Third instalment in the series on third-generation therapies applied to family business. This time: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
Series: third-generation therapies in the family business · 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6
I am going to tell you about a situation I have witnessed countless times in board meetings. Someone proposes something sensible, even urgent, and another family member picks up the protocol, sometimes literally, and says: “that has to be decided unanimously!”. End of conversation. It doesn’t matter that unanimity is impossible because two branches of the family haven’t spoken to each other since a wedding eight years ago.
The family protocol says what it says. Nobody argues with it. What often nobody remembers is that this particular clause was drafted to protect the family. It was written fifteen years ago so that no branch could impose itself on the others. It was a shield. And that is a good thing. What happened is that nobody ever decided to turn that shield into a padlock, but that is what it has become, and a padlock hurts the family and the business alike.
That is what today’s article is about, as I promised when I closed the previous one: what happens when the family protocol, instead of granting freedom, takes it away. I will build on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), created by Steven Hayes.
Hayes did not arrive at it through a clinical trial, the way Jacobson arrived at behavioural activation. He arrived at it through his own panic attacks, which began, with an irony he has recounted many times himself, at a department meeting at his university. The harder he fought the anxiety, the worse it got. Until he asked himself a question that changed the course of his career: what if the problem isn’t the anxiety I feel, but the war I have been waging against it for years? In other words, what if the problem is all the time, effort and resources I spend on not feeling bad, instead of spending them on doing what I need to do?
Hayes began working on this idea in the early eighties and took almost twenty years to give it its definitive form. From his work, and from the conclusions he reached, comes what those of us trained as lawyers find hardest to accept: that you don’t always have to fix what troubles you before you can decide well. Sometimes you have to make room for what troubles you and decide anyway.
When a rule stops working and nobody notices
We all carry habits we learned years ago and have never revisited. I know people who still turn up three hours early for a European flight, the way they were taught in the nineties (I confess I am one of them). Nobody checks whether it’s still necessary. The rule was learned once and now runs on its own.
We have known this happens since Skinner, who already in the 1960s distinguished between behaviour that is shaped by its consequences, through trial and correction, and behaviour governed by rules, which follows a learned instruction without needing to check each time whether it still holds true. Humans, unlike almost any other animal, can do the latter. The rule says so, and that is how you act. It is an enormous evolutionary advantage, because it saves us from having to test everything every time: if we follow the rule not to pick up a burning stick, we save ourselves from getting burned, and there is no need to verify it every morning.
But every shortcut has its drawback. When a rule stops being valid, or stops serving the purpose it was designed for, nobody warns us. And if we don’t check it ourselves from time to time, we will keep acting in a way that is inefficient, flawed, or outright absurd. Reality changes and the rule stays exactly where it was, working away on its own, in a vacuum.
Robert Zettle and Hayes himself went a step further in 1982 and distinguished two very different ways of obeying the same rule, which they named tracking and pliance.
There is tracking when a rule is followed because it genuinely delivers what it promises. The board requires an audit report before approving the accounts, and requires it because that report actually catches things. The day it stopped catching them, someone would notice and change the procedure.
There is pliance when a rule is followed because of what would happen if it weren’t. Not because of the outcome, but because of other people’s reaction. Because it has always been done that way, because grandfather put it in writing, because questioning it in front of the cousins puts anyone in an extremely uncomfortable position.
And here a problem appears that is specific to family business. Pliance feeds on social consequences, and in a family those consequences are enormous. In a company of strangers, questioning an outdated rule costs a tense discussion at a meeting. In a family it can cost an entire Christmas Eve, a relationship with a sibling, or the uncomfortable feeling of betraying someone who is no longer there to have an opinion. The price of asking is extremely high. That is why nobody asks.
ACT has a name for what happens then, fusion, and explains it with an image I find extremely useful. Looking at a thought is one thing, and looking at the world from that thought is quite another. When you look at it, you can examine it, argue with it, keep it or discard it. When you look from it, you can no longer even see it, because it has become the lens through which you view everything else. A kind of fusion takes place between what we think, which remains a cognitive object, and reality itself.
This is exactly what happens with protocols. The family stops looking at the protocol and starts looking at the business through the protocol. It is no longer a document that specific people wrote in a specific year. It simply becomes the way things are.
The opposite movement, and this is the important one, is called defusion, and it consists of putting the thought back in front of you so you can see it again. One of the simplest ways to achieve it is to give it back its origin: instead of saying “I am a disaster”, say “I am having the thought that I am a disaster”. It sounds like a trivial nuance, and it changes things quite a bit.
Translated to a family council, defusion is easier than it sounds. It means no longer saying “the protocol requires unanimity” and starting to say “in 2010 we decided to require unanimity so that no branch could impose itself on the others”. Same rule, but now with a date, an author and a reason. As soon as a rule recovers those three things, it can be discussed again. Without them, it is not a rule, it is a commandment.
Goals that get crossed off, values that never run out
The second idea is easier to explain and harder to apply. ACT carefully separates goals from values, and almost every protocol I have read in my life confuses the two.
A goal gets fulfilled. It gets crossed off the list, the file gets closed and a bottle gets opened. “Sign the protocol before the end of the year” is a goal.
A value is never fully fulfilled, because it is a direction, not a destination. “Treat each other with respect even when we disagree” is not signed once and settled forever. It has to be done again at every board meeting, at every Christmas dinner, and every time someone inherits a shareholding.
The trouble starts when a protocol writes its values as if they were goals. Unity. Harmony. Cohesion. Then the first serious argument arrives, and it will arrive because families argue, and someone concludes that the protocol has failed, that unity was not achieved, as if it were a box that was left unticked.
But unity was never a box. You can argue fiercely at a board meeting and still be walking in the same direction. What you cannot do is confuse a Tuesday’s disagreement with the failure of the whole project.
And this can already be fixed at the drafting stage. Instead of declaring a state (“the family will remain united”), describe a behaviour that can be sustained over time (“no disagreement will be resolved by refusing to speak to one another”). The first is a photograph that will one day stop resembling reality. The second is something you can do next Tuesday, and again next month, and again in ten years.
How to open the cage without burning down the house
None of this means every rule has to be questioned every morning. We would live exhausted, and a business family needs legal certainty as much as it needs to breathe. ACT does not propose living without rules. It proposes reviewing, every so often, whether a given rule is still doing what was expected of it, or whether it only survives because touching it feels tedious and frightening in equal measure.
There is a question I tend to leave on the table, one that any family council can ask itself once a year without needing to reform anything just yet. For every clause in the protocol: can we explain today, in our own words and without reading the text, what it is for?
If the only answer that comes up is “because the protocol says so”, you are probably looking at a textbook case of pliance. That doesn’t force you to change anything tomorrow. It only means that clause deserves a conversation before it is used again to close down a debate.
In the next instalment we leave the cage behind and step into something even more uncomfortable: what to do when two opposing truths are both true at the same time. Being a sibling and being a business partner, for instance. Marsha Linehan will explain it to us, the therapist who developed Dialectical Behaviour Therapy working with patients nobody else knew how to help.
This text is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy or psychological counselling. 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 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.