Inspired Legacies for The World We Want: Leo and Charita Get it All Together

Scene 1:  The View from the Hilltop

Trusted advisor (Lauren) and client (Leo) have spent the day at the client's farm.  Spouse (Charita) and children have gone off to town to see a movie.  For the last two days nothing much has been said about finance, or giving, though much has come up in passing about the state of society, particularly the state of our democracy.  Leo suggests a walk. Through the apple orchard, down a path, across the ravine, then up the hill.  The two are comfortable, being civic friends, with silence. They catch their breath at the top of hill, looking out across the farm land,  the stream, and the city in the far distance, shrouded in smog.  "Look, Lauren, I have been thinking.....," begins Leo. 

Scene 2: Democracy Conference: The Community of Interest

Leo and Lauren are not surprised to have found each other's names on the list of those attending the "post-partisan" conference on revitalizing civil society.  They see many old friends, and recent acquaintances. They see people from religious organizations, the arts, political advocacy, the media, funders, and activists.  At the reception, they watch pockets form as various groups coalesce and disperse.  "Feel at home?," Leo asks Lauren. "Well, yes, sort of. I know a lot of people here, and am glad to see so many new faces from the Christian community and business world." "Yeah, but we Buddhists had better stick together," jokes Leo, "we are out-numbered."

Scene 3:  The Family Therapist

Leo and Charita are both on their second marriage.  The children from Leo's first marriage are estranged.  He has taken her children into the house, if not completely into his heart.  They have one child from their marriage.  With a prenup in force, the money in the family is Leo's. After the trauma of his first divorce, he is not too eager to share control, as committed as he is to Charita.  As "dysfunctional" as his own kids may be, he has not given up on them.  As much as he loves her kids, "blood," he feels "is thicker than water."  As he thinks about his "lasting legacy," he gets uncomfortable.  There is so much that is unspoken. His legal work, other than the prenup, is way out of date. His company, started years ago with very little money, may soon be bought out.  Lauren, the one advisor he trusts, is urging him, to basically, get his act together. So, here he is with Charita in the family therapist's waiting room. "Shoot," thinks Leo, "Why does life have to be this hard? How do I tell Charita that her kids ain't getting squat?" 

Scene 4: Around The Planning Table(s)

Well, how many tables? Just one with Leo, Charita, and their advisory team? Or will she have her own legal representation, and he is his, negotiating at arm's length? Who will lead and who will follow in the conversations that ricochet around from Leo, to Charita, to the CPA, the trust officer, the financial advisor, the money manager, the insurance agent? (And somewhere in the background maybe the family therapist is involved, and maybe a philanthropic advocate, or organizer for democracy).

If we put a dot on a sheet of paper for each professional, and used lines to diagram who talks directly to whom, how would those lines look?

Controlling CEO Model: Here Leo would call the shots, maybe keeping Charita informed. All lines go from Leo and back to Leo.

Trusted Advisor Model: Here Leo puts Lauren as the "monkey in the middle," as he jokingly refers to her. She is the one in whom he confides his hopes, dreams, doubts and ultimately his decisions. "Get it done," he says, "and keep me informed." Now all the lines go to and from Lauren as trusted advisor and project manager.  How well she keeps Charita informed may be a sore point. (Is she working for Leo or for the couple?)

Patient Doctor Model: Leo is no passive patient etherized upon the planning table, expecting his advisors to read his mind and do what is right. He is, if anything, over-controlling. But what of Charita? Might she just let go and let it happen, trusting that her interests will be weighed and considered? Will she say, "Whatever you want, dear"? Or will she assert herself, and if so how will her views be debriefed, represented, and factored into the plan? When the legal and project plans are drafted,  does she get sign off or just Leo? And who decides that?

Collaborative Chaos Model: Here advisors jockey for access to Leo or to Charita or both. They keep one another in the dark, and play for positional advantage. Each has his or her own ends in view, and favorite tools and techniques, as well as having the client's best interests at heart. It is not clear who runs the team, and so paper and bills fly back and forth, until the planning tolerance and bill paying tolerance of the family have been reached, and the planning subsides for awhile, half finished.

Scene 5: Hilltop a Year Later

Leo's business has been sold. A chunk went into a family foundation. Leo himself is out of a job, in essence, having sold his company. The legal work has been created for the ultimate tax wise distribution of his estate at death.  As head of his new foundation Leo is wondering, "Now what? Democracy....wasn't that the point? How do I get from the interest on this pile of money to a more vital democracy? What am I supposed to do now, exactly? Read all these piddling grant proposals and dole out the chump change? I am a leader, not a penny-ante banker. Wasn't this supposed to be fun? I just got myself a rinky-dink hobby job as an amateur program officer at my own foundation.  What was this all supposed to be about?"

