On the night of 21 August 2008, inside Beijing's National Stadium, the United States put four of the fastest men alive into the qualifying round of the 4 x 100 metres relay. For three and a half laps of running, they...
On the night of 21 August 2008, inside Beijing's National Stadium, the United States put four of the fastest men alive into the qualifying round of the 4 x 100 metres relay. For three and a half laps of running, they were exactly as fast as their times promised. Then Darvis Patton came off the final bend and reached the baton forward to Tyson Gay, the reigning world champion over 100 metres, and somewhere in the half second when the tube was supposed to move from one hand to another, it hit the track instead. The nation that had won this event more often than any other in Olympic history was out of the Games before the final was even run.
Less than an hour later, on the same track, the United States women's team dropped their baton too. Same round, same failure, and the same exchange: the last one, the pass to the anchor, Torri Edwards reaching toward Lauryn Williams.
Nobody in either quartet was slow. That is what makes the night so instructive. The explanation that emerged afterwards was the least dramatic one available: these four runners had spent very little time passing a baton together. Each was individually brilliant. The handoff, though, is not an individual skill. It is a skill that belongs to a pair, built only through repetition by that exact pair, and it cannot be improvised at full speed on the night it matters. The fastest team on paper lost in the one part of the race that paper cannot measure.
Hold that picture, because it is the most precise image anyone has produced of what happens to a family when leadership of its affairs transfers all at once, unpracticed, to a group of siblings in the season of loss. Two books, written on two continents by authors with almost nothing else in common, converge on the same argument, and this article makes that argument its single claim: sibling teams do not emerge, they are built through practice, and the time to run practice handoffs is now, while life is full and the founder is on the track to coach the exchange.
The relay image comes from Entrusted: Building a Legacy That Lasts, a 2015 book by Andrew L. Howell and David R. York, two estate planning attorneys in Salt Lake City, Utah. An honest note on the source before taking anything from it: Entrusted is a professional thought-leadership book, self-published by the authors' own firm, and much of its later machinery, the American estate tax mathematics, the trust structures, the recommended teams of hired advisers, describes problems and remedies that belong to its authors' clientele and their legal environment, not to most families anywhere else. None of that machinery travels. What travels is a metaphor the authors place at the centre of their chapter on family governance, and it is worth quoting at length because it is the best thing in the book.
"In a four-person relay race, there are points at which each competitor races alone... These pivotal moments in a relay race take place in a spot called the exchange zone... By creating a family exchange zone, the passing of the baton from one generation to another can be a process that occurs over time while the wealth creators are still alive."
Look at what the metaphor actually contains, because each piece carries weight. In a relay there are stretches where one runner carries the baton alone, and there are marked stretches of track where two runners run together, both at speed, both with a hand on the baton. The exchange zone is not a point. It is a place with length, entered deliberately, where the incoming runner is still driving forward and the outgoing runner is already accelerating. The baton moves between two people who are both running. And every serious relay team rehearses that overlap more than it rehearses anything else, because the zone is where races are won and lost.
Now set the metaphor against how most families actually pass the baton. Howell and York, who spent their careers watching the moment of transfer from the closest possible seat, describe the default with a bluntness their profession rarely allows itself: "Too often, the passing of the baton of financial control occurs at the attorney's office after the death of parents - much too late for proper mentoring or guidance."
Read that as a relay coach would. The first runner has left the track. The second runner is standing still. There was no zone, no overlap, no rehearsal, and the baton is simply handed across a desk to someone who has never run with it, by someone who never saw the race. Everything the exchange zone exists to provide, the overlap, the coaching, the repetitions, has been skipped, and the team finds out at full speed whether the handoff works.
There is a second thing wrong with the desk at the attorney's office, and it is not about paperwork at all. It is about what else is happening in that room.
A family that has just lost its founder is grieving, and grief deserves to be named gently and given its full space. In the weeks after a loss, a family should be allowed to be only a family: to mourn, to cook for one another, to receive visitors, to tell the stories, to sit together without an agenda. That season has its own work, and the work is love and memory. What the season cannot also carry, without something breaking, is the launch of a leadership team.
