Juan de Pareja – The Calling of Saint Matthew

Part 1/20 of the Dissecting a Dissertation series

This series explores the findings of my Doctorate in Business Administration research at SDA Bocconi, which examined why holistic wealth management remains so difficult to deliver in practice.

Across twenty articles, I will unpack the core insights from the dissertation in an accessible format for advisors, family office professionals, and enterprising families. Each piece examines a different dimension of the advisory system: how institutional incentives shape behaviour, why governance conversations often struggle to gain traction, and where structural constraints quietly shape the outcomes families experience.

Rather than presenting the research as a single academic document, this series breaks it into focused themes. Each article looks at one mechanism inside the advisory system and connects it to the real-world challenges families and advisors face when navigating wealth, governance, and succession.

The aim is not to criticise individual professionals. Many advisors genuinely want to provide holistic guidance. Instead, the series examines the structures that define what advisors can realistically deliver within modern wealth management.

Over the coming articles, we will look at how these structures emerged, how they influence everyday advisory work, and where families and advisors can redesign their relationships to make holistic engagement possible.

Your wealth manager promised you family governance. What you got instead was a portfolio review.

The quarterly meeting arrives. You’ve arranged for your family principals to join. You’re hoping to finally discuss the succession process, family values, and multigenerational alignment. The advisor walks in and immediately pivots to basis points, tax-loss harvesting, and asset allocation. The topic of family dynamics is quickly shelved.

You feel deceived;  you were sold a relationship, but were delivered a transaction.

The Compartmentalisation Trap

When families raise this frustration, the industry’s response is almost always the same: schedule another meeting to discuss family dynamics.

On the surface, this approach sounds sensible: allocate time, create structure, discuss governance separately. But it rests on a flawed assumption: that family dynamics can be separated from financial decisions. In reality, every financial choice sits on top of family priorities, values, and relationships. Family values should guide portfolio construction, not exist alongside it as a parallel discussion. Yet the advisory system treats them as if they were unrelated topics.

The issue is not the advisor’s intention. It is the structure they operate within. This critique targets the system, not the individual professional.

When Tools Meet Structural Impossibility

I encountered this disconnect directly during my Doctorate in Business Administration at SDA Bocconi. Realising that advisors often spoke about holistic wealth management but lacked practical structures to facilitate it, I designed a client engagement framework called the Family Council Canvas together with our Awesome Team at The Cecily Group. The framework was created to help advisors guide values-based conversations with families and translate those discussions into concrete governance decisions.

I tested it with an ultra-high-net-worth family during a complex transition. The intervention worked beautifully. Family members aligned around shared priorities, and their governance structure became clearer and more coherent.

Confident in the tool, I rolled it out to eight principal owners of independent financial advisory (IFA) practices in the UK and Australia. They universally validated it. They called it conceptually necessary. They expressed full buy-in.

Then came the jarring reality: near-zero adoption.

This critical incident forced a complete strategic pivot. Using the Gioia methodology, a rigorous qualitative research approach, I conducted in-depth interviews with all eight IFA principals, systematically building theory from their lived experiences.

The interviews revealed a consistent pattern.  Each practice operated within the same institutional environment.

None had an economic structure that allowed them to charge for the extensive relational time required for family governance work. At the same time, they all faced identical regulatory obligations in the UK and Australia, particularly the suitability documentation required by financial regulators. Compliance work consumed the time that deeper relational conversations would require.

The advisors did not lack interest or capability. Their rejection was driven by an operating environment that made this type of work structurally difficult to sustain.

The Architecture of Structural Impossibility

This is where the concept of Structural Impossibility enters.

 It occurs when an advisory system’s stated goals are undermined by its own incentives and constraints. Wealth management firms promise the “Most Trusted Advisor” — someone able to guide families through complex emotional and generational dynamics — yet the system surrounding the advisor makes that role extremely difficult to fulfil.

The modern wealth management industry exists in permanent institutional collision:

  • Market logics demand efficiency and scale
  • Regulatory logics enforce rigid standardisation and compliance
  • Professional logics call for holistic, customised client care

These three forces are fundamentally incompatible. Advisors cannot simultaneously maximise asset gathering, meet regulatory scrutiny, and provide unbillable family facilitation. The system has rigged the game.

