It isn't unsolvable. It's been decided.

The room full of experts: why well-advised families stay stuck

By the time a family in real trouble finds me, they are rarely under-advised.

There is a lawyer, often several. There is an accountant, a wealth adviser, sometimes a family-office team. There may be a governance consultant who has produced a handsome family charter, a mediator who brokered a truce that held for one Christmas, and a therapist seeing at least one family member, occasionally all of them separately, like a diaspora.

These are capable professionals doing genuine work. And the family is still stuck. The succession still stalls, the siblings still route everything through intermediaries, the founder still cannot say the one sentence that would change things, and family dinners still feel like board meetings held in a minefield.

If this is your family, or your executive team, because everything here applies to the room at the top of a company too, I want to offer you something better than another expert. I want to show you the layer where your conflict actually lives, why none of the professions around you can reach it, and why "unsolvable", the word you have started privately using, is almost certainly the wrong diagnosis.

Legal, governance, mediation, therapy: what each honestly does

Let me be precise rather than dismissive, because each of these professions does something real, and the family that understands exactly what will stop expecting it to do something else.

Legal. Law is built to determine rights and allocate outcomes, and when you need that, you need it done well. But understand what the process does to a family: it escalates. Its native frame is right versus wrong, claim versus counterclaim, the exact frame your conflict is made of, now with funding and momentum. There can also be financial incentive to keep escalating; even the best-intentioned lawyer, and most are well-intentioned, simply does not have tools for connection. Ask your own lawyer, in a candid moment, whether litigation has ever made a family closer.

Governance. Charters, councils, constitutions: genuinely valuable, and I often work alongside them. Clarity and predictability are gifts. But a rule is a container, not a resolution. Governance does not stop conflict; it schedules where conflict will appear. And a rule experienced as unfair does not contain resentment, it manufactures it, with compound interest.

Mediation. A skilled mediator can settle a dispute, and sometimes that is exactly what is needed. But notice the premise: "we have a conflict to sort out". The engagement is isolated around a subject, and when the subject is settled, the mediator leaves, and the family's capacity is exactly what it was. The next issue, and in families of wealth there is always a next issue, arrives to find the same people with the same dynamics and one more scar. My premise is different. Not "how do we sort out this conflict" but "how does this family make life more wonderful together", from which the current conflict resolves as a consequence.

Therapy. Therapy can be profound, and there are situations, deep trauma among them, where it is the right first door, and I say so and refer. But for a family in transition, therapy has two structural limits: it works predominantly in the past, and it does not build a shared skill base. The family needs something faster and more present-tense: the ability, together, this quarter, to have the conversations the transition requires. I have had many clients tell me they got more from six months of this work than from years of talking about their problems. The work heals, but as a by-product. It does not therapise, does not pathologise, and nobody in the room is the patient.

More than one reality in the room: where stuck conflict actually lives

So where does the conflict actually live?

Here is the assumption every stuck family shares, usually without knowing it: that there is one true account of what happened, and the family's problem is agreeing on it. Who was promised what. Whether the daughter-in-law overstepped. What Dad meant by what he said in 2019. Everyone is holding out for the moment the others finally concede the facts.

That moment is never coming, because the assumption is wrong. There is more than one reality in the room. Not one truth and several delusions: multiple lived experiences, each internally coherent, each real to its owner. Your brother is not lying about the past you shared. He lived a different one. So did you.

The moment a family stops litigating which reality is correct, something almost physical changes in the room, and the thing I have learned to wait for becomes possible: the information that would change everything is already in the room. It always is. The fear the founder has never said aloud. The reason the sale actually stalled. It cannot surface in a right/wrong frame, because in that frame every disclosure is ammunition. Curiosity beyond right and wrong is what lets it out, and I have watched a single surfaced sentence do what four years of correspondence between lawyers could not.

This is not a soft idea; it is a rigorous one, and it has serious company. Arun Gandhi, president of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, said of the approach at the foundations of my work that it "gives us the means to create peace through our speech and communication". Peace in a family is made of exactly that material, and it is built one surfaced sentence at a time.

“The information that would change everything is already in the room.”

— Shari Elle, one of the four original trainers to bring Nonviolent Communication to Australia

A Melbourne succession story: the gold digger who wasn't

Let me make this concrete.

A father in Melbourne, self-made, in his eighties, was building wealth structures to pass a considerable estate to his children and grandchildren. Late in the process, his adult daughter, herself around fifty, raised a reasonable concern about how one structure treated her family.

