In values based planning we align financial capacity with moral compass, or the client's values. To arrive at values we sort values cards, check boxes on lists of values, or take psychological tests whose outputs are a map of client values. Given, though, that values are most often honored in the breach and that most human behavior is determined by delusion, obsession, bad habits, foibles, eccentricities, temptations, besetting sins, moral cowardice, vanity, and addiction, it seems the values exercises are incomplete. Why not give clients vice cards and ask them to sort by their own besetting sins? Then, as a cross check against hypocrisy, have the family and employees of the philanthropist do a 360 degree analysis, in strict confidence, to make sure we have a complete map of the client's vice, blindness, spiritual pride and corruption. "Which of the Ten Commandments do you most frequently break? Are there any you have kept? If you were going to observe just one Commandment, which would it be? Which if of the Ten Commandments is right for you?"
Wouldn't you guess, wouldn't we all guess, that more behavior in all echelons of society is determined by vice and folly than by wisdom and virtue? Why then in our efforts to best serve clients do we leave out of our fact-finding and goal setting their operative motives?
I think it is because buying decisions are, like the values cards themselves, an exercise in social identity construction. Knowing who the person wants to pass himself or herself off as is an excellent predictor of the props he or she will purchase to round out the act. Since we are all in sales in one way or another this serves our purpose perfectly. That this is itself blind, manipulative, and vicious is my point. That is to say it works, And how can that be bad?
Still, knowing the client's operative motives, as well as the self-avowed moral ones is good for business. If your client's moral compass points due north, and he is traveling due South, towards the Tropics, I would suggest you not try to sell him a parka and mukluks, instead tell him that the North Pole is unseasonably warm and sell him the swimwear.
