Learn to read the family system behind every stuck business/estate plan. A hands-on, one-day mapping intensive for advisors to families.
Mapping Family Systems: A Practical Framework for Estate Planning Professionals & Advisors to Families in Enterprise
A one-day, in-person working intensive. Friday, August 14, 2025 · Seattle.
You've seen it happen. The estate plan is sound, the structure is clean, the strategy is right — and the family still can't move. Meetings circle the same drain. A decision gets made and quietly unmade. Someone goes silent. The "irrational" heir digs in. And you're left holding a technically perfect plan that no one will sign.
Here's the thing most advisor training misses: the family isn't the obstacle to the work. The family is the work. And the dynamics driving your hardest cases aren't random — they're a system, with a logic you can learn to read.
This hands-on workshop teaches you how to see that system before it derails your engagement — and how to talk about it without overstepping your role. You'll work a single, richly detailed family case study across the entire day, building the same maps and tools I use inside live family engagements: genograms that surface who's really in the room, timelines that turn a family history into lived experience, and dynamic maps that expose the "round-and-round" pattern underneath a stuck decision.
This isn't lecture-and-slides. You'll diagram, map, and work in real time, leaving with a set of practical cheat sheets and a repeatable framework you can open the next time a case won't move.
Who this is for:
Anyone who advises families in business — estate planners, trust & estate attorneys, wealth managers, CPAs, family office professionals, business brokers, caregiving consultants, insurance and fiduciary professionals, and the multidisciplinary teams who serve multigenerational enterprise.
What you'll leave with:
— A working method for mapping any family system: structure, timeline, and dynamics
— The ability to spot patterns, gaps, and red flags before they surface as conflict
— Language for naming what's really happening — and a clear sense of where your role as an advisor ends
— A printed toolkit of cheat sheets and frameworks to use in your own practice
— A grounding in the ethics of family-facing advisory work, especially from a fiduciary seat
Format: In-person, capped at 45 attendees for a genuinely interactive room. Boxed lunch provided. Bring something to write with — you'll use it.
Your facilitator:
Savannah Berry Suttle, MAMFT, is a family-systems consultant and the founder of Schema Consulting, LLC, serving family enterprises, family offices, and the advisors who work with them. Trained in marriage and family therapy and drawing on years inside multigenerational family business, she helps advisors and families move from contempt to curiosity — and from stuck to structured.