Quarterback and jazz combos provide good models.
In the late 20th century, the U.S. Army War College created the acronym “VUCA” to describe the conditions that would exist after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The acronym stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.1 VUCA has become a shorthand term to describe the general conditions that exist today in nearly every aspect of our lives: technology, culture, politics and economics. Growing levels of stress, anxiety and even fear are symptoms of the VUCA world we live in.2
VUCA also applies to lawyers,3 financial advisors4 and the future of trust and estate planning. Professionals have long relied on specialized expertise—what researchers call “information asymmetry”5—to build and sustain their careers. As artificial intelligence (AI) and information technology advance, there may soon come a day when sophisticated tax, legal, financial and other technical information and strategies will be available to the public on demand. Eventually, AI, big data and algorithms may know us so well that our most sophisticated multigenerational planning is automated and personalized.6
Advances in bioscience will soon allow many generations of family members to be alive concurrently. This phenomenon will disrupt our traditional patterns of work, career development, family dynamics, aging and retirement.7 In this world of disruption, unprecedented change and the growing dominance of technology, what will the future of trust and estate planning be?
Star Quarterback Concept
The late 20th century also marked the rise of the star quarterback in the media and in football fans’ minds. Bart Starr of the Green Bay Packers, Joe Montana of the San Francisco 49ers, John Elway of the Denver Broncos and many other star quarterbacks became iconic sports figures. Their fame and stature, although certainly enhanced by their individual accomplishments, were strongly associated with the successful championship teams that they played on.8
The star quarterback concept has influenced the way that we think and speak about success and teamwork. We often speak metaphorically about the quarterback as the leader of groups and teams. Just as the quarterback of a football team calls the team’s plays and leads with authority and control, the metaphorical quarterback directs business activities, operating in a hierarchical environment. The quarterback model is common in trust and estate planning. The quarterback—the dominant, most influential advisor—leads a team of advisors that develops and executes a plan.
Often an entrepreneur, while still building his business, forms a relationship with an advisor who, over time, becomes the most trusted family advisor. This advisor becomes the quarterback of the business owner’s advisory team. There are inherent risks and limitations to this quarterback model. Client families’ needs may exceed their trusted advisors’ capabilities. There also may be no obvious successor to that advisor. Because of the perceived stability, reliability and assumed competence of an institutional advisory team, a safe successor quarterback can be a large institution. In my experience, most second and third generation family decision makers are loss-averse. Family leaders are generally less subject to second-guessing or buyer’s remorse if they select a name-brand, institutional
service provider. In the case of trust and estate planning, a safe choice is very often a vertically integrated financial services firm or a major law firm as the quarterback of their advisory team.9
Nevertheless, there are those families who consider or prefer an ad hoc team of unaffiliated professionals. Some families have had poor experiences with large institutions or are skeptical of the motivations and incentives of large institutions. Other families have grown their own teams organically, adding advisors as their needs have evolved. Still others embrace the opportunity to self-govern and strongly influence the future direction of their families. Such families often seek highly personalized, often customized, counsel and services.
Does the quarterback model optimize such ad hoc teams? What alternatives might better serve families?
The Jazz Combo Model
“Individuals aren’t really individuals. They are more like musicians in a jazz quartet, forming a web of unconscious actions and reactions to complement the others in the group,” noted Alex Pentland, head of the MIT Human Dynamics Lab.10
Jazz musician Miles Davis released the album Kind of Blue in 1959. The album was a major departure from the music of the past; it revolutionized the way that jazz was played and performed. Musicians were given more freedom to express their best ideas and their best musical selves.11 Davis and Kind of Blue are considered by many to represent the essence of jazz.
There were many now-famous musicians who played on Kind of Blue. One of them was John Coltrane. At the time, Coltrane was in the process of establishing his own legacy as one of the most innovative jazz musicians in history. American culture in many ways has been built on competition—at times cutthroat competition—for money, power and recognition. Jazz musicians are no different. Yet, somehow in the process of creating Kind of Blue, Davis was influential but not overly dominant, allowing Coltrane and other accomplished musicians to perform in collaboration like never before. Their results are legendary.
Could Davis’ Kind of Blue story—the “jazz combo” model, if you will—be a better metaphor than the quarterback model when it comes to the practice of trust and estate planning?
