Overview
Jon's increasing involvement in conflict management and problem solving for family businesses was one of the major motivators behind the development of The Solutionist Group (TSG). He tells the story:
"I'd been working with family businesses for many years, as a professional accountant, business adviser and dispute resolver. I'd always treated them in more or less the same way I treated "ordinary" businesses with complex problems. That is to say, neither they nor I thought or chose to go far below the surface into the inter-personal issues that are invariably at work in family businesses. Instead, we dealt with the usual presenting problems - and generally dealt with them to the reasonable satisfaction of all concerned.
As my facilitation and mediation experience, skills and confidence grew, I began probing much deeper into the relationship dynamics of these situations.
Combining research with experimentation and lessons learnt from the mediation work I was doing at the time, with separating couples and in the workplace, I found myself abandoning, or at least heavily modifying, the "standard" commercial mediation process models I'd been using for business, in favour of more profound, facilitative processes.
Then along came the Family Business Council, which later became Family Business Australia (FBA). Its emergence just happened to coincide with some training and shared projects I was involved in with the recently established de Bono Institute in Melbourne.
Out of this eclectic mix of inputs, and with extra motivation gained from some particularly complicated family business situations I was trying to deal with at the time, I developed the idea of a service designed specifically to deal with the unique problems and dynamics encountered in family businesses - of all types and sizes.
On one hand, this service had to be properly equipped to deal constructively with overt or underlying family business conflict. On the other hand it needed to have the problem solving tools and techniques to handle the major strategic challenges faced by most family businesses. So, I began inventing ..."
The result was a group of services that could move a family from a highly conflicted situation - sometimes on the very verge of meltdown for both the business and the family - to a relatively harmonious state that held out hopes of prosperity for the individual, the family and the business. These included:
- Focus - corporate visioning.
- Planning - strategic and business planning.
- Managing growth - modernising and corporatising.
- Managing conflict - inter and intra generational issues.
- Managing the Interface between the family and the business - Family Councils, Family Forums, Family Retreats, Family Constitutions and Family Agreements.
- Generational transitions - succession planning and leadership transition.
