds and Allocations Commons is the operational arm of a single argument made with unusual persistence: sustainability without thresholds is not sustainability. EFO adopts the thresholds-and-allocations move as the discipline that distinguishes Whole Wealth from one more multi-capital reporting layer.
Further inspirations
Beyond the four core traditions, EFO's working orientation draws on the Living Systems view articulated by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi (life as a self-organising network across biological, cognitive, social and ecological dimensions); on the continuity-field and total-value-at-risk reframing developed by Indy Johar and Dark Matter Labs (which informs the deeper risk discipline of the Whole Wealth Diagnostic); and on the unitive-science perspective and pluriversality discipline being developed within the Club of Rome's Fifth Element programme. None of these is sufficient on its own. The methodological work is, in part, the work of bringing them into productive contact with each other and with the frontier AI capability that has only recently become available.
We work alongside the field, not above it.
EFO is deliberately a connective node, not a competing platform. We learn from and collaborate with the organisations doing serious work in adjacent parts of the system, including:
Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP)
University of Zurich
Academic-grade research and education on sustainable finance for private wealth.
Toniic
The global community of impact investors and the T100 Project.
NEXUS Global
The next-generation peer-convening network.
The ImPact
Peer learning for families committing to measure impact.
GIIN, BMW Foundation, Katapult, Creo Syndicate, The Beam Network, Mission Investors Exchange
Among others.
Where partnership makes the field more coherent, we partner. Where the gap is genuinely unfilled, we build.
The Big Tent
EFO convenes wealth holders, founders, technologists, scientists, field-builders and stewards in small, carefully composed groups. The convenings are off the record by default. They exist to make connections that would not otherwise happen, and to develop the integrative thinking the moment requires.
Membership is by invitation and contribution. We are not building a marketplace.