Third-generation therapies in the family business (II): behavioral activation, or paralysis by prudence

Second instalment in the series on third-generation therapies applied to family business. This time: behavioral activation therapy.

Series: third-generation therapies in the family business · 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6

In the first instalment of this series, I promised we’d start looking at what lessons from third-generation therapies can be applied to business, beginning with what I think is the simplest of the five I named: behavioral activation therapy.

In this instalment I’ll look at what happens when a family business, like a patient with depression, stops acting, and what can be done to get it moving again.

Human beings are purposeful. Our behaviour is generally directed at a goal. Reaching the goal produces satisfaction, and that satisfaction, or more precisely the expectation of satisfaction, is what supplies the energy to start new purposeful behaviour. If a person stops acting, the sources of reinforcement disappear, the pleasure once felt from the reward of acting disappears, and the behaviour itself stops making sense, so the activity stops happening altogether, entering a vicious circle: less activity, less reinforcement, less activity, less reinforcement. This is, in essence, what Peter Lewinsohn proposed back in the 1970s as the behavioural theory of depression.

But why does someone stop acting in the first place? Very often, avoidance gives us immediate relief: it avoids, for example, the tension of having to face an unpleasant problem. By experiencing that immediate relief, we reinforce the avoidance behaviour itself and perpetuate it. The result is that acting becomes more and more frightening, out of unfamiliarity and anticipation, and doing nothing becomes more and more relieving. But it’s immediate relief, paid for dearly in the medium term.

I’ve seen that pattern in business more often than I’d like to admit. Many companies going through growth or transition never quite believe they can meet the challenge, for lack of what Bandura called perceived self-efficacy (a topic for another article, though not in this series). Other times it’s simple fear of unforeseen consequences, which in turn erodes that perceived self-efficacy even further, in a self-feeding loop. The result is the same either way: a family council that has been meeting punctually for years without making a single important decision. A family protocol drafted, revised, almost finished, that no one signs because “we’re still not all fully in agreement.” A succession that gets discussed at every family lunch for half a decade, without anyone ever setting a date. The company keeps running, the accounts keep closing, but there’s a part of the family and corporate life that has simply come to a stop.

The pattern, at bottom, is looking for an excuse that makes it seem like I’m doing something, while actually doing nothing. I remember a family council that had spent close to four years meeting every quarter with the same item pending on the agenda: dividend policy. Every session ended with the same conclusion, that it needed further study. No one disagreed with studying it. The problem is that studying it had become the most comfortable way of never deciding it.

As a lawyer, this is hard for me to admit, because my entire profession is built on analysing before acting. And yet what psychology has shown about this kind of paralysis points in exactly the opposite direction. We’ll see that, contradictory as it may sound, acting fast and being prudent aren’t incompatible.

What the evidence says

Getting into the therapy itself: the most widely used treatment for depression is cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT (leaving pharmacological treatment aside, and simplifying a great deal, because this is an article about business, not psychotherapy). CBT combines the modification of irrational cognitions with aspects of behaviourism, essentially aspects tied to the natural reinforcement of behaviour, which is what we were discussing above.

In 1996, Neil Jacobson wanted to find out which part of cognitive therapy for depression was actually doing the curing: activating the patient to resume tasks and routines, or teaching them to identify and question their automatic, irrational thoughts (that is, the cognitive part of the therapy or the behavioural part). The result surprised the whole field: activating the depressed patient’s behaviour, without touching a single thought, worked just as well as the full CBT package. Ten years later, a much larger study led by Sona Dimidjian confirmed it, and today behavioral activation therapy is among the treatments with the strongest empirical support for treating depression recognised by the Society of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association.

A few years later, Christopher Martell, Michael Addis, and Jacobson himself went a step further and published the full clinical protocol for behavioral activation therapy. And there they add something that changed how I look at these blocks, and that I’ve already touched on above: we almost never stop acting out of laziness. We stop acting because acting is uncomfortable, and avoiding that discomfort gives us instant relief (though it drops us straight into the vicious circle described earlier).

