Wealth
Design
studio
We are co-creators of and/ OR partners with ~
An independent quarterly publication for women navigating significant wealth. It brings together practical financial intelligence, emotional honesty and emerging ideas about how wealth can be held, managed and moved differently.
Co-created with the Wolf Willow Institute, the Wealth Dojo is a practice ground for wealth inheritors and capital stewards. It develops the inner, relational and systemic capacities needed to move wealth wisely during a time of upheaval.
Toniic Co-Lab -
A design and practice space within Toniic to build the network’s capacity for collaborative and systemic action, at a time of increasing volatility and an urgent need for more capital to flow towards systemic change and impact.
EXISTENTIAL CAPITAL - with civilizational optionality -
A partnership with xCO, part of Dark Matter Labs, exploring what systemic risk and civilisational optionality ask of capital. The work starts from the recognition that wealth rests upon ecological, social and institutional conditions that cannot be protected through financial diversification alone.
Kinido -
A family-centred service supporting families and their family offices to bring wellbeing and wealth into greater alignment. Kinido works across the inner and relational life of the family and the structures through which its wealth is governed and carried forward.
THE WEALTH SHIFT STUDIO IN CANADA -
We helped to establish and continue to collaborate with Wealth Shift Studio in Canada. It is a women-led field catalyst and ecosystem steward connecting people, ideas and emerging possibilities around the role of capital in Canada’s Great Wealth Transfer.
The Studio
We are an international network of designers working across different institutional and practice settings.
We are situated in the Waterloo Institute for social innovation and resilience and we work globally with wealth stewards, families, family offices, philanthropic foundations, wealth managers, advisers and networks.
Redesigning Private Wealth.
The private wealth system
The private wealth system includes wealth holders and families, but also the wealth-management world around them: family offices, wealth managers, private banks, investment advisers, lawyers, accountants, foundations, networks, products and governance structures.
Structural barriers include mandates, fiduciary interpretations, legal structures, investment products, incentive and fee models, professional silos and established ideas about risk.
Psychological and relational barriers include identity, safety, belonging, family dynamics, control, legacy, status and ideas about success and enough.
These are inseparable. Internal and relational dynamics influence which structural changes feel possible, while existing structures continually reinforce particular behaviours and beliefs.
Why design?
Design helps move from intention to changed practice.
Our practice combines strategic sensing, discernment, propositional commissioning and field-shaping. We look across the landscape to notice emerging shifts, systemic risks and possibilities, identify where something important is missing, and create practical ways to explore and act on what we find.
This might mean redesigning a family office, investment mandate, advisory relationship, governance model or wealth-holder journey. It might also mean commissioning research, creating a new proposition, convening an unusual constellation of people or prototyping something the field does not yet have.
Wealth Design Studio works to reimagine and redesign the private wealth ecosystem, its psychology and its structures, so that more capital can move, and move faster, as a regenerative and worldbuilding force.
We are doing this during a time of profound rupture and transition. Private wealth does not sit outside the conditions of the world. It depends upon ecological, social, financial, technological and institutional systems that are under growing strain. How wealth is managed, invested, governed and transferred shapes both its exposure to systemic risk and its capacity to help regenerate the conditions on which all value depends.