Why family offices need real-life examples, not just frameworks

For the past few years, I've watched the same pattern repeat itself. A family office principal attends a conference on impact investing. They come back energized, armed with frameworks, white papers, and a slide deck on best practices. They share it with their team. Everyone nods. "This makes sense. Let's do impact investing."

Six months later, nothing has changed.

The biggest challenge isn't lack of information. It's not even lack of commitment. The challenge is that frameworks tell you what to do but they can't show you how to navigate the messy, and quite frankly complex, reality of operationalizing impact.

How do you convince a skeptical family member that impact investing isn't just "giving up returns"? How do you get your wealth manager to report quarterly against your impact framework when they've never done it before? How do you develop an investment policy statement? Or know if you're actually creating impact?

Frameworks provide the ingredients but rarely the recipes. Stories do. They show how these ingredients come together in practice, in wildly different ways, and bring context that makes implementation possible.

The Implementation Gap

The tools, methodologies and measurement frameworks for impact investing are all improving. Yet, the gap between intention and implementation persists.

This is why CSP partnered with the ImPact to bring not another framework, but a collection of stories showing how families are intentionally deploying capital and leveraging business for good. In “Ten Ingredients for Impact Investing” and “Insights from Journeys of Eight Asian Families” we asked families to share not just their successes, but the challenges they faced. Not just their polished strategies, but the uncomfortable moments that made those strategies evolve.

What emerged wasn’t a linear playbook. It was 16 different paths through the same framework, each shaped by different constraints, different catalysts, and different breakthroughs.

Why Stories Accelerate Learning

When a family office reads that they should "establish impact measurement" (action 8 in The ImPact's framework), they understand the concept. When they read how Paolo wrestled with that exact question and which specific framework helped him see his additionality, they understand the application.

When they read that they should "build impact into your Investment Policy Statement," they get the instruction. When they read that Keller operated for a decade without a formal IPS, making inconsistent decisions based on individual judgment, and then hear a family member say the IPS "didn't constrain us, it liberated us from relitigating the same questions and gave the family a common language for investment conversations", they understand that structure enables speed, not bureaucracy.

Theory tells you where to go. Stories show you how others navigated the terrain to get there, and why certain tools worked in certain contexts.

This is why peer learning works. It's why family offices increasingly seek each other out, not just to network, but to learn from those one step ahead on the journey.

Learning from family offices in-person

What if you could ask Principals and Single Family Office Executives about their impact journey directly? What if you could see the actual blueprints, ask the follow-up questions, and pressure-test your approach with people who have solved the problems you are facing.

That's the natural evolution: frameworks orient you, stories inspire you, peers accelerate you.

And it is the approach we take in our family office training program “How Leading Family Offices Grow Future-Fit with Impact”. We create space for impact-focused family office executives to share not just what worked, but what they learned. To show their blueprint for engaging families on the topic of impact, their decision-making structures and governance models, their deal-flow and portfolio construction. To say "here's where we struggled" and hear "here's how we got through it."

The families in our research didn't figure everything out alone. They learned from each other. They borrowed frameworks and adapted them. They asked for advice and got honest answers.

That's the bridge from theory to practice: seeing how others did it, then figuring out how you will.