Somewhere in the middle of a book written for American families worth thirty million dollars and up, in a chapter on family governance thick with constitutions, bylaws, and boards, an Alaskan judge...
Somewhere in the middle of a book written for American families worth thirty million dollars and up, in a chapter on family governance thick with constitutions, bylaws, and boards, an Alaskan judge stops to describe a stick.
"In some indigenous cultures," writes Suzanne Cole, a judge magistrate in Anchorage, "tribal members often use a talking stick to ensure the integrity of the process for any meeting. Whoever holds the stick has the floor. No one else may talk, or interrupt, unless they have the stick, which is passed from one participant to another."
The book is Michael Cole's More Than Money: A Guide to Sustaining Wealth and Preserving the Family, published in 2017 and built from the author's three decades advising ultra-wealthy American families at Ascent Private Capital Management, part of US Bank. The judge's long guest passage on mediation is, for our readers, the most valuable thing in it, and the stick is why. Because notice what has happened in that paragraph. A book aimed at the most professionally advised families on earth, families with lawyers on retainer and facilitators on speed dial, reaches the hardest problem in family wealth, which is how people who love each other talk about money without destroying each other, and the best tool it can find is not American, not corporate, and not new. It is borrowed from indigenous council practice: the ordered, uninterrupted, witnessed turn to speak.
African readers will recognize it instantly, because a close cousin of that practice is ours. Across the continent's clan meetings, elders' councils, and family sittings, the deep grammar is the same: matters are heard in order, elders and branches speak in turn, interruption is a serious offense, and the point of the form is that every voice lands before any decision does. This essay's argument is simple. The structured family meeting is not a foreign import that African families must learn from wealth manuals. It is an inheritance many of our families already hold in half-remembered form, and this book's real gift is a set of concrete techniques for running it deliberately, about money, before money becomes a crisis.
First, the evidence that the meeting matters at all, because it is startling. Cole leans on a study by Roy Williams and Vic Preisser, published in their book Preparing Heirs, covering more than 3,000 families over twenty-five years. Among the wealth transfers that failed, 60 percent of the failures traced to a breakdown of communication and trust within the family. Another 25 percent traced to heirs who were never prepared. Only 15 percent came from everything else combined, and within that remainder, a mere 3 percent involved failures by the professionals: the accountants, lawyers, and advisors.
An honesty note this journal owes you whenever it quotes a statistic. Those numbers describe the population Williams and Preisser studied: wealthy, overwhelmingly American families moving fortunes between generations. Nobody has replicated the study across African families, and the book contains no African family anywhere in its pages. Treat the 60 percent as evidence from one well-studied population, not a universal constant. But treat it seriously, because the direction of the finding matches what any of us have watched at a funeral: the estates that burn rarely burn because the money was badly invested. They burn because of the conversation that never happened while the parent was alive.
Cole adds a second statistic that sharpens the picture. Citing communication research, he notes that nonverbal signals make up somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of our total communication. The lifted eyebrow when a brother mentions the land. The silence that follows a sister-in-law's suggestion. In family money matters, most of the real conversation is happening in the room's body language, which means an unstructured meeting is never actually unstructured. It is structured by whoever glares most effectively. That is the case for form: rules of speaking do not make a family cold. They protect the quiet members from the loud ones, and the spoken conversation from the unspoken one.
Judge Cole's guidance begins with a reframing many families need to hear from someone with a gavel. "Conflict is inevitable," she writes. "It can even be positive." Conflict, she argues, is a necessary ingredient of growth in individuals, families, and communities, and disputes left to bubble unaddressed will eventually boil over. Then the sentence worth writing above the door of every family meeting: "A system is only as strong as its ability to resolve conflicts with integrity, while preserving the well-being of its members, and encouraging the expression of genuine differences."
Read that against the way many families, including many of ours, actually operate, where the appearance of harmony is the prize and the relative who names a problem is treated as the problem. The judge is saying the opposite. A family that cannot host a disagreement is not a peaceful family. It is an untested one, and the test is coming, usually attached to a coffin or a land title.
Her method, offered as principles families can use in their own meetings without any professional present, runs roughly so. Begin with ground rules everyone endorses: basic courtesy, listening without interruption, respect, and, where feelings run high, some device that guarantees each person an uninterrupted turn. She is careful to say she is not advocating a literal stick, only the function of one. Every person then gets an uninterrupted opportunity to name the issues as they see them. Accusations get reframed into interests: her example turns "He is so incompetent he can't handle running our business" into "I feel I have the skills and temperament to more successfully run our business," which lowers the temperature without burying the claim. Every issue named, however small, is written into an agenda everyone agrees on and can see. Before arguing anything, the facilitator names the points of agreement that surfaced, because families in conflict routinely underestimate how much they still share. Then, and this detail is gold, you start with the easiest issue, because an early win builds the momentum that carries the room through the hard ones. When emotion swamps the process, she prescribes the caucus: a trusted neutral person speaks to each side separately, lets the anger vent in private, and brings back only what moves things forward.
