Engagements
The work is a year, and then it happens again.
Every family is somewhere on the same curve, and most do not know where.
The method
There are five stages, each with the behaviour that characterises it, and the honest way to find yours is to be scored against evidence by somebody who is not you.
The five stages are below in full, then the architecture underneath them. What a family retains once it knows its stage is a governance office, and the instrument that office runs on is the platform.
The Governance Maturity Curve
The five stages, and how to tell which one is yours.
Five stages, measuring how much of your governance survives the absence of the person who built it. They are not a ranking of families. They describe systems, not people.
Stage 1
Founder-Led
One person decides, and the enterprise works because that person is good at it.
What it looks like
- Decisions are made in conversation and confirmed by memory.
- There is no standing agenda, because the agenda is whatever is urgent.
- Documents exist for lenders, auditors and counsel rather than for the family.
- Asked who approved something, people give a name rather than a record.
How you know
If the founder were unreachable for a month, would anything of consequence be decided? If the honest answer is no, you are here.
The exposure is not the founder's judgement, which is usually excellent. It is that the judgement has no successor and no record.
Stage 2
Managed
There are meetings and there are reports, and both depend on whoever happens to run them.
What it looks like
- A regular meeting exists, and its agenda is set by whoever prepares the papers.
- Thresholds exist, informally, and different people describe them differently.
- Minutes are notes of what was said rather than records of what was decided.
- Delegation happens by trust rather than by instrument.
How you know
If two senior people were asked separately which decisions require the board, would they give the same answer? If not, you are here.
This stage feels orderly from the inside, which is why families stay in it for a decade. Order that depends on particular people is not yet governance.
Stage 3
Disciplined
The rules are written, and mostly followed.
What it looks like
- A decision rights matrix exists and most people know roughly what is in it.
- A board or committee meets to a calendar and papers circulate in advance.
- Conflicts are declared, usually, and by the people who remember to.
- The record is retrievable, but assembling it takes real effort.
How you know
Could you produce, within a day, the paper and the approval behind a material decision taken two years ago? If it would take a week of searching, you are here.
Written rules with uneven observance produce a specific failure: everyone believes the system is working, so nobody checks.
Stage 4
Institutional
The architecture runs whether or not any particular person is in the room.
What it looks like
- Decision rights are current, tested, and used at the level they specify.
- Every material decision carries its own record of who approved it and on what evidence.
- Board packs are assembled to a standard and approved section by section.
- Conflicts and risks are registered, reviewed and acted on.
- The next generation enters on a defined path rather than by invitation.
How you know
If the chair, the chief executive and your most senior family member were all absent for a quarter, would governance continue unchanged? If yes, you are here.
The work at this stage is no longer building. It is keeping, and keeping is harder to sustain because nothing visibly breaks when it stops.
Stage 5
Legacy Enterprise
The record has itself become an asset, and the family governs across generations rather than within one.
What it looks like
- Decisions cite earlier decisions, and precedent is used deliberately.
- The governance system is reviewed and improved on a cycle rather than after an incident.
- The record is durable and provable to outsiders, including ones who are not yet born.
- Governance is taught to arriving family members rather than absorbed by proximity.
How you know
Could a family member born after a decision was taken understand why it was taken, from the record alone, without asking anybody? If yes, you are here.
Few enterprises of any kind reach this stage. Those that do tend to have treated the record as infrastructure for at least one full generational handover.
The assessment
Scored by a facilitator against your evidence. Never self-assessed.
Twenty four questions across six dimensions, with one hundred and twenty written anchors so that two facilitators reach the same score. It produces a stage, a heat map, and priorities in the order they unblock each other.
An assessment keeps the version of the instrument it was scored against. A later version cannot silently reinterpret an earlier reading.
We assess what you can demonstrate, not what you can produce. A family with an excellent charter nobody has opened in four years scores lower with us than a family with a plain one they cite in every meeting.
So the questions are behavioural. Not do you have a conflicts policy, but show us a conflict that was declared, ruled on, and recorded. Not is there a decision rights matrix, but ask two people and see whether the answers match.
The score comes from documents you supply and from what different people independently say when asked the same question.
Governance maturity is not a matter of opinion.
The Governance Pyramid
What governance is built from, in the order it has to be built.
Five layers, in order. Each rests on the one beneath it, and installing the fourth where nobody has written the first is the commonest way a governance programme fails. Each is read three ways: what it is, what its absence looks like, and what proves it exists.
01
Purpose
- What it is
- What the enterprise is for, written plainly enough to settle an argument.
- Without it
- Every disagreement becomes a question of personality, because there is nothing above the people to appeal to.
- What proves it exists
- A statement of purpose somebody has cited in a live decision, and a proposal that went the other way because of it.
02
Principles
- What it is
- The standing commitments that constrain what may be decided. Constraints, not aspirations.
- Without it
- Values written in warm language nobody could act on, and every case argued from the beginning.
- What proves it exists
- Principles expressed as limits, and an attractive proposal recorded as declined on one of them.