The Moments of Choice

This collision plays out in individual meetings, in real time.  Smets, Morris, and Greenwood (2012) studied how professionals manage competing institutional logics in their daily work. They found that when complexity, time pressure, and the risk of failure combine, professionals rarely step back to redesign the system. Instead, they practice situated improvising, adopting practical, intermediate solutions that allow the work to continue.

Smets et al. describe the tactic that emerges: selective signposting — formally complying with the bureaucratic or regulatory logic (checking the boxes) while subtly tweaking the interaction to deliver the relational outcome the client actually needs. The most effective advisors in the dissertation’s research engage in pro-social rule-breaking: consciously violating formal firm parameters to synthesise these contradictions in real time. They do the holistic work. They just cannot do it openly within the system. 

The Identity Wound

This collision also creates a profound psychological experience. Advisors report feeling like “imposters in reverse.” 

In this phenomenon, the advisor possesses the relational competencies needed to support a family meaningfully. Yet the performative contradictions within the firm — which publicly champions holistic care while structurally rewarding only AUM growth — prevent those capabilities from being fully enacted. They adopt a transactional, technical persona to survive. Ibarra (1999) describes how professionals adapt to new roles by experimenting with “provisional selves” that bridge the gap between their capabilities and the behaviours expected of them. When the provisional self is fundamentally incongruent with the advisor’s authentic identity, the result is severe emotive dissonance. Caza et al. (2018) expand on this: advisors who want to be holistic experience the “imposter in reverse” and are performing painful identity work, suppressing their authentic holistic professional self to conform to an organisational identity they know is fundamentally inadequate for serving family enterprises.

The competence is there, yetthe system forbids its use. The failure to deliver holistic governance is an institutional impossibility embedded in the contradictory demands of modern professional service provision.

For the Family: Restructure the Mandate

Stop expecting your advisor to be a miracle worker within a broken system. Instead, architect the relationship for actual holistic engagement:

Separate the economics. If your advisor is compensated solely through an AUM fee, the incentive actively punishes family facilitation. You must explicitly separate the fee for managing capital from the fee for governance work. Make the economics align with the behaviour you want.

Acknowledge the regulatory boundary. Your advisor’s primary legal obligation is documented suitability. They cannot squeeze deep values conversations into a compliance-laden quarterly review. Family discussions require dedicated, completely separate environments free from execution pressure. This means a family must also make time available for these discussions.

Build the multidisciplinary container. Stop expecting one person to bridge technical mastery and emotional architecture. Give your wealth manager explicit permission to collaborate with external governance specialists, psychologists, or facilitators without threatening your core relationship.

For the Advisor: Design the Exception

You cannot provide holistic advice within a transactional business model. But you can design explicit exceptions:

Carve out protected time. Create client relationships that include dedicated governance hours, completely separate from portfolio review meetings. These sessions operate under different rules—they’re exploratory, unbillable, and focused entirely on family dynamics.

Redefine your economic contract. Introduce retainer fees for family facilitation work. Stop asking advisors to perform this work on their own dime. Align economics with the scope you’re asking them to deliver.

Name the structural constraints honestly. Have candid conversations with clients about where your firm’s capabilities genuinely end. A mature professional relationship requires both parties to acknowledge institutional limits, allowing clients to source specific needs externally without perceiving it as a failure.

The Core Question

Are we asking our wealth manager to play a game that the system has actively rigged them to lose?

This is Article 1 of my 20-part Dissecting a Dissertation series. Stay tuned as I continue unpacking the research, and subscribe to our newsletter to follow the full series.

References

Caza, B.B., Moss, S. and Vough, H., 2018. From synchronizing to harmonizing: The process of authenticating multiple work identities. Administrative Science Quarterly, 63(4), pp.703–745. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839217733972

Ibarra, H., 1999. Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), pp.764–791. https://doi.org/10.2307/2667055

Smets, M., Morris, T. and Greenwood, R., 2012. From practice to field: A multi-level model of practice-driven institutional change. Academy of Management Journal, 55(4), pp.877–904. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.0013