Two consultants who spent their careers inside troubled family companies noticed something eerie. When they mapped their client families on paper, generation above generation, the big events kept...
Two consultants who spent their careers inside troubled family companies noticed something eerie. When they mapped their client families on paper, generation above generation, the big events kept landing together. A business founded shortly after a parent's death. A divorce arriving shortly after the birth of a child with special needs. A son's rebellion timed, almost to the year, with the age at which his own father had once broken with his father. The families themselves had never seen these alignments, because nobody had ever drawn them where they could be seen.
The consultants were Jane Hilburt-Davis and W. Gibb Dyer, Jr., and they put the method into their 2003 book Consulting to Family Businesses: A Practical Guide to Contracting, Assessment, and Implementation. The tool is called a genogram, and in the book it belongs to the professional: the consultant draws it, reads it, and decides what to reveal. This essay takes the tool out of the professional's briefcase and hands it to the family, because nothing about a pencil and a sheet of paper requires a license, and because the questions a genogram answers are questions a family ought to be able to ask itself. Before you hire anyone, before you fill anything in, draw the tree first.
Here is the essay's one idea, in a sentence. A family tree that records only names and dates is a list; a family tree that records what happened between the names, the closeness and the cutoffs, the losses and the launches, becomes a mirror, and a family that looks into it honestly will learn things about its business that no outsider could ever tell it.
Start with what the thing actually is, because it is simpler than its name. A genogram, borrowed by the authors from family therapy, is a family tree drawn across at least three generations, with extra marks for the things ordinary trees politely leave out: which relationships were close and which were cut off, where the open conflicts ran, who struggled with illness or addiction, who was in the business and who owned it. The book suggests drawing family members in the business in one color and ownership in another, so the overlap of family and firm becomes something you can see at a glance.
Then come what the authors call nodal events, and this is the heart of it. Their instruction is to map the family "over at least three generations, with significant, 'nodal' events highlighted (illnesses, critical life changes, deaths, start of business, repetitive patterns, shifts in family relationships)." A nodal event is a moment the family bent around: a death, a migration, a bankruptcy, a birth, the founding of the enterprise itself. And their clinical observation, the one that opened this essay, is that "nodal events are concurrent." The business decisions and the family shocks keep happening in the same years, because they were never separate to begin with.
If your family runs a shop, a farm, a workshop, a company, ask yourself now, before any drawing: do you know what was happening in the family in the year the business began? Not the founding story polished for retelling, but the weather around it. Whose death freed or forced someone's hand? Whose marriage brought the capital? Who left for another country, and what did their leaving pay for? Most families cannot answer, and the tree is how you find out.
Why go to this trouble? The authors' summary of what a genogram demonstrates is worth quoting exactly, because each clause carries weight. "Families repeat problems and solutions," they write. "Nodal events and how a family reacts to them continue to influence the family over time and can be predictive." And finally: "Families and their businesses are interwoven over generations."
Repeat problems and solutions. Both halves matter. A family that sees, drawn in its own hand, that three generations of eldest sons have left the business in anger around age thirty is not cursed; it is patterned, and a pattern seen is a pattern that can be broken before the current eldest son turns twenty-nine. But the tree also shows the repeated solutions, the family's inherited strengths: the generation that survived a war by pooling everything, the grandmother who rebuilt twice, the habit of educating daughters that turned out, forty years later, to be the firm's salvation. A genogram is not an indictment. Half of what it surfaces is treasure.
The book adds a gentler use, one families rarely expect: the tree gives context that dissolves old judgments. Their example is a grandfather's legendary stinginess, which reads differently once the tree shows he was raised in the Depression, the economic collapse of the 1930s that marked everyone it touched. A miser becomes a survivor. An "impossible" aunt becomes the child who was sent away at seven. The authors put it plainly: through genograms, families "begin to understand and put behaviors in context and come to appreciate their legacy and history."
