Read this short piece on “What is Family Governance?“, as published in Point of View online magazine on August 2, 2023, also a short video clip.

What is Family Governance?

Last updated: July 8, 2026

What is governance? As a term, governance is really just a fancy way of saying, how do we as a family make decisions? How do we as a family establish structures and a framework for generations who come after us to make decisions after the referees — the matriarch and patriarch — are no longer with us? After the referees are gone, the opportunity for bedlam can ensue.

The process of establishing a governance framework is best done before a crisis happens. It’s best achieved when a family is thinking about how as our family grows, whether through marriage or through births, how can we as a family, establish a system and a framework for the way we’re going to govern ourselves, the way we’re going to live our lives and make decisions, whether about a common investment vehicle, or a common vacation house. As I’m sure many of you can relate to, sometimes the biggest issues are who gets to redecorate the vacation house, or who gets to spend Christmas week at the family vacation house, or the prime summer week at the family lake house, to the exclusion of the others.

Establishing that framework before there’s a crisis is critical. I worked with a family a number of years ago; there was a son and two daughters. And the daughters in their youth had been sent away to boarding school on another continent and ended up marrying and settling there. Their children didn’t even know their cousins who were the offspring of the son who grew up in their home country.

The first family meeting that I organized for them was really a way to get them to know each other and get them to learn to trust each other a little bit in a in a non-threatening way. And through that process, we established a family council and a family assembly as a way of providing representative government so that these families could come together and effectively make decisions going forward about their shared investment assets and their shared common assets.