This post originally appeared on the Exit Planning Exchange Knowledge Exchange site.
___________________
I am going to start with a bold statement in a transparent attempt to pique your curiosity, spark some controversy and entice you to read on – and I will later back away from this bold statement (but only by a bit). Now that you know my plan, here goes:
Family mission statements are a prime example of what the consultant class thinks wealthy families need. I would humbly, iconoclastically and somewhat rebelliously suggest that families actually don’t need mission statements. Not really.
Like many of you, I have been through a number of mission statement exercises – in my case more than a dozen and less that twenty. At the behest of leadership, I have facilitated or been part of the central task force on almost all of these. In every case but one, I have to report, sadly, that they made very little difference. They took months to develop, the teams putting them together twisted themselves in knots over every word, and the arguments both philosophical and lexical were sometimes quite fierce. In the end, the statements were written and adopted.
I am chagrined to report that all but one sit in binders on some dust encrusted shelf and are memorialized in a few anemic words perfunctory splayed across a website. No one in the organization appreciates the fine distinctions that were made in the creation of the statement. If anyone in the organization was asked to recite It, they would be hard pressed to do so.
In my experience, mission statements fare rather badly in the world of organizations.
And I would suggest that they do even worse in families.
In organizations they are meant to align action, create strategy, preserve sharp focus, serve as a litmus test in times of hard choices, and move the organization in clear and specific directions. When they do work in the hands of a skilled and focused leader, they can work beautifully. They can also work when people are desperate for some clarity. One family business I consulted with was fraught with real conflict. It now uses their mission statement like Occam’s razor at every Board meeting. It is used to craft agendas, make decisions, bring recalcitrant people in line and so on. It is one of the few organizations where I have seen a mission statement truly work – and there it has worked largely because the system would fall apart but for the glue and the ray of hope provided by that statement. But that was a mission statement for a business – it wasn’t a mission statement for the family.
Mission statements rarely live up to their hype in most business. They fare even worse in complex and conflicted social systems. In families, they are introduced by well-meaning family leaders and consultants, with all good intentions, in the hope that it will help the family bring some clarity to a complex situation. In my experience, mission statements simply don’t fit how actual families operate in the real world. Indeed, let’s consider families for a minute.
Our friends in the world of anthropology would tell us that families function organizationally as tribes – not corporations. Tribes are what are known in their parlance as “kinship systems”. This means that they are bound together by ties of blood and marriage. They function not so much because of organizational structure but because of cultural values, roles of individuals, and complex systems of norms and expectations. In tribes, all of this is carried in stories.
What always strikes me what I start working a family are the stories I hear. Within five minutes of talking with someone about their family, the person I am talking with is telling stories. Stories of betrayal and support. Stories of slights and celebrations. Stories of defeat and despair. Stories of challenge and triumph. Stories of disappointment and pride. I hear stories about parents and children and siblings and cousins and ancestors. Stories come out everywhere I turn until I start hearing the same stories all over again from different people with different perspectives. It is these kinds of stories that drive tribes and families. Stories are how tribal systems – ancient and modern – uncover meaning and purpose. These stories make the purposes and meanings of the family visible to the tribe. Tribes and clans do not have mission statements – they have stories of the past and the future grounded in the present.
Recently I was working with a family in Seattle. They are a wonderful family that is deeply interested in preserving lineage. The parents were immigrants from China who came to this country with nothing. Through lots of hard work and rock solid financial habits, they became remarkably successful. Their four children are now grown and most are married and have – or soon will have – children of their own. Things in this family are basically sound but there have been some tensions and challenges and the family wanted help. There have been questions of business succession and participation. Some of the children live further away and cannot take an active part in the business. Others are working very hard in the business. Spouses had been excluded from business conversations. There was a growing recognition that these issues needed to be addressed proactively.
The family thought about creating a mission statement. I suggested that there might be a better way and they were open enough to try it without much of a preview on my part as to what we would do together. So we all gathered – mom, dad, siblings, spouses and partners – on a wet Seattle weekend and they began telling a series of highly structured stories – these were stories of the future based on a technique known as scenario planning which was developed at Shell Oil Company and is now used by people such as Adam Kahane to address profoundly difficult social problems around the world.
