Future Vietnam

Rooted in education, the Berlin School of Creative Leadership Foundation is inherently and actively engaged in shaping the future. Yet encouraging the development of human potential, when considered from its ultimate purpose, raises an inevitable question: potential towards what end?

A deeper understanding of progress is needed, requiring better ways of making human advancement identifiable, measurable, comparable, verifiable, and open to deliberation. Building on substantial intellectual and institutional groundwork, the Foundation seeks to contribute to an economy centred on human flourishing and to a society better equipped to guide its own development. Through its intellectual work, the Foundation aims to serve society, inform markets, and enable individuals, irrespective of origin, gender, place, or circumstance, to realize their inherent potential.

What the Foundation adds amounts to a change of vantage point. Where richer, more granular data now allow it, attention shifts from economic activity at the scale of aggregated entities to the places where value is actually created and materializes: the work of enterprises and the flourishing of individual lives. It aims to make answerable an old and yet still unsettled question: what kind of growth a society ought in truth to foster, what constitutes genuine improvements, and how such advancements can be expressed and captured in terms of standardized social outcomes. The immediate task to be pursued: designing a framework that translates the elusive and complex concept of progress into functional and intelligible criteria, documented, measured, validated, and registered in terms of standardized social outcomes, thereby enabling the empirical assessment of collective advancement as well as individual flourishing, encouraging institutional action, entrepreneurial initiative, and personal agency, while simultaneously informing organizational decision-making and the allocation of capital towards improving the human condition. The central challenge today is not merely whether the right things are being done, but whether what contributes to human flourishing receives the recognition it deserves and requires — becoming visible in ways that allow beneficial endeavours to be supported, rewarded, financed, and scaled.

Within the present moment lies a transformative potential that is both extraordinary and, as yet, largely unrealized. It extends across several fundamental aspects of human existence: technological advancement, moral imagination, our relationship with the living world and fellow species, scientific understanding, and the institutional arrangements that enable societies to flourish.

The question arises: what will humanity choose to make of these dormant possibilities?

We may broaden the horizons of what we are capable of. We may find a more enduring peace with nature and with the other creatures who share this planet. We may cultivate, with patience and care, the unique capacities of every individual, allowing education to become not merely a system of instruction but a lifelong practice of human development. We may learn to cooperate across continents, renewing the social contract in ways that leave greater room for human lives to unfold. To make all of this possible ultimately requires a more fundamental transformation: the deliberate design of an economy whose ultimate purpose is the cultivation of the conditions in which individuals, communities, and ultimately humanity itself can flourish, while the ecosystems upon which they depend can regenerate. Humanity stands therefore at the threshold of a new era of progress; one brought into being by its own ingenuity and imagination.

A structural shift of this magnitude cannot remain a merely normative aspiration. Every economic order depends upon a shared standard through which progress becomes observable, comparable, identifiable, and ultimately actionable. If the coordinating logic of the economy changes, so too must the standards by which it is assessed.

What this requires is an expanded, synthetic standard for measuring progress, one capable of capturing those dimensions of human advancement that conventional economic indicators leave invisible. Such a standard makes no claim to completeness.

It is neither epistemically exhaustive nor philosophically final. It is conceived instead as a pragmatic and functional instrument: a common framework that renders progress measurable, and verifiable.

This matters for a concrete reason. Only what can be observed and credibly validated can become the object of institutional decision-making, effective governance, and efficient capital allocation. A society that seeks to invest in human flourishing must therefore develop the means to identify, and reward the conditions under which it emerges.

History offers a clear lesson. Every economic era develops the metrics that allow its priorities to be coordinated, financed, scaled, and operationalized. Gross domestic product became the defining metric of the industrial economy because it rendered industrial output visible and comparable. Capital flowed towards what could be measured; much of what could not be measured remained economically invisible.

This recognition seems neither recent nor marginal. It was present at the very creation of the measure. Simon Kuznets, the principal architect of modern national income accounting, warned from the outset against the mistaken belief that the welfare of a nation could be read off from its national income. Writing in The New Republic in 1962, he pressed the argument further: growth pursued for its own sake, he observed, revealed nothing about its quality, its costs, or its time horizon, and any serious objective of growth therefore had to specify growth “of what and for what.” For decades this remained a caveat at the edge of practice. It moved to the centre in 2008, when the then President of the French Republic convened the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, advised by Amartya Sen, and coordinated by Jean-Paul Fitoussi. Reporting the following year, the Commission concluded that wellbeing is irreducibly multidimensional and identified eight dimensions through which it might be assessed: material living standards, health, education, the use of one’s time in work and personal activity, political voice and governance, social connection, the quality of the environment, security in both its economic and physical forms. Its guiding premise was disarmingly plain: what we measure affects what we do, and a society that measures the wrong things will in time come to pursue them. The implication was not degrowth but growth of the right kind. What began as a national commission grew into the ambition to establish a durable international reference. The OECD adopted the Commission’s agenda and gave it institutional permanence, launching its Better Life Initiative and, most consequentially, issuing the methodological guidance that specified not only what to measure but how to methodologically measure it. For the first time, the effort to look beyond gross domestic product acquired the beginnings of a shared and repeatable calculation process. The trajectory went further still. In the 2018 report Beyond GDP: Measuring What Counts forEconomic and Social Performance, the OECD-hosted High-Level Expert Group warned that if a society does not measure certain parameters, they will be collectively neglected as though they did not exist, and the organization argued that renewed frameworks are needed to build awareness and coordination in order to keep a society informed about its own trajectory.

