By Jay L. Rogers
Most family offices can tell you exactly how their assets are managed. Far fewer can tell you how they’re preparing their heirs to own them. I’ve helped run several single-family office portfolios and also serve as a testifying expert in family office litigation. The pattern I see repeatedly isn’t a bad investment policy. It’s heirs who have no real framework for understanding what they’ve inherited, what it costs to keep it, or what it asks of them. Fixing that isn’t succession planning. It’s education, and the two aren’t the same.
Separate Education from Succession
This distinction matters more than most families appreciate. Succession planning answers a specific question: who holds which authority, and when? Next-gen education answers a different one: what must every family member understand and be able to do before authority is even considered?
Conflating the two creates predictable damage. When participation in an education program functions as a proxy for inheritance, employment, or an eventual executive title, you’ve created competition. Heirs perform for approval, withdraw to avoid being judged, or treat learning as a political campaign rather than a genuine development process. The more capable ones often disengage entirely.
The fix is structural. Establish two separate tracks with separate committees, separate documentation, and separate purposes. Education is broadly available to adult family members, with age-appropriate stages for younger participants. Succession is a governance conversation for principals, trustees, and advisers. Education may eventually inform succession; it should not drive it.
A Framework That Scales
The most useful model I’ve seen organizes development into five levels: Know, Interpret, Decide, Lead, and Steward. Each level has a different learning objective and a different form of evidence.
At the Know level, a family member should be able to read a personal balance sheet, a basic investment report, and understand the legal structures the family uses. At the Interpret level, they can explain portfolio performance, fees, and risk exposures to themselves – not just nod along when an adviser presents. At the Decide level, they’ve completed supervised assignments: a due-diligence memo, a philanthropic grant recommendation, or a project with a defined scope and a real outcome. At the Lead level, they’ve facilitated a meeting, navigated a conflict, and documented their reasoning. At the Steward level, they can connect capital, family purpose, and long-term accountability in writing – a multi-year stewardship plan that reflects real judgment, not inherited talking points.
The key is progression with evidence. No one earns a seat at the table by showing up or by surname. They earn it by demonstrating specific, documented capability at each stage.
Six Domains That Actually Matter
A complete next-gen curriculum goes well beyond investing. I’d organize it into six domains, each with a practical exercise attached – not because exercises are fun, but because the only way to build judgment is through decisions, even simulated ones.
Personal financial independence covers budgeting, credit, insurance, taxes, and personal investing. The exercise: build an annual financial plan and defend the major choices to a mentor.
Family office literacy covers what the office actually does—how entities, trusts, foundations, operating companies, advisers, and custodians relate to each other. The exercise: map the family enterprise at a level appropriate to the participant’s maturity and what they’re cleared to know.
Investment judgment covers asset allocation, public and private markets, liquidity, concentration, and valuation. The exercise: write a two-page investment memo and present it to a panel.
Ownership and governance covers fiduciary duties, trustee roles, conflicts, and decision rights. The exercise: run a simulation involving a conflict of interest, a liquidity request, or a contested allocation.
Enterprise and operating skills cover financial statement analysis, capital allocation, and vendor oversight. The exercise: analyze an operating business case or design a modest family-sponsored venture.
Purpose, leadership, and reputation covers philanthropy, family history, communication, and responsible use of privilege. The exercise: manage a defined charitable grant budget, conduct diligence, meet grantees, and report outcomes to the family council.
According to the J.P. Morgan Private Bank 2026 Global Family Office Report, next-generation engagement and succession planning remain among the top operational priorities for family offices globally. The gap isn’t awareness – it’s execution.
Build It Around Real Decisions
The strongest programs make learning experiential while keeping the core portfolio at arm’s length from novice mistakes. The practical design is a sandbox with clearly limited authority.