And then there are the questions the consultants ask while the drawing is being made, questions that work exactly as well when a family asks them of itself. "Where do you think you learned that?" "Who are you most like?" "What was happening in your family and in the world when she started the business?" "What patterns of entrepreneurship do you see?" Ask that last one over a three-generation tree and watch. Families that thought they had one founder often discover they have had traders, brewers, builders, and market women all the way down, and the current business is not an anomaly but a continuation. That discovery changes how the next generation sees itself.
Everything so far is the book. What follows is our translation into the families LegacyPot serves, African families at home and in the diaspora, and it is ours alone. We should say honestly that the book gives culture almost nothing: ethnicity gets about a page, and that page is mostly a list of questions the authors admit they cannot answer. So do not look to them for guidance here. Look to your own elders.
For a diaspora family, the genogram does double work. The tree does not stop at national borders, and drawing it shows what distance has quietly done: which branch has been in London or Atlanta for thirty years, which cousins have never met, which relationships went from close to cut off not through any quarrel but through sheer mileage and expensive phone calls. Migration itself is a nodal event, one of the largest a family can have, and it deserves its highlight on the tree along with what it produced: the remittances that built the house, the school fees paid across an ocean, the business at home that a sister abroad has been silently funding for a decade. Draw the money's path and the family's real structure appears, which is often not the structure anyone describes at weddings.
There is also urgency here that a Boston consultant's client rarely feels. In many of our families the deep genealogy is oral, held in the memory of elders who can still recite the line of descent, the clan, the land, and the reasons behind a name. That memory is the genogram's source material, and it does not keep. Every year of delay is a branch lost. So the drawing session is also an interview, and the elder at the center of it is not a subject but a co-author, likely the only person alive who knows why the two brothers stopped speaking in 1974 and what that silence cost the shop they shared.
A practical honesty note before you begin. In the book, the genogram is a facilitator-led exercise; a trained consultant decides what to surface and when, precisely because trees can turn up live wires. A family running it for itself should soften the format accordingly. Set ground rules first: the tree is a record, not a trial; anyone may decline to speak about any branch; nothing said at the table is repeated outside it without permission. Work in pencil, literally and figuratively, because first drafts of family history are always wrong somewhere. And let the questions do the work. "Where do you think you learned that?" opens doors that "why are you like this?" slams shut.
Two cautions, both drawn from the book itself. First, one of the marks the genogram carries is addiction, and the authors report that in their own consulting practice, 90 percent of client families had at least one member struggling with addiction. Treat that number as what it is, two practitioners' clinical impression rather than a research finding about all family businesses, but treat the pattern seriously: businesses are unusually good at hiding addiction, because relatives are hard to fire and family money is close at hand. Second, and firmly: if the drawing surfaces active addiction, abuse, or a member in genuine psychological crisis, stop. The book is explicit that these are matters for trained professionals, not kitchen-table exercises, and reaching for real help at that moment is not a failure of the family; it is the tree doing exactly what it was drawn to do.
The cases in the book, we should add, are disguised composites, altered to protect the consultants' clients, so hold their details lightly. The method is what travels, and it travels anywhere a family can find paper.
Here is the work for this month, and one afternoon will do for a first draft.
Gather whoever holds the memory, in one room or on one call across time zones, and draw three generations. Names first, then the marks: closeness, cutoffs, conflict, illness, who was in the business, who owned what. Then the nodal events, in a different color: every death, migration, marriage, collapse, and founding, each with its year. Then sit back and ask the consultants' questions out loud, starting with the largest: what was happening in this family in the year the business began, and what patterns do we see that nobody has ever said in words?
When the draft exists, move it somewhere it cannot be lost. The Family Tree module in LegacyPot holds the structure, the names, dates, and relationships, and its notes can carry the weather: the nodal events, the stories behind the cutoffs, the elder's testimony recorded while it can still be given. A tree like that, kept where every branch of a scattered family can reach it, becomes the reference document for every hard decision ahead, from succession to land to who should never be asked to work with whom.
Hilburt-Davis and Dyer built their consulting practice on a truth families keep proving: "Families and their businesses are interwoven over generations." The weaving is happening whether you look or not. The only choice any generation gets is whether to see the pattern while there is still time to change it, or to become one more repetition that some grandchild, pencil in hand, will one day mark on a tree.