03
Decision Architecture
- What it is
- Who may decide what, at what threshold, on what evidence, and who must be consulted before they do.
- Without it
- Authority is remembered rather than defined, and remembered differently by different people.
- What proves it exists
- A current decision rights matrix, and recent decisions made at the level it specifies.
04
Execution
- What it is
- The rhythm that turns architecture into practice. Meetings held, papers issued in advance, approvals recorded as they happen.
- Without it
- The documents are excellent and the enterprise is run entirely outside them.
- What proves it exists
- An operating calendar with a measured compliance rate, and board papers that reach members before the meeting.
05
Continuous Improvement
- What it is
- The governance system is itself reviewed on a schedule, against a standard, by a named owner.
- Without it
- Governance was installed once, has quietly aged, and nobody is responsible for asking whether it still fits.
- What proves it exists
- A dated reassessment showing movement, and an instrument amended because of what it found.
The Blueprint
What a family actually receives.
The Pyramid is the architecture. The Blueprint is what gets built. A family receives all six components or it receives an incomplete system.
01
Purpose and Principles
The purpose statement, the principles that constrain decisions, and the family's own account of what it is preserving and why. Written by the family, not for them. It is the component most often skipped and the one everything above it rests on.
02
Decision Governance
The decision rights matrix, the thresholds at which authority moves, the bodies that hold it, and the evidence each decision requires. Most of the value sits here, and a family can feel it working within a quarter.
03
Institutional Documentation
The charter, the committee mandates, the policies and the delegations, drafted so they bind and so they can be amended without starting again. Documents are the instrument, never the achievement.
04
Governance Execution
The operating rhythm: what meets, how often, with what papers, prepared by whom and approved by whom. Execution is where a good design usually dies, so it is designed rather than assumed.
05
Continuous Improvement
An annual reassessment against the Governance Maturity Curve, the Governance Priorities that come out of it, and a named owner for each. Movement is measured, so its absence is visible too.
06
AI-Augmented Governance
A narrow, disclosed use of machine drafting inside the record. It drafts from data the system already holds, it approves nothing, and every passage it writes stays marked until a named person accepts it.
Where this goes
Questions
Frequently asked.
What is family office governance?
It is the system that determines who may decide what, on what evidence, and how each decision is recorded so it can be proved later. The Governance Pyramid above sets it out as five layers: purpose, the principles that constrain it, the decision architecture that allocates authority, the execution rhythm, and the review cycle that keeps all of it current.
How is a governance assessment scored?
A facilitator scores twenty four questions across six dimensions, one to five, against evidence you supply. Each level carries a written anchor describing what that score looks like in practice, so two facilitators reach the same reading. You do not score yourself.
What is the difference between a maturity score and an operating index?
The maturity score answers how good the architecture is. The Governance Operating Index answers whether you are running it, from your own records, with no facilitator in the room. A family can build good governance and then stop showing up, and only the second measure sees that.
How is governance different from investment management?
Investment management decides what a family should own. Governance decides who is allowed to make that decision, on what evidence, and how the answer is recorded. We do the second. We are not investment advisers and we take custody of nothing.
At what size does a family need formal governance?
No threshold of wealth triggers it. What creates the need is the number of people who can legitimately ask why something was decided. Once that is more than one, you need an answer that does not rely on one person's memory. It usually arrives suddenly: a second generation reaching adulthood, an event that removes the founder, or a sale that turns a company into capital.
What is a decision rights matrix?
A written schedule stating, for each class of decision, who decides it, the threshold at which it moves to a higher body, what evidence must accompany it, and who must be consulted first. It is the third layer of the Governance Pyramid, and the component families most often believe they already have.
What is the difference between a family charter and a family constitution?
The terms are used interchangeably and neither is a legal instrument on its own. Both name the document in which a family sets out its purpose, its principles, who counts as a family member, and how the family relates to the enterprise. What matters is whether it has ever been cited in a real decision, and whether it can be amended without starting again.
Further reading
The seventy percent statistic is not evidence
Where the figure came from, what it actually counted, and the three questions that would tell a family where it really stands.
Eighty-six percent have no succession plan for the people who decide
The succession most families have thought about is the shares. The one J.P. Morgan found missing is the people who run the place, and it is the one that stops an office within a week.
The succession paradox: agreement is not a plan
Deloitte Private asked three hundred family businesses about chief executive succession. Eighty-five percent call planning for it critical. Twenty-three percent are implementing a plan. What sits between the two is governance.
The Governance Maturity Curve
Five stages describing how much of an enterprise's governance would survive the absence of the person who built it, and how to tell honestly which one you are in.
Succession is a governance problem before it is a tax problem
Ownership transfers on a date certain. The ability to govern does not transfer at all unless somebody built the architecture that carries it.
Who decides what in a family office?
The decision rights matrix, what belongs in it, the four bodies authority usually sits with, and the test that reveals whether a family actually has one.
What is family office governance?
A definition that can be acted on, the four things governance actually consists of, and the distinction between governance and the investment management it is constantly confused with.