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A Fresh Look at Defining “Who’s Family”?
Writing this blog each week allows me to see subjects come up again over time, and realize that evolution affects things in many ways.
The world is evolving, the ecosystem of professionals serving families continues to grow and make progress, and my practice is always maturing.
Some “evergreen” subjects show up in different ways for families and those who serve them.
For example, Continuity Planning; Who Is at the Table dates back to 2019, and this week we’ll revisit that subject from a fresh angle.
I’ll also introduce the idea of a “family project”, thanks to a fluke of vocabulary.
My Bias Towards More “Familiness”
Regular readers will recognize my long-time penchant towards wanting to include more family members in continuity planning, as it has probably been a top “hobby horse” of mine for over a decade.
While I continue to believe that most families should be working to expand the number of seats at this proverbial table, I want to acknowledge that there are in fact logical limits to what’s beneficial.
Just because “some is good”, that doesn’t automatically mean that “more is better” in all cases.
This idea has come through loud and clear recently in my role as a project team advisor for participants in the Family Enterprise Advisor program.
During the past couple of cohorts where I’ve worked with a multidisciplinary team of professionals, tasked with finding and serving a real family enterprise, I’ve also managed to invite myself to the final presentation of all the teams in the cohort.
There’s a lot of learning in those sessions, for the participants, the instructors, and the lucky team advisors who attend.
The “Do No Harm” Maxim Comes to Life
When a team of people enrolled in an executive education program gets unleashed to go find a family and offer to engage them in a discovery project, there need to be some guidelines in place.
One of those, borrowed from the world of medicine and the Hippocratic Oath, is the very simple maxim of “Do No Harm”.
Having witnessed end-of-project presentations by several teams over the past number of months, I got to see a couple of versions of this, and I want to share those perspectives here.
What I’ve come to discover is that there are a few ways to look at “do no harm”, beyond simply thinking and stating “let’s not make things worse”.
A couple of the presentations I saw actually extended the concept to the choices made when deciding which family members would participate in the family project.
Finding the Goldilocks Number of Participants
As an advisor to teams embarking on these projects, one of the first questions I get asked is “how many family members do we need?”
Because a 4-5 month-long project is a bit “artificial” as an exercise, landing on a reasonable number, ideally around 5 to 8 people to interview, is a critical question.
As teams present their project journey to classmates, the question of “who’s in/who’s out” always gets shared.
My little “A-Ha’s” from these revolve around the “do no harm” angle.
One team noted that a sibling in their project family was excluded, because of the fear that they would “do harm” to the functioning of the project. I thought that was a novel way of expressing the reason for that exclusion.
Another team noted that in the family they worked with, a sibling was excluded based on the perception that being involved in the project might be harmful to their mental health. This is more aligned with the traditional view of “do no harm”, but with an individual, mental health twist.
My Fluke of Vocabulary: “Family Project!”
It’s interesting to me how an artificial construct like a team project for executive education can lend itself to learning about how a “family project” might be embarked upon by a family.
When I work with a family in the “real world”, we also spend time evaluating and considering just who should be included in our work together.
This isn’t as simple as you might think, and it truly is a “family decision”.
Starting small, and then eventually expanding the group later, are always ideas I put out there.
Creating a situation where everyone is invited, but nobody is forced to attend meetings, is also encouraged.
Any “family project”, especially related to embarking on family governance, requires lots of thought and planning.