The hierarchical, quarterback model is deeply ingrained in our society and culture. Entire generations have been raised, educated, served in the military and worked their entire careers with this model as their underlying frame of reference. Citing evolutionary psychological theory, Jordan B. Peterson explains that dominance is embedded in every interaction:
Status is the most important determinant of survival and reproductive success…dominance hierarchy allows for orderly resource access…Adults form sophisticated coalitions, jockeying for positions. Such jockeying can become horrifically violent…Interaction can be cooperative at one level, and competitive at another. The dominance hierarchy is in fact a form of extended cooperation, establishing the frame for within-hierarchy striving…12
When professionals work together, I often hear the admonishment, “check your ego at the door.” Yet, what happens more often than not is “status management.” Professionals appear to collaborate, “but in fact they are…figuring out where they fit into the larger picture: Who is in charge? Is it okay to criticize someone’s idea? What are the rules here? Their interactions appear smooth, but their underlying behavior is riddled with inefficiency, hesitation, and subtle competition.”13
Peterson suggests a solution to status management and this seeming dichotomy between dominance (the quarterback model) and extended cooperation (the jazz combo model):
…aggression is counterbalanced by two powerful regulatory processes…The internal process is empathy, the ability to feel another’s
experiences…When human children are socialized, they learn socialized alternatives to violence, which serve as more effective means to social status. They do not simply inhibit the primal aggressive circuits. Instead, they integrate these circuits into more sophisticated behavioral games…Once a game becomes a regular occurrence…it can be explicitly codified…It is the ability to establish these joint schemas that allows for the modulation of motivation and emotion toward some shared end.14
That is, the combination of empathy and adherence to rules of the game create the conditions under which extended cooperation or collaboration can be achieved.
Developing Empathy
I believe empathy begins with gratitude. My firm has developed three interrelated “levels of gratitude” that together create an expanded concept of what gratitude can be:
1. Respect: courtesy, civility towards others. Despite rivalries, Davis and Coltrane respected each other. We don’t have to like everyone, but we can aspire to respect everyone, especially people we might find difficult.
2. Appreciation: genuinely appreciating attributes, talents and skills of others. Despite jealousy, envy, resentments and even past ill-will, Davis and Coltrane appreciated each other.
3. Generosity: giving unconditionally, especially one’s time, energy and attention. Davis and Coltrane each gave to make the music better.
Besides empathy, emotional intelligence, including self-awareness and emotional self-control, social awareness and skills and situational awareness, form a set of skills that contribute to collaboration.
Rules of Engagement
In my experience, most collaborations begin immediately with a discovery or strategy design session without first establishing rules of engagement. This leads to misunderstandings and suboptimal
collaboration.
“Encouraging rigorous, constructive debate is indispensable…Argument is how we come to understand things…Each of us has a crazy idea from time to time. We should probably share them more often than we do.”15 To encourage such debate, here are some rules of engagement that have worked for me and my colleagues.
1. Begin in gratitude (see above).
2. Be for, not against. Disagreements are inevitable, being disagreeable isn’t.
3. Speak from “I.” We can speak with some certainty about our own beliefs and thoughts; less so about others’.
4. “T.H.I.N.K.” before you speak. The acronym T.H.I.N.K. stands for:
True: Is what you’re about to say an exaggeration or even untrue?
Helpful: Is what you’re about to say actually helpful?
Improve on silence: Is what you’re about to say better
left unsaid?
Narcissistic: Is what you’re about to say just about you?
Kind: Is what you’re about to say mean-spirited?
5. Be easy to work with by:
• Being on time.
• Being present (avoiding being distracted by text messages, emails, phone calls).
• Being vulnerable, expressing fears, doubts and uncertainties. Being interested rather than trying to be interesting.
• Doing what you say you’re going to do.
Learning Through Experience
People learn not just from thinking but also through their experiences.16 We’ve observed that learning accelerates when family members and advisors share experiences and interact outside of their comfort zones. This is the way Davis’ music and Kind of Blue evolved. We encourage people to be aware of their own perspective and sensitive to the perspective of others. Practitioners nudge people to step outside of their comfort zones in the areas of trust and how people view wealth itself.
According to Charles H. Green, founder of Trusted Advisor Associates in West Orange, N.J., the level of trust is influenced by credibility, reliability and intimacy divided by self-orientation. In essence, trust increases or decreases based on one’s ability to have empathy and a fiduciary mindset (that is, putting clients’ interests ahead of one’s own).
Green says:
People rarely give over their trust to institutions; really, they trust other people…While companies are often described as credible and reliable (the first two components of The Trust Equation), it’s really the people within the companies that make those companies what they are. And intimacy and self-orientation are almost entirely about people.17
The simplest and most direct way to increase intimacy and reduce self-orientation is to “seek first to understand, and then to be understood.”18 The way we conceptualize and practice gratitude reflects this approach.
Viewing Wealth Holistically
Noted attorney and author James E. Hughes, Jr. and others have promoted19 a holistic view of wealth. Thus, true wealth includes not just financial assets but also, importantly, core values and virtues; the knowledge, wisdom and good judgment that derives from experiences; and the joy and satisfaction of contributing to the well-being of others.20 In layman’s terms, one might call this “wealth and wellbeing.”
