What Really Counts: From Measuring Progress to Playing the Future

How the Genuine Progress Index, Genuine Wealth Index, and Impact Gaming Converged at the 4FuturesLab

What really counts?

This question has accompanied humanity for as long as societies have organized themselves around work, wealth, and power. Today, in the face of climate breakdown, social fragmentation, and growing distrust in political and economic institutions, the question has become unavoidable again.

It is also the title of a seminal book by Dr. Ronald Colman, developer of the Genuine Progress Index (GPI), a framework that challenges the dominance of GDP and asks a far more meaningful question:

Are we truly progressing in ways that improve human wellbeing and protect the living systems we depend on?

At the 4FuturesLab – Impact Mapping & Gaming, hosted by Generation iTrust during the Stiftung Entrepreneurship Summit, this question became the guiding thread for a shared exploration of the future. Not as an abstract debate, but as a lived experience—through mapping, dialogue, and play.

This blog tells the story of how we arrived there, why it matters, and how seemingly different elements like indices, games, civic participation, entrepreneurship, and democracy form one coherent movement toward genuine progress.

Why GDP Is No Longer Enough

For decades, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has served as the central indicator of success. Governments rise and fall by it. Companies optimize for it. Media headlines celebrate or panic over it.

Yet GDP measures only one thing: the monetary value of market transactions. It does not distinguish between activity that heals and activity that harms. A traffic accident increases GDP. Burnout increases GDP. Environmental destruction followed by cleanup increases GDP.

GDP does not ask whether people are healthy, whether communities are resilient, whether ecosystems are regenerating, or whether future generations are being protected.

This blind spot has become dangerous.

The Genuine Progress Index: Asking a Different Question

The Genuine Progress Index (GPI) emerged as a response to this problem. Developed in its most advanced form by Ronald Colman through GPI Atlantic, it builds on ecological economics and social accounting to answer a fundamentally different question:

Not “How much did we produce?” But: “Did we progress in ways that truly improve lives and ecosystems?”

GPI introduces a net-accounting logic. It measures positive contributions such as education, unpaid care work, volunteerism, and healthy ecosystems alongside negative costs, including pollution, inequality, overwork, and social disintegration.

Crucially, GPI does not collapse everything into a single number. Instead, it maintains separate but connected balance sheets across economic, social, and ecological domains. This makes trade-offs visible and politically discussable rather than hiding them behind averages.

In his book What Really Counts, Ronald Colman shows that when these factors are taken seriously, a striking pattern emerges: while GDP has continued to rise, genuine progress in many industrialized societies has stagnated or declined.

From Measuring Progress to Creating Change

Yet one insight became increasingly clear over the years, both in research and practice:

Measurement alone does not create transformation.

Even when societies know that GDP is misleading, they continue to act as if it were the ultimate goal. Even when people understand climate science, inequality, and ecological limits, behavior often remains unchanged.

At the 4FuturesLab, this paradox was captured in one simple sentence that echoed throughout the session:

Even if we know, we don’t change.

Why?

Because change is not only a matter of information. It is a matter of mindsets, emotions, habits, incentives, and lived experience.

The Genuine Wealth Index: From Progress to Practice

This is where Generation iTrust began to extend the GPI logic further.

Building on GPI Atlantic, and in close dialogue with Ronald Colman’s work, the Genuine Wealth Index (GWI), also referred to as the Gemeinwohl Index is being developed as the next evolutionary step.

The GWI translates the GPI’s accounting logic into a participatory, urban, and learning-oriented framework. It is designed not only to evaluate outcomes, but to support transformation processes at the level where change actually happens: cities, districts, organizations, and communities.

The GWI integrates classic GPI domains with additional dimensions that reflect contemporary transformation challenges:

• inner development and mindset change

• social trust and cooperation

• civic participation and democratic capacity

• regenerative and sufficiency-oriented practices

  
  

In Berlin, the GWI is being developed as the measurement backbone of Neustart Berlin—connecting citizen participation, local administration, impact entrepreneurship, and climate action into one coherent system.

From Index to Experience: Celebrate the Planet & KiezRebellen

Still, another realization shaped the work of Generation iTrust:

If progress is to become real, it must be experienced, not just calculated.

This insight led to the creation of formats such as Celebrate the Planet and KiezRebellen. These initiatives are often seen as events or games, but in reality, they are living expressions of the GWI logic.

They translate abstract ideas such as sufficiency, subsidiarity, and regeneration into embodied experience. Participants do not debate sustainability; they live it. They do not analyze trade-offs; they feel them.

In this way, learning moves:

• from information to experience

• from belief to embodiment

• from individual insight to collective meaning

  
  

Impact Mapping: Seeing the System Behind Our Actions

At the 4FuturesLab, this experiential approach was deepened through Impact Mapping.

Impact Mapping is a visual, collaborative strategy tool that helps people understand how:

• personal intentions

• organizational decisions

• and political frameworks

interact within complex systems.

Instead of linear cause-and-effect thinking, Impact Mapping reveals interdependencies. It connects the inner level (values and motivations) with the collective level (practices and institutions) and the systemic level (outcomes and indicators).

In the context of the GWI, Impact Mapping becomes a translation layer linking lived experience to measurable impact.

Serious Gaming: Learning by Playing the Future

The next step is Serious Impact Gaming.

Serious Games use simulation, role-play, and scenario design to allow participants to explore real-world systems safely. They make complexity tangible. They bypass resistance to abstract policy. They turn opponents into co-players.

At the 4FuturesLab, gaming demonstrated how quickly perspectives can shift when people experience consequences directly rather than arguing about them.

Economic trade-offs, climate pathways, governance decisions, and social dynamics become visible, emotional, and discussable. Learning happens faster not because it is simplified, but because it is embodied.

The 4FuturesLab: Where Everything Converged

The 4FuturesLab – Impact Mapping & Gaming, hosted at the Stiftung Entrepreneurship Summit, brought all these elements together:

• The conceptual clarity of GPI

• The participatory ambition of GWI

• The experiential formats of Celebrate the Planet and KiezRebellen

• The systemic lens of Impact Mapping

• The transformative power of Serious Gaming

  
  

Entrepreneurs, administrators, researchers, and citizens explored futures not as spectators, but as participants.

The lab did not provide final answers. It created something more valuable: a shared understanding of what really counts, and a set of tools to start living it here and now.

From Growth to Genuine Progress

As Ronald Colman’s work reminds us, progress is not about accumulation. It is about time, care, relationships, trust, and ecological integrity.

At Generation iTrust, this longing is translated into indices, games, maps, and civic practices, not as ends in themselves, but as invitations to a different future.

A future where progress is measured honestly.Where wealth is understood genuinely.And where change is learned by doing.

What really counts is no longer an abstract question.

It is becoming a shared practice.