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.
Eighty-six percent of the family offices in J.P. Morgan's 2026 global survey have no clear succession plan for their key decision makers. Not for the shares. For the people: whoever knows which adviser to call, which commitments are outstanding, and why the last significant decision went the way it did.
The same report names overreliance on a single individual or a single provider among the most commonly cited risks to the continuity and effectiveness of a family office.
Ownership succession is a document. Decision succession is a system, and it is the half most families have not started.
The gap is about people, not shares.
J.P. Morgan Private Bank surveyed 333 family offices across 30 countries for its 2026 Global Family Office Report. Eighty-six percent of them lack a clear succession plan for key decision makers, inside the family and inside the office itself.
Most families reading that have an estate plan. Many have a shareholders' agreement, a trust structure and a will that has been reviewed within the last three years. All of those answer who will own the enterprise.
None of them answers who will decide, on what authority, by what standard, when the person who currently does is not there.
A lean office is one absence away from a standstill.
A family office is usually small on purpose. Three people, five, sometimes one, often serving a family for a decade or more. That is a strength in every year but one.
The report describes offices held together by individual decision makers or by executives who have been with the family a long time. Judgement built over ten years is the asset such a family is paying for.
It is also the concentration. When one person carries the working knowledge of the structures, the counterparties, the outstanding obligations and the family's own history, an illness lasting a month is an operational event, and a departure is a year of reconstruction.
What a succession plan for a role contains.
Four parts, each answerable in writing. A plan naming a successor and nothing else is a hope with a name attached.
- The decisions the role holds
- Every decision that person may take alone, with the threshold at which each stops being theirs. Written as it operates today rather than as the structure chart describes it. This is where two senior people typically discover they disagree.
- Who holds them in the interim
- Named, in advance, with the authority to act on the day rather than the authority to convene a meeting about acting. An interim holder who has to ask permission is a delay dressed as a plan.
- What the role knows
- The counterparties, the standing obligations, the reasoning behind the arrangements currently in place. Most of this exists only in one person's head, and the whole of the exercise is moving it somewhere it can be read.
- How the role is filled permanently
- Who chooses, against what specification, and who must be consulted first. Deciding that under time pressure, with the office already stalled, is how families appoint the person who is available rather than the person who is right.
Most of what leaves with a person was never written down.
Ask why a holding sits in the structure it sits in, why a distribution policy was set where it was set, or why a particular adviser was chosen over another. In most family offices those answers exist in one memory and nowhere else.
Minutes rarely help. Minutes record what was said in a meeting, and the reasoning behind a decision is usually settled before the meeting and assumed during it.
A record built as decisions are taken carries the reasoning with the approval, so it survives the person who held it. A record assembled after somebody leaves is partly reconstruction and partly invention, and nobody who reads it later can tell which parts are which.
Name the roles before you name the successors.
Families stall on this because it reads as a conversation about mortality and about who is trusted. Naming successors first makes that unavoidable, and the exercise stops.
Start with the roles instead. Write down every decision the office takes, and beside each one the person who currently takes it. That schedule is short, it can be produced within a fortnight, and it names nobody's replacement.
It also does most of the work. A family looking at that page can see which decisions rest on one person, which have no written threshold at all, and which nobody can name an owner for. Those three findings are the plan's agenda.
The Governance Maturity Curve measures precisely this: how much of an enterprise's governance would survive the absence of the person who built it.
Questions this raises.
We have an estate plan and a shareholders' agreement. Is that not succession planning?
It is ownership succession, and it is necessary. It settles who holds the shares and on what terms. It does not settle who may approve a commitment next Tuesday if the person who normally approves it is unreachable, or where the reasoning behind the last three years of decisions is held. Those are separate instruments and they are usually missing.
Our family office is three people. Is a formal plan proportionate?
Three people is where the exposure is highest rather than lowest. A large office absorbs an absence because several people hold overlapping knowledge. In a small one each person is the only holder of something, and the concentration the report describes is at its most acute exactly where the headcount is smallest.
How long does it take to produce one?
The schedule of decisions and who currently takes them is a fortnight of work and is the part that yields most of the findings. Naming interim holders and agreeing thresholds takes longer, because it requires the people involved to agree, and that agreement is the substance rather than an obstacle to it.
What is the first sign that this is missing?
Ask two senior people separately which decisions require the board and at what amount. If the answers differ, authority has never been allocated in writing, and whoever has been resolving that ambiguity in practice is the single point of failure the plan needs to address.