One approach: each participant or small cohort receives responsibility for a notional portfolio, a modest pool of philanthropy capital, or a tightly risk-limited co-investment sleeve. They must state an objective, time horizon, and risk budget. They research the opportunity, identify downside scenarios and conflicts, prepare a memo, present to a mentor panel, make or recommend a decision, and review results quarterly – including what went wrong and what was learned. For the philanthropic module, a family might allocate $25,000 annually to a cohort grant pool. The cohort sets criteria, conducts interviews or site visits, selects grantees, tracks outcomes, and reports to the family council. That’s real accountability without real exposure.
The format develops judgment without exposing family capital to unseasoned decision-making. It also teaches something that no classroom session can: what it feels like to be wrong and have to explain why.
A 24-Month Design
A two-year cycle is long enough for learning to become a habit and short enough to produce visible milestones. The first three months cover baseline assessment and orientation – a confidential skills inventory, an individual learning plan, a family office map, and a personal financial plan. Months four through six focus on personal finance and investment fundamentals. Months seven through nine cover governance, trusts, tax, and risk, including a governance simulation and an adviser interview. Months ten through twelve produce the first applied assignment: an investment or philanthropic memo presented to a mentor panel with a written post-decision review.
The second year extends into operating businesses and private markets, leadership and communication, advanced responsibility (shadowing an investment committee, board, or operating executive), and a capstone stewardship plan that defines the participant’s chosen role and next two-year learning agenda.
The format should vary: short technical sessions, one-on-one adviser interviews, site visits, investment manager meetings, board observation, simulations, peer learning, and real-world projects. A small cohort of siblings or cousins close in age and readiness is worth the coordination cost, shared learning normalizes questions and builds durable communication habits across the rising generation.
Governance and Measurement
Establish a Next-Gen Education Committee, separate from both the investment committee and the succession committee. It should typically include one or two family representatives from the senior generation, one independent family office executive or external facilitator, one adviser with relevant technical depth, and a rotating next-gen participant or alumni representative once the program is established.
Its job is not to rank heirs. It approves the curriculum, safeguards confidentiality, ensures consistency across family branches, assigns mentors, and reviews whether the program is actually producing competence – not just attendance.
Measure development through evidence: Can the participant interpret an investment report and ask a useful question? Does their decision-making process identify key risks, missing information, and conflicts? Do their post-mortems show intellectual honesty and improved reasoning? Can they explain a recommendation in plain language to a nonfamily adviser? This turns next-gen education into a disciplined development system rather than an annual retreat that everyone attends and no one remembers.
Principles That Prevent Problems
Start with the family’s purpose of wealth before touching the portfolio. Only 17% of rising-generation participants in a recent survey reported being highly engaged in defining or updating their family’s purpose of wealth, despite next-gen preparation being one of the leading reasons families create such a statement in the first place. That number should be much higher, and the fix is structural: purpose comes first in the curriculum, not as an afterthought at a family retreat.
Teach rights and responsibilities together. Ownership may create economic rights; stewardship creates obligations to future family members, employees, partners, communities, and charitable commitments. Maintain a right to pass – not every capable family member should be expected to become an investor, executive, trustee, or public representative. A successful program creates informed owners and healthy choices, including a well-supported decision to pursue an independent career. Pay for work, not lineage: if a next-gen member has an operating role, internship, or committee assignment, compensation and evaluation should reflect defined responsibilities and market-calibrated performance.
At the end of a well-run program, the family has more than financially literate heirs. It has a documented pipeline of family members who can read the office’s major reports and ask useful questions, understand the difference between ownership, fiduciary duty, management, and governance, evaluate an investment or philanthropic proposal with appropriate skepticism, and articulate the family’s purpose of wealth in their own words. That outcome makes succession planning easier later. It doesn’t prejudge it. The family first develops capable stewards. Authority conversations can wait.
Author Bio: Jay L. Rogers is Chief Investment Officer of Alpha Strategies Investment Consulting and Managing Partner of Global Rock Family Office Group. He has spent more than thirty years in institutional and family office investment management, including senior roles at Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo, and serves as a testifying expert witness in fiduciary duty and family office litigation.
