History of the AGILE Tool Design (2021–2025)

Chronicle of a human, technical, and collective journey in service of impact finance

Why Tell This Story

L’outil AGILE was not born of a lone intuition, nor of a theoretical or disconnected exercise. It is the result of four and a half years of continuous work (2021–2025), marked by constant back-and-forth between fieldwork, finance, international cooperation, and impact engineering, carried out jointly and hand-in-hand by the project teams of the Geneva Foundation for the Future and the Geneva Forum.

Telling its history addresses a twofold imperative:

• The opportunity to ensure accountability, by naming the individuals, collectives, and steps involved;
• A pedagogical purpose, to make visible the genesis of a tool specifically designed to resolve the structural unreadability of impact projects.

This account will therefore be chronological, documented, and embraced as a collective human and intellectual journey, animated and structured over time.

The Origins: A Shared Intuition Facing a Systemic Blockage (2021)

A Founding Steering Committee

The need to design a tool like AGILE, as it would later be named, formally began in 2021, within the work of the Geneva Foundation for the Future, led by a four-person steering committee:

• Michèle WACHS
• Alejandro JARA WEITZMANN
• Christa MUTH
• Thomas EGLI

From the outset, these discussions stemmed from a shared observation:

conversations between funders, philanthropists, and project leaders are long, complex, often frustrating, and rarely lead to clear operational decisions (see Foreword)

Early Dialogue with Financial Stakeholders

In parallel with internal discussions, the committee quickly initiated dialogue with high-level institutional and private actors, including:

• The European Investment Bank (EIB)
• Foundations affiliated with several private wealth management banks in Geneva’s financial sector
• Various other institutional and private financial stakeholders

These discussions, often informal but sometimes long and in-depth (up to two hours per call or meeting), revealed a central issue:

impact projects are rich, but difficult to translate into the frameworks expected by finance, and such an environment is needed.

Field Participation: The Structuring Workshop of 2022

A Decisive Workshop with Swiss and European Finance

In 2022, a major workshop marked a turning point. It brought together financiers from key financial centers as part of the Geneva Forum:

• Luxembourg:
  • Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)
  • European Investment Bank
• Family offices and investment firms from:
  • Zurich
  • Geneva
  • Germany

This workshop enabled the collection of on-the-ground insights, previously unformalized: actual expectations, points of blockage, mutual misunderstandings between projects and funders — all cross-referenced between the different participants.

A Clear-Cut Finding

Two phrases kept coming up, from both sides:

• “We can’t find projects that are sufficiently readable” (funders)
• “We don’t understand what is really expected of us” (project leaders)

It was at this precise moment that the need for a structured, cross-cutting, and non-reductive translation tool became obvious.

From Discourse to Framework: Birth of the Criteria Families (2023)

Foundational Work Presented at the Geneva Forum

In 2023, during the Geneva Forum, Alejandro presented a comprehensive overview of impact finance worldwide and its different systemic levels, outlining the major existing approaches, their strengths and their limitations.

This work was faithfully transcribed by Michèle.

Thomas’ Key Role in Translation

It was from this dense material that Thomas carried out a decisive transformation during the 2023 Geneva Forum and throughout the first half of 2024: shifting from expert discourse accessible only to a few informed individuals, to a structuring and actionable tool usable by all actors in the daily life of finance and projects.

Initially, three or four major criteria families preexisted in proposals (financial foundation, scalability, values, and impact). After lengthy phone work with Alejandro and Michèle, Thomas reformulated these elements into a clearer framework, resulting in five criteria families, explicitly positioning:

• Simplified financial foundation
• Hight impact
• Human Goals
• Scale potential
• Vital functions

These additions directly addressed the blockages observed in 2021–2022 and the debates of 2023.

At this stage, the conceptual framework of AGILE was set, even though Thomas would only name it and structure its questions a year later.

Fine Engineering: Questions, Iterations, and Academic Contribution (2024)

Tristan’s Report in Service of the Project

From the end of 2023 and throughout 2024, Tristan LESCURE, a practitioner in selection and referral criteria at the European Union and later at the French National Research Agency, joined the project as part of his MBA.