Scene 6: Family Therapist Year Two

"I am just so damned depressed," says Leo. "About the country, about my life. I just know there is so much more I could be doing.  How do I get something going? I am sick of nothing to do. I am sick of reading proposals.  I am sick of being treated like I am some kind of god when all they want is my money. What am I doing with my life? I am a useless piece of dirt." To which the therapist says, "And, Leo,  how does that make you feel?" 

Scene 7: Team Formation At Democracy Conference Year Two

Leo, Charita and Lauren are huddled with Melinda who has created an online meeting place for funders, activists, and "domain experts" around grassroots democratic revival. A number of community foundations want to use materials she has created to stir up local conversations and deliberations about issues of concern to the local community. Melinda has a network of Open Space conveners who can do citizen driven meetings at small cost. She wants to feed these local conversations up to a master site, or maybe even a national conference, to create enough critical mass to break through into the mediated consciousness of her couch-sitting compatriots.  She has a couple of books she sees herself promoting, The World We Want by Peter Karoff, and Inspired Philanthropy by Tracy Gary.  She has web friends who will give the project "link love," driving online traffic. She wants to attract big gifts and "legacy giving" along with lots of little gifts accepted online from ordinary people, and to pair funders and activists to go off in many directions in pursuit of the world each wants in their community. She has tons of other ideas and no way to make ends meet as she gets things going. Leo sees that she is talented, passionate,  under-funded and out-classed.  "How could we grow this to scale," he asks. "What would it take?"

Charita sees the old fire in Leo's eyes. "The man is taking charge," she murmurs. Lauren is taking notes, scoping out the projects, figuring out who else should be on the action team, running budgets and timelines in her head. When Leo attacks, it will be all out.  He will need a business plan for this new startup and he will need to rejigger his personal finances to fund it. Lauren is factoring prudence into her fast-running financial eqations. How much will Charita need if Leo blows it all? What should be reserved for the kids of his marriage, her prior marriage, and their marriage together? What is Charita thinking about Leo's new mission in life? Can this be the project that draws them together and engages their blended family?

To Be Continued

Gentle Reader, you can continue this saga as you wish. You can vary names, ages, gender relationships, race, and family situation. Change the cause. The moral is the same. Planning for "The World We Want" is not so easy. The world we want is in our bed with us each night, and in the kitchen each morning, and on the phone when the kids call home. The world we have is on t.v., and in the news, often simplified and distorted. The world we want is not some isolated rich person giving grants, not even if the rich person might be us. The world we want is more inclusive, vibrant and active.

Morals to Be Drawn

1. Inspired legacies as Tracy Gary calls them are embedded in deep contexts from which they must be "birthed." The inspired legacy promoter cannot forget or neglect or bypass the deep issues around conflicting personal, family, business and civic claims on the donor-citizen's time, attention, and funds.
2. The World We Want will not be funded out of the interest on money sitting in foundations. There is not enough of it. And, unless coupled with active leadership, money alone won't have much transformational effect.
3. The World We Want will be funded largely by couples, with new wealth, like Leo and Charita, who work through the issues with a good planning team and get their money and their energies aligned with their talent and their community.
4. The World We Want will be catalyzed by legacy leaders who think beyond themselves to engage activists and organizers to co-create a movement or a self-catalyzing chain reaction.
5. We are still building the framework within which these self-catalyzing networks of advisors, new money, old money, foundations, volunteers, and activists can meet, form relationships, create projects and get moving. The framework or "hub" will need to foster face to face and online interaction that goes on with increasing intensity year by year.
6. If done right, the networks will be self-catalyzing in the sense that they free up more money and energy than they use up.
7. I would like to imagine that Leo, having found the team, will aggressively invest his personal funds, as well as his foundation funds, and his life energy and managerial drive in creating the infrastructure needed to help others do the same.

When Peter Karoff asks how the world we want can be accomplished, the case study above is my best answer.

Comments

[Gerry]

Great stuff. You've been working towards this kind of story for a long time and it shows.

[phil]

Great story, if only if only, we could get people to follow the script. But there is hope. With Tracy and Peter enagaged there is hope.

