|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Business, Family, and Ownership Each Have Their Own “Clock”.
I’ve been a huge fan of the Three Circle Model since I first saw it almost a decade ago, and wrote about it almost instantly. See Three Circles + Seven Sectors = One A-Ha Moment.
It remains the simplest way to quickly get at so many of the issues that enterprising families face, in a way that just about everyone involved can quickly grasp.
That model from Tagiuri and Davis has been around for over 40 years now, and many people have commented on it, tried to modify it, added circles, changed the sizes of the circles, turned the circles into spheres, etc.
Rarely, however, have I seen much comment around the time elements that affect each of the three areas.
That will change today.
An Old-Fashioned Analog Clock Analogy.
Many of the posts I write here are inspired in one way or another by group discussions that I’ve been part of over Zoom, and this is yet another of those.
This one involved a number of local family business folks who have begun kicking around an idea to host an event next year to celebrate the community in some way.
The call included people from a local university, some practitioners who work with enterprising families (like me), and a few who run some pretty cool family enterprises, who I was happy to meet.
The discussion went all over the place and was all positive, and although I didn’t attend in order to find a blog topic….
When the academic on the call mentioned the Three Circle Model, my ears perked up, because I wasn’t expecting it to come up in this context.
And then he added the part about a clock, and the second hand, the minute hand, and the hour hand.
Bingo!
Flashback and Confusion, But No Time to Argue.
He shared that someone had pointed out to him that you could look at an old-fashioned clock and think of each of the circles as being represented by one of the sweeping hands.
I’m pretty sure I stopped listening at that point because my imagination had taken over.
I’m not even sure which hand he had assigned to which circle, but that’s probably moot here. I’ve got my own thoughts on that and I’m not sure they agreed with his, but in this context there was no time to argue either.
It also caused a flashback to a post I wrote about ownership and how that’s the circle that changes the least often, so for me it would have to be the one that gets the “hour hand”. See Clunky Ownership Syndrome in Family Business
What About the Seconds and Minutes?
So what about the second hand and the minute hand, to be assigned to the family and the business?
Well, more often than not, I’d be inclined to say that the business turns at a faster rate, especially when there’s an operating company with lots of employees working there, possibly for many hours every day, possibly even around the clock.
I’d say that the family circle would be best ascribed to the minute hand, because things change there more frequently than in the ownership, but there aren’t necessarily any noticeable changes happening on a frequent basis.
If you have a family genogram with everyone’s age on it, you could update it once a year and never be too far off.
Attention, Focus, and Intention.
You may be wondering what any of this has to do with anything, and if you are still left wanting, (and still reading this!) I’ll share my thoughts on the relevance of this.
Quite often, family members who also work in the business can become overly focused on the business, at the expense of the attention they pay to their family.
They follow that second hand around because it’s moving quickly, and in the time that the business went around the circle five times, the minute hand barely moved, so it’s easy to ignore.
Now extend this analogy to the ownership, and you can barely even notice that anything there needs to even be thought about.
But eventually….
Don’t Get Caught Watching the Clock.
It can be very seductive to pay attention to the fast-moving business circle and forget that the minutes and hours also continue to move along at their own, slower pace.
The other circles, most notably the family circle, also require attention, focus, and intention.
Don’t get seduced by the second hand.
