people
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Your team's room
One account per team. Your instructor gave you the details.
Before you go in
A briefing for the team. Read it once before your first meeting, and again before your last.
We have been retained by the family, not by the company, and not by any one person in it. Keep that straight, because almost everyone you speak to will assume we are working for them.
Read the file before you speak to anyone. It costs you nothing — the clock on a meeting does not start until you ask your first question, so you can sit with the documents for an hour and spend none of it. Going in unprepared is the most expensive mistake available to you, and it is the one teams make most often.
Each person sees the business from where they stand in it. One has sat on the board for twenty years, another married into the family, another runs a plant and has never been to an owners’ meeting. What each of them can tell you is bounded by that.
Expect their accounts to differ. When two people describe the same decision differently, that is usually not dishonesty — it is position, memory, and what they were told at the time. Note the difference rather than resolving it in your head: the disagreement is often more useful than either version.
And expect some of them to be wrong. People are confident about events they have recounted the same way for years. Where an account carries weight in our advice, check it against a document or against someone else who was there.
They will also help you. Ask something a person cannot answer and most will tell you who can, or which paper records it. Follow those.
Write your questions before you go in. Not a script to read out — an agenda, so that a conversation that wanders still covers what you came for.
Start from the answer, not the question: what do we need to know when this meeting ends? Three or four things, written down. Then work out which of them only this person can tell you, and put those first.
Order it deliberately. Open with facts they can confirm plainly — dates, roles, who was present. You are calibrating: you learn how precise this person is, and they settle into answering. Save the difficult question for when they are talking freely, not for your opening.
One question per item. If an item has three parts, it is three items — asked together, you will get an answer to the easiest one and nothing on the other two.
Ask the same question of several people. Putting one carefully worded question to three of them is how you find the places where the story does not hold, and it is worth more than three unique questions asked once each.
Mark each item for what it is: something you need to discover, or something you are testing against what you already have. The second kind should quote what you have — “the 1998 minutes say X; is that how you remember it?” — because that is where you find out whether the paper is the whole story.
Leave room. The questionnaire is the floor, not the ceiling. The best material in any interview comes from following what someone has just said, so plan to abandon the order and return to it. If you finish your list with time left, you prepared too little.
Divide the work before you go in: who asks, who takes notes, who is watching for what has been avoided.
One conversation each. When it ends it does not reopen — as in a real engagement, where a chief executive gives an adviser an hour and does not give it twice. We cannot go back because we forgot to ask something.
Open a conversation and leave without asking anything and nothing is lost. It is spent only once you have put a question.
Inside your window, take as long as you like between questions. Confer, look something up, disagree with each other. None of that costs you anything.
You will be allowed to download the full transcript when the interview is completed.
Take notes anyway. Taking notes helps you track the flow of the interview and decide what to ask next — which is the whole job in the room. It shows you what has already been answered, what was half-answered, and what the person moved away from. A team that is writing is listening; a team waiting for the record afterwards is not steering the conversation while it still can.
Decide before you go in who holds the pen.
You start with the engagement pack and the curriculum vitae of everyone you may interview. More arrives three ways: something in an interview releases it, you ask the registry for it, or your team leader puts it there. Anything you are given stays available.
Not a chronology — they know their own history better than we will. What they are paying for is a view: what the ownership actually is, where it is fragile, and what they should do about it, with the evidence for each claim and an honest note where the evidence is thin.
Sign in
One account per team. Your instructor gave you the details.
You have one conversation with each person, and it does not reopen. Read the pack before you spend one.
Everyone the family has agreed you may speak with. You have one conversation with each, and it does not reopen — so read the room before you choose.
Your papers
Everything your team holds. The onboarding pack is yours from the moment the course opens; the rest reaches you as you work. What is not listed here is not yours yet: if you believe a record exists, ask the document desk for it by name.
The text
Before the conversation
You are about to open your team's one conversation with this person. You will have minutes of their time, inside a -minute window. Their time is spent by talking, yours by the clock. When either runs out, the conversation ends and does not reopen.
The window starts with your first question, not with this button. Open the room, read it, agree who asks what — none of that is charged. The clock begins the moment you send.
There is no live transcript: take notes.
The record
Released when a conversation ends, never before.
The literature
The family tells you what it believes. A desk tells you what the literature says, and where to read it. A desk has never heard of this family and cannot be asked about it.
Before the conversation