[Spinorb]

Ah, but there are more players needed than Tracy and Peter. Who will build the tools? Who will hold the open space/the space open? Who will make the introductions? Who will facilitate? And are there other options for planning in our complex world of tangled relationships and mingled families?

Great story Phil.

[Phil]

The context, or scenes, are already set in many cases. The stories are already in medias res, and often there is no felt need for a new way to organize the process. The community events happen one place, the planning team meets in another, the charitable advisor or fundraiser intervenes in another place, and the scenes do not make one story. The client is caught among worldviews, business models, and "tribes" of advisors. There are others who do this work, and several organizations that provide training, although the majority of clients still are left wandering among the "silos" or islands of specific expertise.

[Spinorb]

This is a time for integration and cross-pollination. It comes slowly perhaps, in fits and starts, here and there. The models evolve and grow. More people come to the circle and join in. You don't know what you don't know, then you begin to see there is a gap. And as you see the gap, you want to shift it. Something else is possible. And it feels more aligned with who we are. But first, we must see it as possible.

[phil]

Spin, Where would you ad the role of personal coach to the story above?

[Spinorb]

A personal coach holds the space for the conversation in private. A facilitator holds the space in the open. Both catalyze the conversation with questions and moderation. Both are best when they both challenge and support.

If you know there is a gap between what you have and what you want, but you don't see a clear path or face hard decisions to change the path, then who do you speak with? Who lacks a conversation warping agenda? Who has the skills to get to the core of it, negotiate conflict, set priorities, manage the process of change? And do so without putting their own values and needs in the fray? The coach.

Who champions the individual to bring out their best self, to prod them to take big steps for themselves, to cross-over their skills in one area, like business, to another area, like giving? The coach.

So where is the coach in the story? The coach is on the phone with Leo or with Charita at each turn, asking, "What do you want here? What will having that get for you? Is that really what you want? What steps are going to take to get what you want? When will you take those steps? Do they need to be chunked smaller? Is there someone who can do those steps better than you which you could ask for help or hand it off to? If you ask for what you want, will there be consequences you don't want? Is there another experience you have had like this where you managed it successfully? What strengths of yours can you apply here to help you on this path? How will you know you have what you want? What evidence will you have? What will that look like, sound like, feel like? If you can imagine having that, does it feel right to you? ... " The questions are not in order, they arise as the conversation requires. This is the beginning.

[Spinorb]

Thanks for the "ad" space. ;-)

[phil]

OK, but if the client bonds with the coach and the coach operates only in private and interfaces only with the client, then the coach is maybe an obstacle in the eyes of the advisory team. Who is the coach to be raising these questions when so many of the answers may be based on a dim understanding by the client of the realities of her situation and of the planning engagement. Let us say the advisors are gravitating towards a recapitalization of the donor's business, setting up a number of trusts, and maybe a foundation. If the coach is whispering the client's ear, and knows nothing of the specific tools, will the conversation really go in a good direction? If you diagram the flow of info, then you have the coach as a greyed out box communicating off the record only with the client. Meanwhile, the client should have a trusted advisor on the team who is communicating with all the other players to nurture the process along.Thus, the client has a trusted advisor on the team and another confidant not on the team. If the two are not in conversation, the client may be caught in the middle.

Team play and team dynamics are critical in this endeavor.

Futher, how does the coach get on the team? Who recommended her? And won't that person want to stay in touch? (I can see a trusted advisor calling in a coach, or recommending one, if the client has difficulty following through on work only the client can do, but in that case, the trusted advisor would expect the coach to maintain open though tactful lines of communication so that the team could move forward together. Clearly the client decides who has permission to tell what to whom, but too many greyed out boxes and too many people not talking with one another can lead to dysfunction, delays, and ultimately higher costs and lower peformance.

If the coach already has the relationship with the client and encouages the client to get suitable advisors, then again the coach may not be able to operate totally in the shadows. She will have to know a good advisor for a very bad one, I would think, and to help the client decide on her team.

When the coach starts asking, "How should the process be chunked?" etc she may well be out of her depth when the process is one that involves high powered advisors who have their own processes. They will not relish being second guessed by somone they have never met, and who may not undersand what is really going on, since the client herself may be confused.

Your note raises lots of issues. You can see how team dynamics are a mission critcal element to all this. If coaches could advance the group effort, they might find a role. If they operate only in a dyad with the client, it seems to me they will have to find the client or have the client on board. Advisors aren't likely to recommend someone who keeps them in the dark. (Therapists may be the exception to this, but the most successful psychologists in this field actually are those who do family counseling and team building. Often they end up hosting family meetings or sitting with family and advisors as facilitators. So they have a real place at the table.)

