Family businesses are complex living systems that contribute to the wider weave of contexts and communities in which they ‘live’ – family, economy, ecology, culture, education, history, etc. So, what would happen if instead of focussing on what the ‘definition’ of a family business is, we shift perspective and explore where the edge of a family business might be and what strategies coalesce to maintain its vitality.

Where is the edge of a business?

If you reflect on this question it can become quite tricky to pinpoint. A family business is in some ways like a gathering. There are plenty of examples of family businesses who consider their employees as ‘extended family’ and family businesses can often comprise one or more families. So where is the edge? Is it in the family, the extended family, the customers, within the bricks and mortar building (if one exists), is it in the numbers in the Annual Report? And what happens if your family business holds 350-years of history in its craft, in its buildings and across many other contexts – now what has happened to the edge of the business?

A Living Strategy

The wisdom of not reducing a family business to one ’thing’, is that it invites us to consider how the business lives, and how it can continue as a vital business. At the present time businesses are facing a polycrisis and business as usual no longer seems to apply. Businesses are required to be resilient, flexible, curious, playful, to embrace uncertainty and to own their complexity.

And that resilience, flexibility, curiousness, playfulness, embracing of uncertainty and owning complexity requires more than a response or reaction to outside ‘threats’, it also invites the opportunity for leadership to emerge in new ways and with new possibilities through ‘inner development’. What kind of leadership is required to navigate the polycrisis? And where does leadership reside in a family business? What new skills and strategies might be helpful to care for a family business and tend to the unfolding crisis at the same time?

One possibility is to imagine the business as a living system and to develop a living strategy that weaves into a collective development to navigate the uncertainty. Strategy after all is everything that a family business does, all its interactions, its way of being, which has an effect on the outside world. A good strategy makes this explicit, understandable and actionable for employees and stakeholders. It is alive.

Fraendi’s Living Strategy process is a holistic, dynamic, self-regulating methodology designed to help leadership teams chart new paradigm-shifting pathways and build purposeful objectives for stakeholders and decision-makers alike. If a family business strategy could respond and adapt with care, compassion and tenderness for all that is present – how might that emerge as a strategy? It will be different for each family business because each family business lives in its own unique complexity, and is part of a larger weave.

Often a family business is already taking a long term and sustainable view within its overall strategy, looking generations back and forward to craft a way forward that lives in ideas of stewardship and of being custodians for future generations. And this is complex as there is a constant need to allow outdated strategies to die off at the same time as tending the soil for resilient, adaptive strategies to emerge and support the business and wider ecologies longer term.

If you are curious to learn more about Fraendi’s Living Strategy process or 2035 or how to make the livingness of the living system be a shared practice and a shared belief that Fraendi supports organisations with, then reach out at hello@fraendi.org