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Research programme · WHF Research Lab

Shameless Institutions

How leaders, organisations and communities stop running on shame, betrayal and revenge — and what happens to Fundamental Peace when they do.

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The question

Why shame, and why institutions

Shame is the wound our modern world most actively manufactures. Guilt says "I did something wrong" and can be repaired; shame says "I am something wrong". Inside institutions it hides behind ranking, public correction and hierarchy, and it travels with two companions: betrayal, the belief that we will be let down, and revenge, the need to make someone pay. This programme asks whether an institution can stop using shame as fuel — and whether that release travels from its leadership to the people at its base, and back.

Read the essay: The Shamed World

The lens

Six frameworks, one map

01

The Six Wounds of Humanity

Repression, Denial, Shame, Rejection, Guilt and Separation, each healed by its virtue: Honesty, Ease, Humour, Gentleness, Forgiveness and Care. Humour heals shame when it carries love, compassion and forgiveness.

Read the article
02

Emotional Alchemy and Shadow–Gift–Essence

Eleven emotion families, each moving from shadow to gift to essence.

Explore the concept
03

Fundamental Peace and FP20

Integrated regulatory capacity under changing conditions, measured by the FP20 scale at every level of the programme.

Take the FP20 on lmgallardo.org
04

The Global Pain & Trauma Map

Seven domains of pain, so that no dimension of suffering stays invisible.

See the map
06

The Alchemy Papers

The full architecture from wound to essence.

Read the papers

How we study it

Three rings, two-way feedback

  1. 1

    Leadership

    The founder or leader does the inner work and carries the culture.

  2. 2

    Organisation

    Leadership circles, a shame audit of systems, trained catalysts.

  3. 3

    Communities

    The people at the base of the institution, with their families and villages.

LeadershipOrganisationCommunitiesChange ↓Stories and signals ↑

Change flows down; stories and signals flow back up.

Intervention and control groups

Clusters are compared with wait-list clusters that receive the programme later, following CONSORT guidance for cluster trials.

FP20 at every level

The same measure of Fundamental Peace for leaders, teams and communities, alongside validated scales for shame, revenge and forgiveness, psychological safety, self-compassion and wellbeing.

Mixed methods

Stories of change, circle observations and field notes coded by wound, virtue and pain domain.

Open publication

Preregistration, protocol, case studies and results, including null findings, in the Journal of Happytalism and Fundamental Peace and other open-access journals.

The founding case

The first case is underway with a founder-led enterprise and its wider community. Identities remain confidential until results are published with the partners' agreement. Every new institution joins as a new case, using the same method and instruments, so the evidence grows comparative over time.

Our commitments

  • Ethics approval and informed consent before any data collection.
  • Pseudonymous data only; results shared by team or community, never by person.
  • No score is ever tied to pay, promotion or selection.
  • Compliance with the data-protection law and research-ethics guidelines of every country where we work.
  • Every community receives its findings back, in its own language.

For institutions and leaders

Bring your institution

Businesses, schools, cities and public institutions can join the programme as future cases.

Talk to the Lab

Programme lead: Prof. Luis Miguel Gallardo · World Happiness Foundation Research Lab

World Happiness Foundation Research Lab · DOI prefix 10.68220 · Content licensed CC BY 4.0 unless otherwise stated.