First installment of a series on third-generation therapies applied to family business.
Series: third-generation therapies in the family business · 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6
I’ve spent nearly three decades advising boards and accompanying business families through difficult moments, and I’ve seen the same pattern over and over: a consultant arrives with a “proprietary methodology” under their arm, the family applies it for months, and in the end things return almost to the same starting point.
It’s not that the methodology is poorly conceived. It’s that, without anyone saying so out loud, it’s usually based on a model of psychology that psychology itself moved past twenty years ago. In this series I’m going to name those models, generation by generation, and explain what came after them and what that means for a family council.
Before getting into it, a quick confession. When people find out I’m a lawyer who also has a degree in psychology, they often ask the same question: what good is that combination? For years I answered with a vague, slightly pretentious line: “well, you know lawyers have to be a bit of psychologists,” which I don’t actually believe, because it sounds like professional overreach. It’s like saying a barber has to be a bit of a dentist.
The real answer is longer, but worth giving: in every board meeting, every family protocol drafted, every consultancy that shows up with its “proprietary methodology,” having studied psychology in depth has let me recognize something. The problems I deal with as a lawyer, and the treatments consultants propose for them, are, almost word for word, concepts psychology has spent half a century developing and testing. This series calls them by their name.
One quick disclosure, and the last thing I’ll say as a lawyer: I’m only going to use models with solid scientific evidence, the ones recognized as empirically supported treatments by the Society of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association, the reference body in the field. No concepts invented on the spot, that all-too-common consulting habit of opening a sentence with “to me, this means…” while ignoring decades of research that has already said something more precise.
Let’s start at the beginning, which happens to have a date. It’s worth telling in three parts, following the three models I mentioned above.
In this article
The behavior model
In the 1950s and 60s, Burrhus Skinner demonstrated something that seems obvious to us today but was revolutionary at the time: behavior is shaped by its consequences. Reward what you want repeated, withdraw attention from what you don’t, and measure.
It didn’t take long for someone to ask whether that also worked for a factory and not only for a pigeon in a lab. In the 1970s, Aubrey Daniels took that same principle and built what we now know as performance management: objectives, feedback, consequences.
In family business this shows up in very concrete ways, even if no one calls it that. When a board introduces, for the first time, a merit-based hiring policy requiring training and experience outside the company before someone can join it, that is performance management. When it sets dividends to depend on results rather than each family branch’s need, that is too. It’s observable, measurable behavior, with clear consequences.
And for a while, it works.
The first generation of business consulting was, almost without anyone saying so out loud, pure behaviorism applied to organizations.
The belief model
But shaping behavior has a limit. Sometimes people do the right thing for a while and then slide back, because what was really guiding their behavior wasn’t reinforcement but an underlying belief.
That’s where the second generation arrives. Aaron Beck had already shown, back in the 1970s, that changing how we think changes how we act, and that many behavioral problems are really problems of beliefs poorly matched to reality.
In management, that cognitive turn arrived with Peter Senge and his mental models — the maps each person uses to interpret what’s happening, which don’t always match the facts — published in The Fifth Discipline in 1990.
It also arrived with Chris Argyris and his double-loop learning, which isn’t satisfied with correcting the error but questions the assumption that produced it. Suddenly every company needed “a mission, a vision, some values.” Today it’s almost nostalgic to see that on some company’s website; as my son would say, very “vintage,” very 90s.
This is what happens when a business family drafts its protocol during a weekend retreat, with the word legacy underlined several times on a whiteboard, and goes home convinced the problem is solved because everyone now shares the same values on paper. The belief has been corrected. The behavior, very often, stays exactly the same.
It was cognitive therapy dressed up as consulting.
And here we still are, thirty years later. Most of the family protocols, family councils, and values-alignment processes sold today in the family business world still operate from that same 1990s cognitive model. The assumption is that if we correct the wrong belief (“we lack unity,” “we lack a shared vision”), the behavior will sort itself out.
And here lies the problem I mentioned at the start: psychology itself moved past that model twenty years ago, and that update still hasn’t reached most business consulting.
The commitment model
In the late 1980s and over the following two decades, a third generation of therapies emerges that changes the underlying question. It’s no longer about correcting what one thinks or feels, but about acting with purpose even when what one thinks or feels never fully changes. It’s a subtle shift, but it changes almost everything.
Steven Hayes develops Acceptance and Commitment Therapy starting from an uncomfortable idea: trying to eliminate discomfort usually produces more discomfort, and what truly moves people forward is their values, not the absence of pain (and please, values are not goals). In a family council, this is the difference between arguing until everyone is exhausted about who’s right, and asking instead what this family is willing to do even if the disagreement never fully resolves.
Marsha Linehan, already in the 1980s, working with patients for whom nothing else worked, creates Dialectical Behavior Therapy on the basis of holding two opposing truths at once without either canceling the other out. Being a sibling and being a partner, for example: you don’t choose between the two, you hold both.
Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale combine mindfulness with cognitive therapy so people learn to observe their automatic patterns before those patterns sweep them away, instead of arguing with them. It’s what a family needs when it repeats the same fight at every Christmas dinner without quite knowing why.
Robert Kohlenberg and Mavis Tsai, in the early 1990s, take the idea one step further with Functional Analytic Psychotherapy, where the relationship with the therapist itself becomes the place where the problematic pattern shows up live. Translated to the boardroom: it’s what happens when the advisor stops merely describing the family conflict from the outside and starts becoming part of it, in the room itself.
And Neil Jacobson, in a 1996 study that surprised the whole field, finds that activating the behavior of a depressed person, without touching their thoughts, works almost as well as full cognitive therapy. Applied to a family business: sometimes you don’t need to resolve the conflict to start moving again. It’s enough to start acting again.
That’s the ground I want to cover in this series, article by article: what behavioral activation has to teach a paralyzed family business, what acceptance and commitment bring to a family protocol that has turned into a cage, what mindfulness can do with the conflict scripts a family repeats generation after generation, what dialectics has to say about the tension between being family and being partners, and what functional analytic psychotherapy reveals about the role of the advisor who sits with the family at its hardest moment.
An open question
Before closing this first installment I want to leave an open question, because I think it sums up what this is all about.
I recently saw a survey of family business specialists on what matters most for the continuity of a family business. “A united family” came up as one of the most-voted conditions.
I don’t fully share that view, and I think behavioral science itself explains why. A family getting along well is desirable. But it isn’t necessary. And chasing harmony as if it were a requirement can be exactly what keeps a business family from functioning.
We’ll go into that in detail when we reach the article on acceptance and commitment.
This is the first installment of a series on how third-generation therapies can be applied to family business. In the next installment we’ll start with the simplest of the five: what happens when a business family, like a patient with depression, stops acting.
This text is informational and does not replace therapy or psychological counseling. The models described here belong to the field of clinical psychology and are presented as a framework applied to family business governance, not as a diagnosis or treatment of any family member.
Do you recognize any of these patterns in your family council?
At Alta Mediación we combine law and applied psychology to work with business families, not just with documents. If the protocol is already signed and the behavior hasn’t changed, let’s talk about which model is behind it, and what can be done differently.