[Gerry]

Interesting conversation. I think part of the difficulty may lie in our mental images of what a coach does, if we expand that a bit it may be helpful.

There is a sense in which the coach is not an active participant. When the game is on the coach is off the playing field, and in some sports may not even communicate with the player. A personal coach has many fewer restrictions, which makes it all the more important that they have a strong ethical foundation. The action that only a few people on the team can take is to make decisions. Delegation can move decision points into the team, but ultimately the delegation comes from very few points.

In this model, there is no reason the coach would be separated from the team. In adition to the softer skills, a good coach should become familiar with the financial and legal instraments involved. Depending on dynamic, the client and coach may interact together with the domain experts, getting briefed and taught the ins and outs of tactics and strategy.

That's a different diagram. The coach and client are closely interacting (privately for personal work and just friendship), and they are often communicating together with the rest of the team. The client is deciding, but can call on her coach at any time for any reason. The rest of the team might as well treat the coach as another family member or personal friend of the client. To question their right to be present in conversations is rightly seen as divisive.

[Gerry]

Just thought of another way to break down the dyad structure and connect the coach with the rest of the team. Instead of being a personal coach for the client, the client hires a coach for her giving team. Now the coach isn't just working with the client but individually and in groups with the entire team.

I wonder if Spin could write more about a coaches role in helping the whole team be successful.

[Phil]

You added one critical component, Gerry, missing from Spin's account. You said, in passing, "In adition to the softer skills, a good coach should become familiar with the financial and legal instraments involved." Well, that is 3 years of full time work to get that expertise even at the "semi-competent" level. Very few coaches have that, or are in a position to pay those "dues."

If this is a team game, and the coach only knows her own position, she really can't help the client with the handoffs with the other advisors - or can she?

The role would have to be defined very clearly, with clear limits. It might involve clarifying goals, dealing with dilemas, working through a pre-arranged fact-gathering process, putting together a "dossier," writing a cover memo re: goals, and helping the client interview advisors. The role in some ways is like that of a para-planner in a financial office. "Data and goals and current documents."

My concern is that once you start collecting data about financial instruments and legal instruments that clients immeidately have questions, "Is this my IRA statement? Or is it a TSA? What block do I enter the number under on the fact-finder?" "What do they mean by "S-Corp," here?" It is hard to keep the specific financial stuff out of an interview about money and life, even if the focus is "values," or goals and objectives. The conversation tends to veer from one to another. Insofar as the coach is involved, and insofar as there are lines that cannot be crossed over into planning, which is a regulated activity, you do wonder who is supervising the coach, or keeping her from doing inadvertent harm. You also wonder how she gets paid. If the client coughs up the money, fine, but if anything goes to her from the advisors, then you have potential conflicts of interest and regulatory issues. Finally, a good advisor will want to be the trusted advisor. Clients bond to advisors during the goal setting conversation, and through the fact-finding. If the coach takes that over, or does too much of it, she may end up as the "leader," in the eyes of the client. And she may just not be able to fulfill that role, since she will not understand how the data will be used, what the legal docs say, or what the planners are creating.

The role of giving coach is somewhat less vexed, but truth be told, a big part of the conversation may be about what is to be given, when, and how much, and how it will affect the donor's life, her children's lives, etc. Those are all planning questions.

There are giving coaches out there, some very good, who are not conversant with finance, but they restrict themselves to working with the current giving budget, rather than repositioning the client's money, and mapping out an overall plan of which the giving plan is a piece.

It would be nice is coaching skills and technical skills were more often found in the same body.

[Gerry]

The thing is that the client isn't expected to be expert in any of it and has to make the final decisions anyway. I'm imagining client and coach being tutored by one or more trusted advisors as appropriate, and helping each other through that part as equals. The coach will grow in financial knowledge with the client, and will be largely dependent on having good and trustworthy advisors. As you say they might help the client form the team, but then they would let the technical leaders lead where they are competent. The coach will need human communication skills to know who is and is not trustworthy more than any specific technical knowledge.

[Phil]

The blind leading the blind?

[Gerry]

I was thinking more like Wilder and Prior in "If You Could See What I Hear". If the client isn't very good at the technical side then maybe the coach needs to be better. I'm guessing that neither the client nor coach got where they are being naive about all of that.