Many family consultants work with families as though they were corporations. They help families create mission, vision and values statements; they seek alignment and accountability; they bring in techniques that are used to create high performance teams; and they apply org development work to their work with families.
Don’t get me wrong, some of this can be remarkably helpful. Some of these tools and technologies are highly effective and we use them in our work with clients. There have been major breakthroughs in our understanding of human behavior and the operation of groups in the last forty years. We would be foolish not to take advantage of the developments.
That said, these tools are also dangerous. Families are not corporations and to treat them as such can do very real violence to core elements of family life. Take for example the notion of “alignment”. In corporations this often involves engineering coordinated behavior starting with a core set of documents (mission/vision/values) through senior management down through the ranks to the humblest employees. A corporation so aligned becomes a well-oiled machine in which the individual is essentially a resource there to accomplish the purpose of the organization. This kind of alignment is often seen as an ideal in the corporate world. While we can leave to another day the question of whether this is smart management strategy, we can say with some certainty that this approach spells genuine disaster for a family. Family members are not good soldiers marching in straight lines into a clear future.
Since before recorded history, families have followed different structural patterns than those found in the modern corporation. Indeed, the corporation is largely derivative of one aspect of tribal culture. The corporation (which has been around for roughly 300 years in its present form) is the modern embodiment of structures that can be traced back to the ways clans organized their warriors. Corporations are thus essentially militaristic structures designed to channel and effectively use power to conquer. No culture (as over and against a civic order) that was based on militaristic principles has long survived – one thinks of ancient Sparta for example. For cultures (tribes) to survive, they must develop beyond such narrow structures.
Families are what are known in anthropological circles as “kinship” systems. They are organized around relationships. Who is married to whom? Who is descended from whom? What roles are played in this web of relationships? What conflicts exist within tribal relations and how are they resolved? Where are attachments close and where are they not? How do form and function make peace with one another in the rhythms of daily life? These are questions that organize life in tribal systems.
In short, families are primarily tribal. Corporations are not.
This very simple distinction has profound implications for creating families that sustain wealth across generations. What follows are some thoughts about how tribes differ from corporations. As you read this keep in mind that we are manufacturing polarities to make a point. There are overlaps and gray areas and you will see plenty of exceptions to the heuristic below – but we are interested in discerning an underlying simplicity beyond complexity and in identifying dominate themes or characteristics of the two systems to accentuate a point. We believe that doing so will foster some examination of the limits of corporate style intervention in the lives of families.
- Purpose and Story: Corporations are driven primarily by purpose; tribes are driven primarily by story. When you ask someone in business what their organization is about, he or she will tell you about the purpose of the organization – what it does in the world. When you ask someone to tell you about their family, you will quite naturally hear lots of stories. These stories shape the experience of family. They tell you how the family came to be, what is important to it, what values underpin its existence, what motivates and worries the people in it, how it has survived, what it has overcome. The family is, in this sense, driven by “mythos” not purpose. The dictionary defines mythos as “the complex of beliefs, values, attitudes, etc., characteristic of a specific group or society” It defines purpose as “the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc.; an intended or desired result, end, aim, or goal.” When families substitute mission statements for mythos, they can do real violence to their deepest structures. (For more on this see Burn All the Family Mission Statements.)
- Relationship of whole and part: In corporations, internal stakeholders belong because of their usefulness in serving the corporate interests. In tribes it is the opposite. Tribes exist to serve the human needs of their internal stakeholders not the other way around. The tribe is only as good as its ability to support the individual thriving of everyone within the tribal system. The corporation is only as good as its ability to gain the support of everyone within the corporate system. We see many families confuse this essential core to the social contract they form with one another by attempting to subjugate individual dreams to a perceived collective good rather than fostering the dreams of the individuals within the family in constructive and positive ways.
