The numbers keep moving: salary, growth, square metres. Somewhere along the way, we started chasing the numbers instead of the life.
The things that make a life good – time, the people around you, a sense of purpose, feeling at home – rarely show up in the numbers we use to judge a life, a business or a city. That gap between what gets counted and how life actually feels is the blind spot. The 17 Living Goals bring it into view, with each colour standing for a group and each symbol for one goal.
The ground you stand on: home, the basics, the place you live.
Whether work gives you a life back.
Body, mind and soul. How it feels to be inside your own life.
Where a good life reaches beyond your own.
This is the standard framework. Every Compass uses it, adjusted to its lens: the same 17 goals, asked about working life for a business, about life in the place for a city, and about the lives of the people you support for care and coaching.
the 17 Living Goals in full detail →Nobody really asks what we're trying to create. Not in our lives, not at work, not in the places we live. So I'm asking. The Quality of Life Study maps what people want their lives, work and places to give them, and how far today is from that. Join in person when the Tour comes to your city, or online in ten minutes. Every answer adds to the picture.
On the Quality of Life Tour, I visit cities for coffeetalks with the people who live and work there. Open conversation, plenty of listening. It shows what life there is actually like, day to day.
Every city becomes a City Signals publication. Five so far.
The Compass asks what good looks like, then where things stand today – for a life, a workplace or a city. Ten minutes, and every answer joins the study, anonymously.
You get your own canvas back: where you stand, and where to start. Run it with a team, a city or the people you support, and you get a written reading of the whole group.
Everything the study finds is published, free.
the study so farBelonging comes first: 80% choose it.the study figures, quality of life in one view
the QOL Dashboard →
QOL Atlas · September 2026Europe used to meet by accident. The places where that happened are emptying.a monthly reading of quality of life across Europe
the QOL Atlas →
City Signals · Eindhoventhe short read from each Tour city
City Signals →
latest perspectivesessays on how we live, work and judge a life
Perspectives →Numbers show how a business or city performs, not what daily life there is like. A Compass shows the gap between what people want and how things are today.
