Wealth of Wisdom

SECTION 7NAVIGATING FAMILY DYNAMICS

Readers will no doubt notice that many chapters of this book would be at home in multiple sections. For example, the same exercise may touch upon What Matters Most, Planning Thoughtfully, and Making Shared Decisions.

This is especially the case with tools and practices devoted to enhancing a family's dynamic, that is, its members' ability to communicate, collaborate, and treat each other with respect, fairness, and trust. The chapters that we have collected in this section represent just a few of those that can help readers in this area.

To begin, Keith Whitaker offers a summary of a very powerful exercise first developed by Charles Collier, senior philanthropic advisor at Harvard University, and described by Charlie in the first Wealth of Wisdom volume. This “Three-Step Process” involves individual reflection, sharing those reflections with the other family members (and hearing their thoughts), and then identifying common ground for next steps. It can be used in its simplest form by couples, but it can also be applied to siblings, parents, and children, or even conversations among cousins or more distant relations.

Most families don't recognize all the factors that keep them together; they observe these factors only in their absence, when conflict threatens to erupt. In the next chapter, Blair Trippe and Doug Baumoel give readers a construct by which to evaluate their “family factor”—the combination of shared history, shared vision, and ...