I asked the family to imagine that it was 20 years from now and then talk about what the future would be like if they did nothing differently than what they were doing now. They spent over an hour and a half with this one story. The end result was a kind of desultory mix of mostly mediocre outcomes. There was some good and some bad, but the entire story felt weak and unsatisfying for all concerned. I asked the family to give that scenario a name. They called it “Tales of Passivity”. Within this tale that they had created, I helped the family tease out two crucial themes that seemed to be at the heart of the family’s interaction that were driving the narrative. These turned out to be issues of participation (mostly in the business) and cohesion (mostly related to the family). So I drew two intersecting lines with participation (high and low) on the vertical axis and cohesion (high and low) on the horizontal axis. We put Tales of Passivity in the lower left quadrant: low participation and low cohesion.
We next talked about what it would be like in 20 years if the family had high cohesion but low participation in the business. The family got into this scenario and, when it was done, it was given the name “Sticky Rice”. We next took on high participation and low cohesion. This was tough in the beginning, but the family came up with a scenario that was highly coercive and demanding. It was a system based on rights and responsibilities and financial incentives. They named this “One Legacy, Many Paths”. The final scenario took the best of the other stories and wove them together – the family discarded portions of scenarios that were incompatible and took key insights from each of the stories (and every story contributed something of value). This became “Great Expectations”.
The family then came to consensus as to which story they wanted to explicitly pursue. They felt that Great Expectations was a reach for them and there was a good bit of skepticism about whether it was possible to fulfill this story, but in the end, they agreed to give it a try for at least five years to see what progress they could make. They figured if they failed, they could default to Sticky Rise.
Now each of the stories the family created could easily be reduced to a mission statement, but we didn’t go there and we didn’t need to. In telling these stories the family did at least four things:
- It created highly memorable stories that helped tie the past, the future and the present together. The family now refers to the story names and knows what they mean and can have intelligible conversations about the future based on which story outcome their actions support.
- It created attunement in the family – in my experience “alignment” as used in the corporate world is probably not truly possible or desirable in family systems given the lack of true hierarchical structure. But “attunement” is possible and when it happens it is a beautiful thing. When people in a family are attuned to each other, they each play their own instrument, but they do so in ways that harmonize like improvisational jazz.
- The stories allowed us to get a great deal of complexity on the table, consider options creatively and move the family towards a sense of coherence about what is important to it. The stories encompass philanthropy, education, lineage, connection, governance and a number of other factors. Keeping all of these straight in non-story form would be an Augean task. The story makes it simple and the family can see how these things tie together.
- The stories brought substantial clarity to what the family did not want as well as what it wanted. Being able to hold in mind these competing visions for the future in ways that are succinct and memorable will help them make decisions as they move forward.
At the end of the day, families are tribes, not corporations. Mission statements are a business solution for a family problem. After doing work with families, I have become convinced that telling stories is the way to go. If a family can change the story it tells about itself, it is able to slowly shift its destiny.
I said at the beginning that I would back off from my radical stance a bit and I will do that. Mission statements can be useful and can indeed create some clarity. The exercise of creating them – if they are created collaboratively – can be quite helpful in its own right. Families that create mission statements together develop important skills in coming to agreements. Often mission statements feel comforting to those who are used to corporate forms or who are liner or deductive thinkers. That said, they often lack the emotional impact or buy and are therefore ineffective in inspiring sustained action. The notion that people will become “aligned” in a family in the same way they would snap to in a business environment is largely a fantasy.
In the end, as part of the consulting class, I find stories to be far more powerful, memorable and effective than declarative mission statements. They cause families to think and chose, imagine and create, and then they work to attune family members to the future they want to create together. They allow for flexibility in means while fostering agreement on ends. They become agreements about the common good of the family and they can become a solid basis for creating roadmaps that will help the family attain these dreams.
And for those who must have a mission statement – they typically just pop out of the story with very little effort.
— March 21, 2013