An advisory team can help families imagine, think about and experience what multigenerational wealth and wellbeing might be and what it takes to sustain and grow multigenerational true wealth. As a result, advisory work inevitably focuses on family leadership and stewardship of the family’s wealth and wellbeing.
Leadership and Stewardship
Leadership means different things to different people. For me, my thoughts on jazz combos and collaboration also apply to family leadership: practicing gratitude; applying rules of engagement; fostering experiential learning; nurturing trust; and thinking holistically about wealth. I believe that exemplary family leaders focus on long-term vision, commit to and model ethical excellence, empower others to act and engage other family members emotionally in the challenges of sustaining the family.21
In addition to developing family leaders, stewardship involves cultivating family culture. I view family culture as the stories, traditions, rituals, ceremonies and unspoken ways that families do things. Often, family culture is a missing element in trust and estate planning, especially when governance, tax minimization and legal structure are the focus of the planning process. Herein lies an opportunity for collaboration. The potential contributions of advisory team members—like a jazz combo—can make a difference in the planning process, especially by adding family leadership and family culture considerations to the collaboration dialogue.
Transdisciplinary Collaboration
The VUCA world is disrupting trust and estate planning in inscrutable ways. However, despite ubiquitous technology, humans will continue to have unarticulated, often conflicting, needs and desires. Addressing these needs and desires will require empathy, imagination and intuition; human attributes that, for the foreseeable future, will elude even the most advanced technologies.
I believe that people will continue to seek purpose and meaning. Most of us will prefer human interactions over robots or smart devices to explore purpose and meaning. I believe clients will choose human intimacy and low self-orientation in their advisors. They’ll prefer to work with grateful, human advisors, assisted by smart technology.
People thrive and flourish because of human interactions.22 The VUCA future presents opportunities for well-rounded, emotionally intelligent human advisors and opportunities for “jazz combos” comprised of such advisors to meet clients where they’re at. To do so well, advisors have an incentive to transcend their disciplines of origin; they can shift from domain specialists in multidisciplinary collaborations to facilitating and contributing to transdisciplinary collaborations.
Opportunities for Advisors
In our VUCA world, it’s important to rethink our professional practices. With inexorable advances in technology and AI, professionals can no longer rely on just expertise to build and sustain practices.
Will people stop needing advisors? I don’t think so. Even with the most advanced technology, people will still respond to the VUCA world with anxiety, apprehension, confusion and fear. This presents opportunities for advisors. Advisors who can build trust by practicing gratitude, developing intimacy and truly putting their clients’ interests first will enjoy new opportunities to facilitate learning experiences with clients. These advisors will help families develop future leaders as well as optimize and steward their wealth and wellbeing. In my view, the future will favor families and communities of wealth and wellbeing, organized and facilitated by jazz combos of collaborative, transdisciplinary advisors.
Endnotes
1. George W. Casey, Jr., “Leading in a VUCA World,” Fortune (April 7, 2014).
2. Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Bold, Simon & Schuster (2015).
3. F. Tim McKnight, “It’s the 6 D’s Not the ‘60’s: Machine Processing and the Legal Profession,” www.slaw.com (Oct. 6, 2014).
4. “Ripe for Disruption…(Part 1),” www.diamandis.com (2016).
5. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry.
6. Peter H. Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, “Abundance 360 Livestream” (Sept. 14, 2018).
7. Ken Dychtwald, “Reimagining Maturity,” American Society on Aging Annual Conference (March 23, 2015).
8. Tex Maude, “NFL’s 10 Greatest Quarterbacks of All Time,” Sports Illustrated (Oct. 27, 2017).
9. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, Macmillan Publishers (2011).
10. Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code, Random House (2018), at p. 14.
11. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, “All Music Review of Kind of Blue,” www.allmusic.com/album/kind-of-blue-mw0000191710.
12. Jordan B. Peterson, et al., “Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity,” The Psychology of Meaning, American Psychological Association, at p. 7.
13. Coyle, supra note 10.
14. Peterson, supra note 12, at pps. 7-8, 19-23.
15. Robert C. Wolcott, “Leading People Too Smart to be Led,” Harvard Business Review (Oct. 2, 2017).
16. www.Activ8-u.com.
17. Charles H. Green, “Understanding the Trust Equation,” www.trustedadvisor.com.
18. Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, franklincovey.com.
19. James E. Hughes, Jr., et al., Complete Family Wealth, Bloomberg (2017).
20. Lee Brower, The Brower Quadrant (2011).
21. James Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge, Wiley (2012).
22. Karin Evans, “Why Relationships are the Key to Longevity,” Mindful (Sept. 17, 2018).