As part of a consulting mission by Tristan for the Foundation, aimed at preparing the facilitation of the 2024 Geneva Forum workshop, Thomas provided him with all materials produced since 2021: transcriptions, working notes, families of criteria, and the specifications document. Tristan also assembled a complementary set of academic sources in order to position the approach within the state of the art.

He thus received the full set of documents, notes, summaries, and materials produced since 2021.

His role:

• analyze
• structure
• begin to formalize the operational questions to be posed to the panel participants in December 2024

As part of his project consulting, Tristan then engaged extensively with Thomas, who provided him with a great deal of information. He conducted a sourced analysis based on the materials made available to him, compiled numerous questions for the experts invited to the December 2024 panel, and cited several tools that currently have the merit of existing, in order to begin envisioning the role the tool should play in this landscape. Tristan contributed to the project with an agile tool, through various potential questions that would allow evaluation of the tool against multiple criteria. These lists of questions will then be significantly expanded in early 2025 within the consulting project, following the discussions from the late 2024 panel.

Expanded Listening Through the International Technology Request (2024)

Throughout 2024, Thomas simultaneously conducted continuous listening, meetings, and audits with professional impact assessment actors from both finance and project fields. This approach was deliberately kept outside public discussion spaces to preserve freedom of speech, sincerity of feedback, and confidentiality.

To do this, Thomas issued a Technology Request at the very start of 2024 via the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN), a European network supported by the European Commission and deployed across the EU and 29 other countries worldwide. This Technology Request aimed explicitly to identify, through responses received, the real needs, limitations of existing tools, and concrete expectations of impact practitioners — without publicly exposing the AGILE project or artificially steering responses.

Through this process, Thomas connected with a dozen qualified professionals from Denmark to South Korea, including Italy, Germany, and France... representing a broad and complementary range of expertise: impact analysts, institutional and private finance actors, structured philanthropy representatives, academic researchers, impact project engineers, and decision-support tool designers. The anonymous exchanges provided particularly precise feedback on current practices, daily operational difficulties, and frustrations tied to fragmented or overly complex evaluation frameworks.

The insights from this Technology Request confirmed, in a converging manner, the observations already made in previous workshops: the need for a readable and shared framework, truly simple for daily use, capable of articulating impact, governance, and economic viability — while remaining flexible enough for very different user profiles. This discreet and international audit thus played a decisive role in the final consolidation of the AGILE tool, reinforcing its operational legitimacy and rooting its design in broad, methodically structured listening to field realities — while also helping identify meaningful questions for project selection or mentoring processes.

The December 2024 Workshop at the 16th Geneva Forum

In December 2024, a workshop brought together, among others:

• Mohammad Firas TABIEKH
• Aymeric JUNG
• Lukas ADAMS
• Grégoire MOUHICA
• Tristan LESCURE
• Thomas EGLI

The five families were publicly presented, with the central question posed to panelists: how to evaluate them?

Objective:

• refine the questions
• identify blind spots
• test the framework’s robustness on real cases

Tristan and Thomas compiled all contributions from the panel to produce a partial but significantly more complete version of the questions that need answering — starting from the list that began to emerge during the 2022 finance workshop.

It was during this panel, explicitly calling for an agile tool (Geneva Foundation for the Future x Geneva Forum), that Thomas proposed its official name: AGILE.

Final Consolidation Phase: AI, Coherence, and Responsibility (2025)

Finalization of the 25 Questions

The announcement of the decision to release a White Paper quickly requires assertiveness in terms of timelines.

Between January and June 2025, Thomas then takes full responsibility for finalizing the tool:

• Stabilize the total number of questions at 25, by reducing or increasing to only 5 questions per family of criteria
• using both human engineering and the notes resulting from the consultation of responses to the Technology Request and during the Panel
• and also using artificial intelligence as a tool for rigorous consolidation,
  in order to achieve:
• optimization and streamlining of the questions through only 5 per family, to ensure ease of daily use,
• elimination of blind spots,
• increased congruence by reinforcing the effect of scale and collective intelligence,
• reinforcement of intersectionality.

