In my work with wealth-creating families, conflict is often part of the picture. To be clear, all families have conflict; it is natural to families. And when family dynamics and significant wealth combine, the potential for conflict grows. It makes sense: many enterprising families have more complicated common interests. They must make decisions of all kinds regarding the assets they manage and share. Who will be a leader? Who can have input into decisions affecting all of them? How are differing visions and values dealt with (or ignored)? What is “fair” in terms of estate planning between siblings or cousins?
Family conflict comes in all sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL. Once you start hitting the realm of adding an “X” (or two or three), it can get pretty messy.
A situation I often find myself in is facilitating healing in a family at the XL+ level of conflict. One of the common limiting factors is resistance to taking responsibility directly with family members for a behavior or decision that led to pain. Taking responsibility and offering a genuine and believable apology is often powerfully helpful on a healing journey. And, it often leads to others feeling safe to join in and share aspects of the situation they wish they had handled differently as well.
Family members often conflate an apology with being responsible for all aspects of the complex situation. Fear of being tagged “at fault” for the whole complicated puzzle often prevents family members from taking responsibility for their piece of that puzzle. And so, the family can become locked in a stalemate when even a small amount of responsibility-taking is what the healing process needs most.
This is where the time machine comes in. It can be very helpful if even one member of a family in stalemate is willing to pretend they can jump in a time machine and go back to before some aspect of the family drama and find one element of it they would do differently that they believe would have limited or prevented the drama that actually unfolded.
Things as simple as rephrasing a sentence or interaction, involving different people (or not involving certain people), or making a different decision along the way, can be a strong show of leadership—that’s right—leadership! One type of leadership that is needed in all families is taking responsibility and ownership for behavior with the family group around the limitations and painful fallout of one’s behavior. When done frequently, this leads to a culture in which responsibility-taking, genuine remorse and apologizing can take hold and more easily help a family through future challenges.
One example of this with a family client involved an argument at the family Christmas get-together. One of the brothers brought up a business issue, it got intense and heated and led to a blowout argument and family stalemate. While doing the time machine exercise, the brother who started the business conversation took responsibility for bringing up the topic and shared that if he could go back in time he never would have brought it up at the Christmas party, but would have waited until the following week when the family had a scheduled family council meeting. This led one of the siblings who took what was a relatively mild issue and blew it up to describe her emotional state that night due to an issue with her in-laws that led her to overreact. Her real upset had nothing to do with the situation brought up by her brother and the actual issue causing her pain engendered sympathy and love from family members.
The time machine exercise is a simple way to turn the tide from anger, stalemate, and shame-fueled resistance to a place of taking responsibility, acknowledgment of shortcomings, expression of remorse, and building a family culture that is resilient in the natural waves of family conflict.