Collective ambitions, meanwhile, have outgrown the metrics that are supposed to capture them. Governments, investors, and citizens increasingly expect economies to generate not only prosperity, but also resilience, human capability, wellbeing, social cohesion, and environmental regeneration. Yet these various ambitions still lack a common unit of account. Capital cannot systematically allocate towards what it cannot reliably measure or value. Social impact is increasingly demanded, increasingly created, yet still largely absent from the institutional architecture through which investment decisions are made.

The attempts to close this gap are already numerous. Gross National Happiness, the Genuine Progress Indicator, the Better Life Index, and many others have broadened our understanding of progress. Yet none has fundamentally reshaped economic behaviour or decision-making. They shared the same limitation: they were measured, but they were never meaningfully transacted. They informed debate, but they never amended the mechanics through which capital is allocated. Without becoming part of those mechanisms, even the most sophisticated indicator remains descriptive rather than transformative.

Yet a deeper limitation unites this entire lineage. From Kuznets to Beyond GDP, each of these frameworks was conceived for a single plane of action, the nation and the macroeconomy. They were built to guide public policy and to steer economies in the aggregate; their unit of concern remained the state and its statistical apparatus. What they never reached was the level at which most economic and human life is actually conducted, the individual person and the workings of enterprises and organizations. This is the recalibration the Foundation now undertakes. Its framework takes these instruments of macroeconomic steering and reorients them, assigning measurable purpose to the flourishing of the individual and to entrepreneurial and organizational action. And precisely because contemporary data architectures now render such granularity attainable, it becomes possible to conceive the conduct of organizations more effectively and more purposefully than any national indicator alone could allow.

It is precisely this gap that the Foundation seeks to address. Its mission extends beyond advancing education in the conventional sense. It is dedicated to advancing the human mind and spirit itself: expanding the capacities through which individuals learn, create, cooperate, and flourish. In doing so, it contributes to the emergence of an economic order that does not merely permit such progress, nor simply encourage it, but systematically validates it, rewards it, accelerates it, and helps bring it into being. As the next step towards this objective, the Foundation is therefore designing a comprehensive measurement framework that synthesizes existing indicators into a coherent and integrated standard, standing on the work already done by other institutions, enlightened thinkers, and esteemed academics. Rather than replacing established metrics, it brings them together where possible and expands them where necessary through an iterative process of refinement and improvement.

The framework to be created provides holistic indicators through which human progress can be identified, measured, compared, evidenced, validated, and ultimately certified, both at the level of the individual and across society. It is not intended to offer a final or exhaustive account of human flourishing, but rather a practical and evolving foundation for its credible assessment. In doing so, the framework aspires to become more than a tool of measurement. What distinguishes it from previous approaches by other institutions is that its results are not merely reported, but designed to become part of the economic architecture through which decisions are made, and resources are allocated. Its purpose is to ensure that verified contributions to human flourishing become not only visible, but economically relevant. Its ambition is to provide both an economic compass and a legitimate basis for institutional and investment decisions, creating the missing bridge between human flourishing and economic value. By enabling progress to be credibly measured, independently validated, and systematically recognized, the framework seeks to direct capital towards those interventions that demonstrably expand human potential. It is here that the Foundation gets to work. A first outline for the prototype already exists, together with an initial approach to the process through which the broader framework can be developed. The immediate task is therefore not to translate a finished concept into practice, but to build upon this foundation: to refine the underlying architecture, develop its methodology iteratively, subject its assumptions to academic scrutiny, and incorporate interdisciplinary expert judgement throughout the design process.

This work requires philanthropic foundation capital. Such support will enable the Foundation to develop the existing outline into a coherent and credible framework, establish the scientific and methodological foundations on which it rests, and create the conditions for its subsequent validation and practical application.

Alongside this development, the Foundation intends to support an initial pilot project in Southeast Asia. Implemented as a public-private partnership, the pilot would apply the emerging framework to the development of a municipal ward, testing how its principles and measurement architecture can inform policy, guide investment, and support community development in a real-world setting. In this way, conceptual development, academic validation, expert review, and practical application can evolve in parallel and continuously inform one another.

Here again, the Foundation’s ambition becomes clear. It does not rest in a categorical idealism that seeks conceptual completion before practical action. Rather, it is guided by the conviction that meaningful progress begins with instruments that are usable, purposeful, pragmatic, functional, and capable of continuous refinement. Its objective is therefore not to present a definitive account of human flourishing, nor to claim conceptual completion, but to establish a living framework that evolves alongside the knowledge it generates and the societies it serves. Its value will ultimately lie not in its finality, but in its capacity to expand humanity’s trajectory of flourishing through an instrument that is immediately applicable today and continuously improved for tomorrow.

Berlin School of Creative Leadership Foundation
Berlin, Summer 2026