Beyond wellness is the phrase I have been quietly trying to land for three years. This week, on a stage in Grand Cayman, I said it out loud. Here is why I am retiring the word “wellness” and the framework I am replacing it with.
I am done calling what I do “wellness.”
Not because the word is wrong. Because the word has become a graveyard. A graveyard of generic. A graveyard of the serious question “what would help a person feel alive again?” stripped down to branded water, a meditation app, and a retreat with an enneagram workshop.
I spent the first half of my career inside corporate transformation. Barclays. Global consulting mandates. A year in India running programmes. 14-hour days and calling it growth. I know what the wellness category sells to organisations like that, I bought it myself, before I built anything. I also watched it do almost nothing that mattered.
This morning I am reflecting on a talk I am giving in Grand Cayman on Thursday. The title is “Beyond Wellness.” It is the thing I have been trying to name since 2023, when I started asking — privately, quietly, then out loud, why a multi-billion-dollar corporate wellbeing industry has watched employee engagement drop to a five-year low, 49% of workers struggling (more than thriving for the first time in recorded history), and manager engagement collapse from 31% to 22% in three years.
The numbers come from Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026. Out this month. Worth reading in full.
Here is what the numbers are saying, if you sit with them long enough.
The category is wrong
Wellness, as it exists in corporate procurement, assumes the problem is the individual. It solves for individual stress. Individual nutrition. Individual mindfulness. Individual sleep. The verbs are personal. The tools are apps, programmes, subscriptions.
If individual interventions worked, a decade of them would have moved the needle. They haven’t. They have moved some of the symptoms around. They have built a $3.7 trillion industry. They have not, at a population level, made workforces feel more alive at work.
The problem was never individual. The problem is the room.
I mean that literally. The room. The meeting room. The conference room. The hotel ballroom. The virtual room. The office that claims to be “activity-based” but is actually just an open-plan room with fewer places to hide. Every one of those rooms is a design decision. Every one of those rooms produces a predictable nervous-system response in the people inside it.
We have been treating the people and ignoring the room.
What I am calling it instead: Human Experience Design
I call the work Human Experience Design.
The language matters because the category shapes what gets bought, what gets measured, and what gets dismissed as “nice-to-have.”
Human Experience Design treats the room, the meeting, the event, the session, the conference, the week as the intervention. Not the programme bolted on top. The room itself.
Underneath Human Experience Design sits a framework I have been building for years and now using it with clients. I call it Well-Longing. Four pillars.
The four pillars of Well-Longing
- Presence — can a person be in the room in their body, without armour, without performing? This is the physiological prerequisite for everything else.
- Expression — can a person say what they actually think in that room, without the political tax? Almost no corporate room is designed for this.
- Connection — does the room produce the conditions for people to experience each other at the same depth at the same time? This is measurable. Neural synchrony is real.
- Purpose — does the room connect what a person does to a reason they care about? This is where meaning lives.
Presence. Expression. Connection. Purpose. In the room, not in a wellness app.
What I watched shift in the last six months
The phrase “wellness fatigue” has moved from conversations at private dinners into trade press. Washington Post covered “friction-maxxing.” HBR covered “quiet burnout” and “job-hugging.” Gallup covered the engagement collapse. Ritz-Carlton opened a vibroacoustic spa. Grand Hyatt opened 47,000 square feet of event space on our island. Meraki Wellness opened a 16,000-square-foot wellness destination ten minutes from my house.
The category is activating. Locally and globally. Which means the question shifts — from “does wellness sell?” to “who’s designing for how people actually feel?”
This is the moat IslandSoul occupies. Not better wellness. A different category altogether.
What changes, practically
If you run an organisation and you have been buying wellness programmes that underperform — I’d like to invite a different question. Not “how do we upgrade our wellness offer?” but “who designed the room our people spent 1,900 hours in last year, and what did that room tell their nervous systems about what to do?”
If the answer is “nobody designed it, it’s just what we inherited,” that is the opening. See how we work with organisations.
If you are a leader and you have been carrying the private version of “I’m fine, just tired, just one more quarter” — I’d like to say the same to you. The problem is not your resilience. The problem is your room.
If you are an event organiser, conference producer, or founder putting 500 people in a hotel ballroom next quarter — I’d like to share what changes when you design the room for Well-Longing first, agenda second. See our work designing conferences.
IslandSoul exists to do exactly this work. Not wellness. Not coaching. Not an app.
Design how people feel. Everything else follows.
That was the last line of my Thursday talk. It is also the last line of this blog.
See you on the other side of the stage.
About the author. Kieri Dornan is the founder of IslandSoul, a Human Experience Design platform based in the Cayman Islands. She spent 20 years in corporate transformation — Barclays, global consulting, change in India — before building IslandSoul in 2023. She speaks regularly on the future of work, eudaimonic design, and the Well-Longing framework. Come as you are.