From theory to the family council

What’s interesting, and what applies most directly to family business, is that they lump into that same bucket of avoidance something we don’t usually recognise as such: turning a problem over and over without deciding anything. You can spend months “studying” a decision, feeling like you’re being responsible, when in reality you’re doing exactly the same thing as someone who simply looks away, just with more meetings involved. What they propose isn’t to stop feeling that discomfort, but to act despite it, choosing a behaviour that actually has something to do with what truly matters.

This will surely sound familiar: the council that doesn’t vote, that meets punctually, reviews the agenda, listens to reports, and pushes the decision that really matters to the next session, and the one after, and the one after that. Each individual postponement seems reasonable. The sum of all of them is a council that has run for years without ever deciding anything that hurts. They’re avoiding, even if they don’t believe they are.

Martell, Addis, and Jacobson gave this pattern a name in their clinical protocol: TRAP (Trigger, Response, Avoidance Pattern). The council that postpones, the protocol that gets polished but never signed, the succession that gets discussed without a date, all three follow the same script: something triggers the need to decide, that need feels uncomfortable, and the family responds by avoiding, even while calling it prudence. The alternative they propose has a name too, TRAC (Trigger, Response, Alternative Coping): same trigger, same discomfort, but a different behaviour at the third step, one that actually has something to do with what truly matters.

Well, the TRAC version of these three patterns is exactly the opposite of what we usually do. Setting the date for the vote, even without full consensus. Signing the protocol with the clauses that are already settled, explicitly noting the ones that aren’t. Calling the council with an agenda that forces something concrete to be decided, instead of “discussing the situation” once more. And here’s the counterintuitive part: the feeling of resolution almost never arrives before deciding. It arrives afterwards, as a consequence of having decided.

How to start

One important caveat, because otherwise this sounds like “act without thinking,” and that’s not it. Behavioral activation doesn’t mean filling the calendar with just anything. In clinical practice, this is worked through something called graded task assignment: an immobilised patient isn’t asked to rebuild their entire life in a week; you start with a small, achievable action, and the difficulty increases as the behaviour re-establishes itself. Translated to a family council, this doesn’t mean voting on the full succession tomorrow. It means scheduling the smallest of the postponed decisions first, confirming that the council is capable of making it, and using that concrete precedent to tackle the next one.

Back to the council stuck on dividend policy: what finally broke the deadlock wasn’t one more round of analysis, but changing the format of the meeting. Instead of “continuing to study dividend policy,” the agenda item became “vote on a minimum payout percentage for the current year, to be revisited next year.” Three years of paralysis were resolved in forty minutes, not because everyone suddenly agreed, but because the question stopped being open-ended.

And here’s something that falls on the adviser too, not only on the family. While the council avoids, it’s easy for the adviser to go along with that avoidance without noticing, extending the analysis because that’s what’s being asked of them, instead of proposing the uncomfortable date. We’ll talk later in this series about the adviser’s role inside that same pattern, and about what happens when that relationship itself becomes the very place where the pattern can be worked through, when we get to functional analytic psychotherapy.

An open question

I suspect some readers with legal training, starting with myself, will find this uncomfortable. All our training insists that you analyse first and act afterwards, and here I’m suggesting almost the opposite. But it’s worth separating two things we tend to confuse: prudence, which is real and necessary, and avoidance disguised as prudence, which is far more common than we like to admit. Before setting any date, the question that actually matters is this: if something isn’t being decided, is it because relevant information is missing, or because deciding is frightening? These are two different problems, and only the second one is cured by acting.

In the next instalment we move on to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and a question that follows directly from this one: what to do when the family protocol, instead of granting freedom, has turned into a cage.

Do you recognise 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 behaviour hasn’t changed, let’s talk about what model is behind it, and what could be done differently.