When I think of succession planning for families what comes to mind is the movie: Little Fockers, starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller.
A Google search on “family succession planning” brought up “family business succession planning”.
Oh for Pete’s sake! That’s not what I was after at all.
When you read Digital Dreaming you’ll understand what I’m mean. And if you’ve followed my blog you’ll read articles that recommend you consider a succession plan for treasured family keepsakes. In my blog Know when to hold’em, Know when to fold’em I covered the scary question of what happens when a family collector dies.
In this article I’m attaching a link about a box of mementos purchased at auction for $5.00. The purchaser thought she was purchasing a box of bed linen for her shop. It’s inspiring to see how thoughtful people can be; the priceless value of the lost family keepsakes was felt and respected automatically by the new owner.
My tip is, act like any business would with your own family memorabilia. It’s sad when you read stories like the one I’ve linked to this article, but it’s also great to see people do care about getting keepsakes back to a knowing family.
You can be sure of one thing, small family businesses and large corporations have a succession strategy – they find key people to entrust company knowledge and groom new people to take over one day. And your succession strategy need not be as complicated as the one portrayed in Little Fockers.
With family keepsakes it doesn’t have to be formal, just sit down with your family and close-friends to show how you’ve kept and why you’ve treasured family keepsakes.
They will be eternally thankful to you, as when you’re gone important family knowledge can become sketchy.
Think like an organisation would. Consider a family knowledge succession strategy.
By learning the classification scheme outlined in Digital Dreaming you’ll be using a consistent and repeatable process to give efficient succession planning for your own family knowledge and keepsakes.