Jon Kenfield

At the recent National Mediation Conference held in Melbourne, Family Business Consultants Network (FBCN) Chair, Jon Kenfield, presented an in-depth insight into how experienced mediators could become valued advisers to family businesses.

Having worked and trained in this area for many years, he described the opportunities as “A great greenfields challenge” for appropriately trained professionals.

Kenfield commented: “There are literally thousands of family businesses in Australia, from small to very large. They’re the engine room of our economy, employing around half of our workforce and generating roughly half of GDP – and yet this economic sector often flies under the radar – which has historically resulted in its being neglected by politicians and traditional advisers”.

Although the opportunity to service the sector is immense, and growing, Kenfield cautioned the audience by saying that the needs of family owned enterprises are more complex than those of ordinary commercial entities. Accordingly, the provision of mediation and professional advisory services requires more evolved knowledge, experience and skills than those used in normal corporate environments.

“Planning for succession is certainly one of the toughest challenges to be faced by family business owners. Many of them are conflicted by the hope that the businesses they’ve created will remain in family hands after their departure, while needing to cash out their years of effort and sacrifice to fund their retirements. This conundrum often demands a strong and sensitive helping hand to work things out, and mediators with sound commercial credentials can play a valuable role here as negotiators and problem solvers”.

Adding his voice to those of other speakers at the bi-annual National Mediation Conference, Kenfield challenged the mediation community to move out of its comfort zone of carefully-defined, set-piece processes, to restore the essence of mediation: managing creative problem solving processes in which the parties themselves are intimately involved. “Mediation processes should help ordinary people, and their businesses, to resolve their own problems in sensible ways,” said Kenfield, “But we’ve allowed many of our mediations to be corrupted into the shape of a pale shadow of the regular legal process. That’s sad, because it was always supposed to be an alternative to those processes, not an adjunct”.

Kenfield was a mediation pioneer in the 1980s. He described how his processes, and those of the FBCN, have evolved from their early origins in interest-based negotiation. “Family businesses have too much history and emotional baggage about them to be able to participate constructively in polite round table discussions about the future. We’ve learnt that it’s far more effective to help a family to patiently de-construct its current situation into bite-sized chunks. This often makes their problems, disputes and conflicts disappear, allowing them to progress to the civilized conversations they crave.

“This obvious truth should encourage professional advisers to act collaboratively, as facilitators of solutions, rather than as champions in battle, because at heart most families don’t really want to exterminate their parents, children or siblings, they’re just steamed up (and have been for years sometimes) at not being able to work out how to talk to them sensibly about whatever ails them”.

“There’s a huge sadness in the destruction visited on families and their businesses through traditional adversarial/competitive professional approaches. Quite apart from the human cost to individuals and their families, any business succession process that’s poorly handled places businesses, jobs and communities at risk. With tens of thousands of business successions in the current pipeline this is one of the most important and urgent issues facing Australia, and all other Western economies, at this time”.

While the reasons for family business failure are many and varied, Kenfield has found that a major concern is lack of clarity – an area where “evolved mediation skills” can be highly effective. He advocates a sequential process that starts with:

• Diagnostic analysis of who’s who in the zoo and what’s going on, before trying to do anything else.
• Provide necessary personal or group support, first aid, or radical surgery as required, so everyone can participate in developing family alignment.
• Create clarity, certainty and commitment by identifying shared values, visions and goals.
• Teach the family to communicate more constructively and to make better decisions by adopting a common language and agreed meeting / decision making processes (sounds crazy, but often needed).

All of these preliminaries are designed to bond the family more closely together. Kenfield often finds himself facilitating conversations that families should have had many years earlier but that, for whatever reason, didn’t happen. “There’s a lot of counselling and chicken soup psycho-therapy going on in these sessions” he says. “As mediators we should feel obliged, encouraged and empowered to help our clients develop solutions, but too much academic and procedural defining of our role seems to have got in the way of many of us performing that most useful function”.

Bringing his presentation to a close, Kenfield strongly affirmed the need for better problem solving skills and approaches in our business and adviser communities. He encouraged mediators to be courageously non-adversarial and challenged them to explore the enormous greenfields opportunities that exist in working with family owned businesses.

Kenfield confirmed FBCN’s support for plans to help mediators, facilitators and other professionals become more effective family business advisers through the launch of a new Family Business Institute which will operate in Australia and New Zealand to train and support advisers, from all disciplines.

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