Something in the way it landed lodged in him. He began, quietly, to wonder whether his own daughter was a gold digger. He never said the word to her, of course. He said it with delays, with new conditions, with a certain tone his advisers noticed and could not explain. She, meeting the delays and the tone, began to wonder what she had done, and then to stop wondering and start resenting. Structures stalled. The professionals had nothing to work with: no dispute over facts, nothing to mediate, and definitely nothing anyone was prepared to litigate. Just a freeze, hardening toward permanent.

What was actually in the room? A man who had spent sixty years turning himself into a fortress of self-reliance, terrified, and entirely unable to say, that at the end of his life he could not tell whether he was loved as a father or valued as an estate. And a daughter who wanted her father, and had learned that the only sanctioned way to reach him was through the machinery of the wealth, the very channel guaranteed to confirm his fear.

Neither of them knew any of this. They were each inside their own reality, certain of it, hurting in it. Through supported, coached conversations, slowly, with the method learned first so the conversations had somewhere safe to stand, those two sentences finally got said in each other's hearing. I will not perform the moment for you; some things belong to the families they happen to. I will tell you the outcome: the structures got finished. So did the fear. What they actually cared about, it turned out, was nearly the same thing, and it took four decades and two conversations to discover it.

The two kinds of unsolvable

Now the distinction this whole article exists to give you, because if your situation is stuck, you have started using the word unsolvable, at least privately, and you deserve precision about it.

There are two kinds of unsolvable, and they are nothing alike.

The first is real, and rare: every thread of connection genuinely gone, or someone actively committed to harming another person regardless of the cost to themselves. Contempt as a settled way of being, dysfunction that some part of the family is invested in keeping. I do not pretend this doesn't exist. When I see it, I say so, and I do not take the engagement. False hope is not a service I offer.

The second kind is what I actually find, in most rooms, most of the time: a conflict that has been decided to be unsolvable. The family ran its honest attempts, the attempts failed, everyone concluded the situation was hopeless and reorganised their lives around the hopelessness, because endless open wounds are unbearable and a verdict, even a terrible one, at least lets you stop hoping. "Unsolvable" was adopted as anaesthetic.

Here is what I need you to hear: that verdict was a decision, made by exhausted people using the only tools they had, and tools were exactly what was missing. A decision made without the tools can be revisited with them. In twenty-five years of this work, underneath every difficult behaviour I have ever been shown, no exceptions yet, I have found a precious human doing the best they could to protect something that mattered to them. Families who are shown how to see that in each other do not tend to stay frozen.

What re-weaving trust actually takes: method first, then the conversations

So what does the work look like, when it is working on the right layer?

First, the family learns the method together. Before anything sensitive is on the table, everyone learns the same foundations of The Living Work: observation without judgment, real feelings, the needs underneath, requests. This matters for a reason families feel immediately: it levels the ground. Nobody is the patient. Nobody is the problem. Nobody is being sent for fixing. You are a family acquiring a shared skill, the way you might all learn to sail the boat you jointly own.

Then, the Supported Conversation/s. The discussions that have been waiting, sometimes for decades, had one at a time, with me in the room, keeping each person connected to what they actually care about and catching the old dynamics before they retake the controls. Not mediation toward a settlement: facilitation toward each other, at whatever pace the family's nervous system can honestly hold. Let's slow this down is among the most useful sentences I own.

What the family keeps is the point. The immediate matter gets resolved, the succession, the structure, the sale, but the durable asset is capacity: the family can now have the next hard conversation without me. The skills protect the next decision, and the next generation, which is why I think of this work less as conflict resolution and more as part of the estate. What you are really passing on is not only the wealth. It is the ability of the people you love to talk to each other about it.

One requirement, and I am honest about it up front: base goodwill. You do not need warmth; warmth may be long gone. You need the actual wish, however buried, to get along, and then I can show you how. A reluctant participant is workable; reluctance often melts once it is safe. What I cannot work with is active investment in the dysfunction. That, in the first exploratory hour, is mostly what I am listening for, and I will tell you truthfully what I hear.

Your forward step

If your situation is stuck, do one thing this week: separate the verdict from the evidence. Write down, privately, the moment your family decided this was unsolvable, who decided, in the wake of what failure, with what tools available. Then ask yourself the only question that matters: is there base goodwill in this family, however deep it is buried? If the answer is yes, or even "I think so", then what you have is not an unsolvable conflict. It is an undecided decision, and one unhurried hour of conversation is how it starts getting revisited.

About the author

Shari Elle

Creator of The Living Work and CNVC Certified Trainer. For twenty-five years Shari has worked with Australian leaders, boards and family enterprises navigating succession, high-stakes conflict and the conversations that decide a legacy.