Yet that is precisely the load the unpracticed handoff places on it. Siblings who have never made a single binding decision together are asked to make dozens, quickly, about assets they may never have discussed, according to wishes they may be hearing secondhand, while each of them is carrying the heaviest emotional weight of their adult lives. Their first experience of one another as partners happens under conditions no team in any field would choose for a first rep. Whatever frictions were latent between them, and every set of siblings has some, now surface for the first time with real stakes attached and with the one person who could have mediated no longer in the room.
Nike Anani has watched this from the inside. She is a Nigerian second-generation family business owner, a former Deloitte UK tax practitioner who went home to join her family's enterprise, a co-founder of African Family Firms, and one of the most recognized family business consultants on the continent. In her 2022 book Lifetime to Legacy she gives the two possible shapes of generational transfer a pair of names borrowed from political history: revolution and evolution. A revolution is a sudden, total transfer of power, triggered by events rather than chosen, received by people who have not governed before. An evolution is the same transfer spread across time, in doses, with the previous generation participating in its own succession. Her prescription is direct: "Instead, business families should pursue evolutions. Rather than a drastic transfer of power from the first to the second generation, this can be more gradual, whereby siblings enjoy gradually increased power, authority, and influence over the family enterprise during the life of the founder."
Anani reaches for a national metaphor here, and it is hers, drawn from her own country's history: Nigeria's long passage from military rule to democracy, decades in which power moved by abrupt seizure until it finally learned to move by staged, negotiated transition. She offers the comparison as a Nigerian, about Nigerian experience, and it stays hers. But the structural point underneath it belongs to every family: power that transfers in a single convulsion lands on people unready to hold it, and the unreadiness is nobody's personal failing. It is what the structure of the transfer produced.
Put Howell's image and Anani's names together and the diagnosis is complete. The default family handoff is a revolution scheduled by grief, and it fails for relay reasons, not character reasons. The siblings were never slow. They were never given a zone.
The deepest sentence in either book is six words long. Anani writes: "Siblings don't emerge as collective leaders, they practice it. They don't emerge as collective visionaries, they prepare for it."
This is a claim about how teams form, and she grounds it in the framework psychologists have used for sixty years, Bruce Tuckman's four stages, which she applies to sibling groups directly: forming, storming, norming, performing. Every team that has ever worked passed through all four. The stage families most want to skip is the second one, storming, the stretch where working styles collide, old childhood roles reassert themselves, and the group argues its way toward rules it can live with. Storming is not a sign the team is failing. It is the mechanism by which a collection of individuals becomes a team, and it cannot be bypassed, only relocated.
That word, relocated, is the entire strategy. A sibling group will storm. The only open question is where. They can storm now, over decisions of modest weight, in a season when everyone is well, with the founder present as referee, context-keeper, and coach. Or they can storm later, over everything at once, in the rawest month of their lives, with the referee's chair empty. The disagreement itself is the same disagreement. Timing is what decides whether it becomes formation or fracture.
Anani adds a distinction that tells you what the practice is for. The goal of a sibling team is not compliance with the strongest voice in the room. Her whole account of collaboration turns on moving a family from individual rulership, a leader surrounded by people who go along, to collective leadership, partners who genuinely commit. Siblings who merely nod along to the founder, or to the most forceful brother, have not formed a team at all; they have formed a queue, and a queue collapses the first time the person at the front of it is not there. The practice reps exist to teach something harder than agreement: how this particular set of people disagrees, decides anyway, and stays a family afterwards.
There is one more reason the reps must start while the founder is active, and it is the most relay-like of all. In the exchange zone, both runners are moving. The founder in a practiced handoff is not an observer of the next generation's work; the founder is still running the race alongside them, carrying the accumulated judgment of decades, available to be asked, able to watch the sibling team's early decisions and coach the technique while coaching still helps. A founder's counsel is at its most valuable exactly when the stakes are still small. That is a reason to begin in a season of strength, when the founder is building, deciding, and leading at full stride. The zone is where the wisdom transfers, and the zone only exists if both generations are on the track at the same time.
What does a practice rep actually look like? Both books converge on the same design principles, and they are the opposite of the two failure modes families usually substitute for practice: shadowing, where the next generation watches but never decides, and the deep end, where an heir is handed something enormous with no preparation. Neither builds a team. Watching builds no skill, and drowning builds no confidence.
