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Both Are Important, But Distinctions Are Key
When I share ideas here around the challenges families face when transitioning their assets from one generation to the next, it’s not uncommon for me to use a “compare and contrast” style.
I just went to my website and plugged the word “versus” into the search feature, and I got lots of hits, from back in 2016 to 2024.
This week’s topic is a rather basic one, but as usual, we’ll look at the distinctions between need and wants from a few different angles to see what we can unearth.
Once again, the story of this post originated in one place, and then veered into a different direction after a case call with peers.
Writing an Article Versus a Blog Post
Creating interesting and useful content takes many forms, and some will naturally be more suited to one’s style than others.
Having written a couple of books, a few white papers, and a handful of articles for publications, by far my favourite format is blogging.
Last week in The Toughest Challenge: Keeping the Family Together, I mentioned that I’ve written some articles for a particular website over the years. (The search feature there is also handy.)
A few months back, I began writing a piece for them on the subject of wants versus needs, from the angle of rising gen family members and to what degree the family’s wealth could realistically be available to them.
But talking about how making sure the next gen family members get everything they need, but not expecting to get everything they want didn’t have enough meat on it.
I got about a quarter of the way into it before abandoning it, as I was missing a certain spark to make it compelling. So it gathered dust in a folder somewhere, until…
Yet Another Meaningful Peer Case Call
Once again I was taking part in a group call with peers, discussing a real live family case I’m working on.
And all of a sudden, people were asking me questions like “What does the patriarch really want?”, to which I replied that I wasn’t sure if he really knew the answer, and that his actions certainly weren’t lining up with what he said he wanted.
We then discussed situations where what people say what they want and what they truly want do not always line up.
But then as so often occurs, someone with a different background and training, in this case psychology, came at things from a new perspective.
All of a sudden we were talking about how so many issues arise from those who have “unmet needs”.
Bang, there it was, wants and needs coming together again.
And having zero to do with the rising generation and how to avoid entitlement.
Basic Units of Analysis?
One way to think about both of these is that they are possibly two of the most basic ways of analysing what people are attempting to satisfy or achieve.
The questions my colleagues were asking were attempts to understand what was at the very heart of what the person was trying to solve for, and trying to zero in on such ideas is almost always a useful exercise when attempting to understand a situation.
In many ways, when working with a family system, we need to try to get at what’s driving each person individually, in order to then try to help them reconcile all the people’s needs and wants into some way forward that tries to maximize the wants and needs of the entire family.
And that’s why this work is not easy; but having ways to try to better understand everyone will always be helpful.
Needs = Must Have; Wants = Nice to Have
So if we try to go full circle here and look at the “versus” part of what I set up, I guess we need to contrast needs and wants again.
Perhaps we are trying to create a situation where every family member gets all their needs met, because these are the “must haves”.
If we can achieve that, we can then move on to the wants of each person, because these are less important, and fall under the “nice to have” heading.
I hope this brain dump of mine has been useful to readers, I know it has forced me to think through these questions a bit more.
If others benefit too, that’s icing on the cake.
