What is a family transmission workshop?

A family transmission workshop is a structured meeting — typically spanning one or two days — in which members of a family, across generations, work together on the questions of values, purpose, and governance that will define how wealth is transmitted. It is not a legal or financial exercise; it is a human one. Westwick facilitates these workshops as part of generational transition mandates, when the family needs to reach alignment before structural decisions can be made.

How do you prepare the next generation in a family office?

Preparing the next generation for responsibility in a family office requires more than financial education. It requires exposure to the family's history and values, structured conversations with the current generation about purpose and expectations, and a governance framework that gives the next generation a legitimate voice before they hold formal power. Westwick's transmission workshops are designed to do all three.

Knowledge Base · Gilles & Aymeric · 30 January 2025

Use case: designing and facilitating a family transmission workshop

Two days. Three generations. Four questions. When a family decides to open its transmission conversation in a structured way, Westwick is often called in to design and facilitate the workshop that starts the process. This is what we deliver.

The mandate

There comes a point when a family has decided that transmission can no longer be left to informal conversations between a parent and a child. Typically, the trigger is concrete: a generational shift on the horizon, a recent disagreement that exposed unspoken assumptions, the arrival of in-laws or grandchildren, or simply the realisation that the family has grown large enough that a structured conversation is now overdue.

The brief, in those moments, is straightforward: bring all the adult family members, regardless of their generation or role, into the same room. The setting should be neutral, with the right questions on the table — and turn what is usually a delicate, postponed conversation into a productive one.

How the workshop is built

A typical engagement runs over one to two days and includes:

Pre-workshop interviews. Confidential one-on-one conversations with each participating family member, across generations, to surface the real concerns before the room is convened. What people say privately is rarely what they say first in front of their relatives.
A tailored agenda. Not a template. The four core questions below are the backbone, but the weight given to each — and the order in which they are addressed — is built around what the pre-workshop interviews reveal.
Neutral facilitation. A neutral and respected third party runs the room. The role is to keep the conversation honest, protect quieter voices, slow down the dominant ones, and ensure no question is left buried under a more comfortable one.
A written output. At the end of the workshop, the family leaves with a written record of what was discussed, what was decided, and what was deliberately left open. The document becomes the reference point for the work that follows.
A follow-up roadmap. Most decisions cannot be made in a single workshop. The roadmap lays out what comes next — family governance design, shareholder agreements, next-generation training, board composition — and helps the family sequence it.

The four questions we return to most often

1. The long-term goal. What do we want to achieve as a family that makes us distinctive? That is the real question — and it usually forces a second one: what do we need to change, in how we work today, to get there?

2. The next generation. How do we make sure our children and grandchildren are given the tools to become effective operators, or effective shareholders, of the family business — should they choose to be either?

3. Family governance. Which processes, committees, or boards ensure that each voice is heard when major decisions are taken, without making those decisions impossible to reach?

4. Family rules. How do we separate business life from family life? And which ground rules protect family time from becoming another management meeting?

What a successful workshop looks like

Some of these questions produce quick answers. Others send the family back to reformulate what they were actually asking in the first place — which is usually where the most valuable insight comes from.

For the family, the objective is not to leave the room with every question resolved. It is to leave the room having asked them properly, having heard every generation, and having agreed on what gets worked on next, by whom, and by when.

What we do for families

One or two Westwick partners plan, build, and run the workshop. We stay involved for as long as the family wants — through the governance design, the shareholder agreements, the next-generation programme, or any specific mandate that flows from the workshop. Or we step away cleanly, leaving the family with the document, the roadmap, and the conversation properly started.

Either way, the test is the same as for every engagement: when we leave, the family is back to its own way of working — with a transmission conversation that is now alive, structured, and theirs to carry forward.

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