Continuity Model Generation

Familial Meta-Framework

While there is a familial component to everything for the Continuity Model Generation, the four frameworks within the familial meta-framework make difficult conversations much easier.

The Big Tent Framework

As businesses and families evolve, promoting meaningful involvement and engagement among enterprise members presents a challenge. As one sage family business leader suggests, “entitlement and wealth become the enemy.”

Most families that have effectively addressed the challenge of engagement pursue a big tent approach. It's the idea that family leaders prefer to have the growing number of family members inside the tent, where they are provided appropriate education and other development support for meaningful roles, rather than outside the tent, where they may become suspicious of what's going on inside and even tempted to sabotage it, whether intentionally or not. Thus, a big tent approach sends a strong message, particularly to next-generation members and affines, about their potential value and contributions to the enterprise, and the importance of their involvement (Illustration 8).

But the approach requires careful, strategic orchestration.

Indeed, with an increasing number of families worldwide committed to family governance initiatives, they are in effect developing their own, idiosyncratic big tent approaches. Specifically, they are setting clear guidelines for how family members can engage meaningfully with, and contribute to, the family ...