This phase directly addresses the previously identified issue:
From a situation with sometimes very numerous, partial, or yet-to-be-finalized questions in terms of formulation, we move to a solid framework representative of the daily fieldwork of finance and business management practitioners.

White Paper Writing and Tool Stabilization

From January 15 to June 15, 2025, Thomas analyzed, dissected, and optimized all the materials, including the results of the December 2024 panel and Tristan’s consulting project aimed at preparing that panel. During this period, Thomas extensively engaged the collective, and everyone contributed. Anecdotally, this was also when the reflection took place on what the five A.G.I.L.E. letters should stand for among different possibilities — and when the 25 questions were gradually assembled into the White Paper’s preparatory documents, reviewed by Thomas, Tristan, and all involved colleagues.

Thomas then takes particular care to ensure that each of the 25 questions is formulated in a way that is both spontaneous—allowing for fluid exploration through collective intelligence—and aligned with the SMART format and Bloom’s Taxonomy, so that the responses enable evaluation and measurement.

From June 15 to August 15, 2025, Thomas then undertook the long and intensive writing of the full White Paper, including the final questions for the five criteria. One of those cherished moments of serendipity occurred: aligning the five criteria with the five letters A.G.I.L.E.

Thus, the five families:

• Simplified financial foundation,
• Hight impact,
• Human Goals,
• Scale potential,
• Vital functions,

are now aligned with the five letters:

• A – Alignment, addresses the Human Goals family,
• G – Governance, addresses the Vital functions family,
• I – initially for Impact, renamed Intention following Aymeric’s constructive review of the White Paper, addresses the Hight Impact Criteria family,
• L – Leadership, addresses the Scale Potential family,
• E – Efficiency, addresses the Simplified financial foundation family.

A collective review was then conducted until September 30, 2025, with and by Michèle, Christa, Alejandro, Aymeric, Grégoire, and Tristan.
At the end of this process, the tool was declared operational, notably to address the structural and financial challenges of international Geneva, and ready for the launch of its Dry Run and upcoming crash tests.

Contribution and Role Attribution – Full Accountability

On the Criteria Families

The five families resulted from collective work involving:

• Christa
• Alejandro
• Michèle
• Thomas

On the Questions

The questions were:

• jointly developed by Tristan and Thomas
• enriched by three years of consultations with finance, philanthropy, and project leaders,
• further developed by experts from the Geneva Forum panel

On Overall Facilitation and Responsibility

Thomas ensured facilitation, continuity, and finalization of the project from beginning to end, especially to compensate for the limited availability of colleagues busy with their respective roles, and to ensure deadlines were met for the official release of the White Paper.

On the Production and Writing of the White Paper

Thomas handled all aspects of design, writing, and analytical intelligence to convey the collective positions contributed by colleagues such as Tristan in his consulting project, Alejandro through insights from his extensive experience, Aymeric through his detailed field-based financial analysis, Michèle through many insightful and candid questions but also systemic questions, and Christa through her strong academic vision.

AGILE as the Synthesis of a Collective Journey

The AGILE tool is the culmination:

• of patient and extensive field listening,
• of demanding dialogue with finance and impact project management,
• of rigorous translation between worlds with different languages

More than a tool, AGILE is now a structured memory of four and a half years of collective work — deliberate, traceable, and dedicated to enabling visible, fundable, and transformative impact.

A Takeoff Carried Collectively by the Field

The Dry Run of the AGILE tool was facilitated by the operational team of the Geneva Foundation for the Future at the December 2025 Geneva Forum, with Aymeric, Grégoire, Tristan, and Thomas, as part of an important day focused on aligning International Geneva with Impact Finance, and a full year of crash tests awaits it throughout 2026. See you at the Geneva Forum 2026 for the next steps in the evolution and deployment of the AGILE tool.

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