- Organization: The visual representation of the corporation is found in an org chart. These identify at least the formal power relationships within the organization. The visual representation of a family is a genogram. It is used to visualize hereditary patterns and psychological factors that punctuate relationships as well as the repetitive patterns of behavior from generation to generation. To bring the genogram into the org chart would create some insight, but mostly noise. To create an org chart of a family entirely misses the actual dynamics truly in play in a system where no one formally “reports” to anyone else.
- Measures of Efficacy: The efficacy of a corporation is primarily measured in terms of its agency. A successful corporation will be expanding in measurable and very tangible ways. It will be effective in meeting key performance indicators, targets, and other metrics. Family efficacy is measured primarily on the basis of communion. Families are successful on the basis of mutual connection, support and cohesion. Its outcomes are far more intangible and subjective. This is not to say that corporations can ignore communion, or families agency – they each must have both to function. It is a question of which is primary and which of these two drives serves the other. When families become too agentic, they become brittle and inevitably fail with respect to core family function.
- Time: Time in corporate environments is largely linear. It is typically measured in progressive accomplishments that build upon one another (quarters, fiscal years, etc.). Time in families is largely felt as cyclic. It is measured in seasons, holidays, births and deaths, marriages and divorces, stages of life, and so on. Attempting to force too much linearity onto families upsets the natural rhythms of the family’s life together. Interventions within families must take cyclic time into account and be organized and designed specifically to support these more elemental cycles.
- Dispute resolution: The fundamental dialectic around dispute resolution in corporations is arbitration. Various positions and views are put forward, consolidated, debated, re-combined and then a decision is made by a person with the authority to make the decision. The fundamental dialectic around dispute resolution in families is mediation. Dialog, deliberation, consultation and emergent consensus characterize truly successful family dispute resolution. In corporate environments there is – at least theoretically – power to impose arbitrated solutions. In families, the durability of agreement is founded almost exclusively on voluntary social contract, compromise, consensus and personal investment in agreed upon outcome.
- Alignment/Attunement. As noted in the introduction, corporations seek to align and create accountability. In families, these concepts are deadly. When families work well, they are not aligned so much as they are attuned. Like good jazz, each family member is improvising while listening carefully and soulfully to what others are doing. They are in sync rather than in line. This moves the conversation from one of accountability (a term of power and control) to one of integrity (authentic personal commitment to agreements with oneself and others). Families that do well have no need to hold one another accountable (as if that were truly possible or even desirable in families) but to remind one another of the essential integrity of the family and aspirational integrity of the individuals within it.
- Sustainability: The average lifespan of a corporation is roughly 40 years with that time shrinking dramatically as economic change accelerate and sectors quickly emerge, morph and disappear. The average lifespan of a coherent family – where there is continuity of conscious legacy – is three generations (grandparent to grandchild – or about 150 years). Corporations that beat the odds do so by internal corporate adaptability, innovation, and brand durability. (The Economist, 2001) Most families already trump corporate longevity (which begs the question of why bring corporate forms into families when families are naturally more successful than the vast majority of corporations on the simple measure of longitudinal cohesion). Families that endure beyond the three generation paradigm do so because of durable culture, highly effective parenting, deep social connection internally and externally, and an expanding financial base. (See, Hughes, 2004) There are analogues here (for example corporate brand can be seen as analogous to family cultural identity), but they are also quite different and families ignore these differences to their peril.
At the end of the day families are tribes. The consultant classes that work with these families may tweak corporate interventions to work within families, but without thinking deeply and with great clarity about the differences between corporations and tribes, these interventions will run the gamut of turning out not to work (the benign outcome) to doing irreparable damage to the family systems they were intended to support (the not so benign outcome). With many family leaders so steeped in business experience and with our work embedded in a culture obsessed by corporate success, it is tempting for family leaders to bring to their families what brought them success in business. This impulse does have much to commend it, but it also has very real hidden dangers that outside consultants must ameliorate if the family is to flourish over time. We are wise to remember, acknowledge and synchronize our efforts with the ancient tribal patterns that have existed and worked well for human beings from time immemorial.
© 2013. The Wesley Group. All rights reserved.
— August 12, 2013