Two of the book's short case studies show the machinery working, and one shows why it is needed. Both are worth retelling, with the reminder that Cole flags such cases as composites drawn from real families, not documented households.
The Miller cousins, three members of a business family's third generation, spent months failing to agree on a family meeting: one wanted the beach, one the city, one had a tight budget, all had children's schedules. On a conference call, a trusted family friend acting as the neutral gave each cousin a full uninterrupted turn, got the three issues named and agreed, and started with the easiest, timing. Momentum from that small win carried them into the hard issue, cost, where the call turned heated. The friend paused for a private caucus with one cousin, who vented years of resentment about another cousin never carrying her weight, then decided the next generation's education mattered more than the old grievance. The call resumed. The meeting was set. Nothing in that story requires a dollar of wealth. It requires a form.
The Smith children show the darker lesson. Three adult siblings had to decide who would take over the family business after their father's sudden death, their grieving mother refusing to choose among them. The eldest brother, responsible and a little arrogant, arrived with a plan he believed fair to everyone. The youngest, dismissed by the family as the unserious one, simply stalled: refusing the process, refusing every alternative, halting the mediation outright. And here the process revealed what the family had never seen. Everyone assumed the power in the room belonged to the capable eldest. In fact it belonged to the youngest, exercised purely through his ability to block. Any elder who has watched a land matter stall for a decade because one relative will not sign knows this power intimately. Structure does not create the blocker. Structure is what finally makes the blocking visible, so the family can address the person's real grievance instead of his stated objections.
Now the honest accounting of what surrounds this material in the book, because it should not be swallowed whole. Judge Cole's mediation guidance is offered as seasoned professional wisdom from a family-law magistrate, not as a validated academic method, and around it Michael Cole builds an apparatus his own clients use: family constitutions with bylaws, family assemblies distinguished from family councils, facilitators flown in twice a year, governance structures priced for families whose fortunes fund an office. Most families reading this will never build that, on any continent, and do not need to begin there. The book stops at the boardroom door. We go one step further, back toward the compound.
Because the transferable core is small and free: a standing, structured, turn-taking family meeting where money is discussed while it is still boring. And here the African reader holds an advantage the book never imagines. The form does not have to be imported and explained over anyone's objection that "this is not how we do things." In most of our families it can be revived rather than introduced, grafted onto sittings that already exist. The clan already gathers for burials, weddings, and introduction ceremonies like the kwanjula, Uganda's formal betrothal sitting, occasions with speaking orders older than any constitution. What our families mostly lack is not the council but the agenda: the habit of giving the family's money, land, school-fee plans, and succession questions a scheduled, peaceful hearing, instead of leaving them to ambush the family at a funeral, which is the one meeting where grief, fatigue, and inheritance collide and no talking stick is anywhere to be found.
So borrow deliberately. Keep your family's own order of respect; the judge's method does not flatten elders and juniors into interchangeable speakers, it only guarantees that the juniors' turn actually arrives. Add her specific techniques: the named agenda, the reframed accusation, the easiest issue first, the caucus through a respected neutral, often exactly the role a senior auntie or family friend already plays without the title. And put it on a calendar, because a meeting that convenes only in a crisis inherits the crisis's temperature.
For families organizing this inside LegacyPot, the Family Council module is built as the home for precisely this rhythm: the standing meeting, the agenda gathered from every branch before the sitting, the decisions recorded where the whole family can see them afterward. The stick guarantees the speaking. The record guarantees the remembering.
Here is the one thing to do this month. Call a family sitting, at whatever scale your family honestly musters, one household or one clan branch, and give it three rules and one agenda. The rules: every person present gets one uninterrupted turn; complaints are restated as interests before they are argued; the easiest item is taken first. The agenda: three money matters, written down where everyone can see them, at least one of them small enough to resolve that day. Ask a respected neutral, an elder, an in-law, a family friend, to hold the order of speaking, and agree before you begin that anything decided is written down and read back before the meeting ends.
Then fix the next sitting's date before anyone stands up, because the first meeting's real product is the second meeting.
Sixty percent of the failures, in the only large study anyone has run, were failures of talking. Your family already knows how to hold a council; your grandparents held them under trees this book has never heard of. Hand the council its agenda, and pass the stick.