A real rep has three properties. It is genuinely shared: the siblings decide together, as a group, not as individuals reporting separately to a parent. It carries real but bounded authority: the decision is theirs to make and theirs to answer for, and the consequences of getting it wrong are survivable. And it ends with a debrief: the family, founder included, talks about how the deciding went, not just what was decided.
Howell and York's version of the discipline is an annual rhythm: each year, identify one family responsibility and formally hand it across, while the elder generation can still mentor the receiving of it. One responsibility, fully transferred, coached, then another. Anani's version is a cadence of joint sibling planning sessions, held regularly, with the elder generation available to mediate while mediation is easy. The two prescriptions are the same prescription: rising doses, on a schedule, with a coach.
Rotation belongs in the design too. If one sibling chairs every practice decision, the family has not built a team; it has quietly run a succession contest and appointed a winner without saying so. Rotating who leads each rep does two things at once: it teaches every sibling both roles, leading and supporting a leader, and it surfaces early, cheaply, and correctably the resentments that a fixed hierarchy would have stored up for the worst possible moment. The baton in a relay touches every hand. That is what makes it a team's baton and not a runner's.
Notice, finally, what this practice is not. It is not a countdown, and it is not a rehearsal of sad events. Nothing about a sibling team's practice season requires anyone to speak of endings at all. A family running its first shared decisions is doing something entirely of the present: brothers and sisters learning to be partners while their parents watch it happen, enjoy it, and make it better. The relay team practicing handoffs on a Tuesday is not thinking about loss. It is thinking about the race, and it is together on the track, which is where the whole point of being a team lives.
Neither of these books wrote about our region. Anani writes from Lagos casework and a business-family world of boards and shareholdings; Howell and York write from an American estate practice. What follows is our translation, LegacyPot's own, and the responsibility for it is ours, not theirs.
In our markets, the sibling team rarely needs an invented practice ground, because the family calendar already supplies one. The end-of-year gathering that someone must budget and host. The school-fees plan for the next term across three households. The repair of the family house roof before the rains. The stocking decision for the family shop ahead of the festive season. The negotiation with a tenant, the sale of a harvest, the contribution plan for a cousin's wedding. Each of these is a real decision with real money and survivable consequences, which makes each one a perfect rep. And in our families the team itself is often wider than the word siblings suggests: cousins raised as brothers, step-siblings across a blended household, the sister in the diaspora who joins by phone and sends her share by mobile money. She especially needs the practice reps, because if the family's way of deciding together is never built, distance will quietly write her out of it.
This is where the practice becomes concrete inside LegacyPot. The rep lives in your Family Council: put the chosen decision on the agenda of a family meeting, name which siblings hold it, note who is chairing this one, and record what was decided so the next rep starts from a written memory instead of a remembered argument. If the rep involves money, give it a Pot: a contribution pot for the gathering, a fees pot for the term, with the sibling team as its keepers, so the practice includes the part teams find hardest, being answerable to each other for shared funds. A family that wants the rhythm to hold can make the quarterly sibling session a tracked habit in Habits. None of this requires a business, a lawyer, or wealth. It requires one real decision, handed to the team on purpose.
This month, run the first practice handoff.
Choose one real, bounded decision from your family's next three months, one whose outcome matters and whose worst case is survivable, and hand it to the sibling team as a group. Name one of them to chair this decision, with the understanding that the chair rotates next time. Ask the founder, or the senior elder, to attend the discussion in a new and honourable role: coach, not chair. Present, consulted, free to advise, and deliberately not deciding.
Then schedule it: open your Family Council in LegacyPot, create the meeting, put the one decision on the agenda, and record what the team decides and how the deciding went. Before you close the meeting, set the next session one quarter out, with the next decision and the next chair. If the decision involves money, create the Pot and make the team its keepers.
One rep will feel small. That is correct; first reps are supposed to be. What you are building is not visible in any single session, because what you are building is the exchange zone itself: a stretch of your family's life, entered on purpose in a season of strength, where two generations run alongside each other with both hands on the baton, long enough and often enough that the handoff, whenever it comes, is just one more thing this team has already done well many times.
Fast runners are common. Teams that never drop the baton are built, rep by rep, on ordinary Tuesdays. Practice the partnership.