For families who have built businesses and wealth over generations, one of the greatest challenges is ensuring that what they pass on remains relevant in a changing world. Preserving a legacy is not simply about protecting what has been built. It also means preparing the next generation to lead, make difficult decisions and adapt without losing sight of the values that define the family.

Friska Wirya, a change management and transformation advisor, TEDx speaker and two-time #1 bestselling author of The Future Fit Organisation series, has spent more than a decade leading transformation programmes across six continents, impacting up to 65,000 people. Her work spans organisational change, leadership and helping businesses navigate complex transitions.

In this conversation with Connect Group, Friska shares her perspective on generational succession, preparing next-generation leaders, navigating differences within families and balancing long-held principles with new ways of thinking. 

Her message is clear: lasting legacy requires the willingness to evolve.

1. Having worked with leaders and organisations across different industries, what do you think are the biggest challenges families face when navigating change across generations?

The biggest challenge, in my experience, is that families confuse heritage with legacy. Heritage is what we are given — the name, the business, the wealth, the expectations. Legacy is what we choose to pass on. Most families think the job is to preserve the inherited thing exactly as they received it. But markets don’t reward what you preserved — they reward what you had the courage to adapt.

The second challenge is uniquely human. In corporate change, you’re managing teams. In family change, you’re managing bloodlines. The emotional debt is older. You can’t fire your sister. Decisions that would take a boardroom twenty minutes can take a family twenty years, because every strategic question is sitting on top of a stack of unresolved dinner-table conversations.

And the third — the one that quietly undoes most dynasties — is the illusion of time. Families assume they have decades to prepare the next generation. But markets move in quarters, technology moves in weeks, and the window to actually transfer leadership well is much shorter than people think. The statistic that 70% of family wealth is gone by the second generation, and 90% by the third, isn’t a failure of investment strategy. It’s a failure of transition.

2. How can family offices help prepare the next generation to take on leadership and stewardship responsibilities?

Stop treating them as apprentices waiting their turn. The families who do this well give the next generation real responsibility early — real capital, real consequences, and crucially, the room to fail at a scale they can recover from. Hand them a $5 million allocation to run themselves, with proper governance around it, long before they’d ever be handed the keys to the whole thing.

I also strongly recommend they build their careers outside the family enterprise first. A decade spent earning your stripes somewhere no one knows your surname does more for your judgment than any amount of family coaching. You come back having been evaluated on your own merit — and the family office benefits from an insider who has seen how the rest of the world actually works.

Formal structures help too — a family constitution, a next-gen council, structured mentorship by non-family executives. But the single most undervalued thing is financial literacy and open conversation about money. Silence doesn’t protect the next generation. It just means they inherit an asset they don’t understand.

3. In your experience, what makes the difference between a family that successfully navigates change and one that struggles with it?

One sentence: the successful ones treat change as the baseline, not the exception.

They’ve stopped asking “when will things settle down?” They’ve accepted that things won’t settle down. Their governance assumes evolution. Their investment thesis assumes disruption. Their family meetings talk about what’s coming more than what already happened.

The families who struggle are the ones trying to protect what was. They treat every market shift, every generational handover, every technology wave as a threat to the thing they inherited. And in that defensive crouch, they slowly lose relevance — not through any single bad decision, but through the aggregate cost of a thousand small refusals to adapt.

Having led transformations impacting 65,000 people across six continents, I can tell you this is the pattern that holds everywhere. The companies that endure — Royal Selangor, LVMH, Kowloon Motor Bus — have one thing in common. They never confused the thing they were handed with the thing they were building. They received the first, and then they got to work on the second.

4. How can families balance preserving their values and legacy while remaining open to new ideas and ways of doing things?

The rule I give every family I work with is this: be inflexible on principles, flexible on practices. Values don’t change. The way you express them absolutely must. Take a client of mine in luxury goods. The values at the heart of that group — craftsmanship, excellence, scarcity, respect for the artisan — have been constant for a hundred and seventy years. But the way those values show up has evolved constantly. 

Digital commerce. Experiential retail. Celebrity collaboration. Sustainability. The principles are a constant. The practices are a conversation that never ends. Families get into trouble when they confuse the two. They treat an operational decision — how we do things — as if it were a sacred value. And they end up defending the way grandfather did it, rather than defending what grandfather stood for.

The practical move is to write down your family’s principles — three to five, no more — in language so clear that any family member in any generation can test a decision against them. Then give yourself permission to evolve everything else.

5. What role does communication play in managing differences in perspectives between generations, particularly when it comes to wealth, business, and succession?

Communication is where most families quietly fail.

Wealth gets wrapped in silence. The senior generation thinks talking openly about money will spoil the children, so they don’t. The next generation inherits an asset they don’t understand, with no vocabulary for discussing it. Succession gets talked about once — at the retirement dinner — when the decisions have already been made and the next generation is being handed a conclusion, not a conversation. The highest-performing families I work with have structured communication. They don’t wait for a crisis. They have a regular family council — monthly, quarterly, whatever rhythm works — where business, wealth and succession are standing agenda items. Not emergencies. Standing items.

They also separate the family conversation from the business conversation. There is a time to be a father and a time to be a chairman, and the two should not happen in the same meeting. This simple structural move resolves more conflict than any amount of mediation. And they start early. The best families I know are talking to their children about money, purpose and responsibility from the time those children can hold a conversation. Not with numbers — with values. 

Numbers come later. Values come first.

6. Looking ahead, what skills and mindsets will the next generation of family leaders need to navigate an increasingly complex and changing world?

Six things, in order.

Change fluency. Not just the ability to tolerate change — the ability to lead through it. This is a learnable skill, and it is the single highest-leverage capability of the next decade.

Technological literacy, especially around AI. You do not need to be a technologist. You do need to be able to tell the difference between a transformational technology and a passing one — and know how to deploy capital accordingly.

Cross-cultural fluency. Asian family capital is now global capital. The next generation needs to be as comfortable in Riyadh and São Paulo as they are in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Emotional intelligence. The governance work of a family office is relationship work. The next generation needs to be able to hold a difficult conversation without blowing up a relationship.

A high tolerance for ambiguity. The world they are inheriting will not offer them certainty. The leaders who can act decisively without complete information will outperform the ones who wait.

A clear sense of purpose. This matters most of all. The external world is becoming less willing to tell

people what their lives should be about. The next generation of family leaders needs to arrive at that answer themselves — and build an enterprise around it. Because in the end, wealth is not the point. What wealth makes possible is the point.

Closing Reflections

Building a lasting family legacy requires more than passing wealth from one generation to the next. It calls for thoughtful preparation, open communication and a shared understanding of what the family wants its wealth and business to make possible.

As Friska Wirya highlights, the families best placed to navigate change are those that treat evolution as a constant. They give the next generation room to learn, create space for honest conversations and distinguish the values worth preserving from the practices that need to change.

For family offices, this means looking beyond succession plans and financial structures to consider how the next generation will develop the judgment, confidence and sense of purpose needed to lead. The question is not simply what the next generation will inherit, but what they will choose to build with it.