Family businesses are often admired for continuity. They do what earlier generations did, refine it and pass it on. Nicolas de Santis, who co-founded the online travel platform Opodo and has spent decades inside the machinery of technology and capital, sees a risk in that pattern. In his conversation with Michael Macfarlane on Wealth Office, he argues that many families are limited by their own past, and that the remedy is a discipline he calls visioneering.

What visioneering means

De Santis defines visioneering as the ability of a person or organisation to explore the future and create it. It requires imagination. His team uses science fiction narratives to conceive things that do not yet exist but would improve the world, then works out how to bring them into the present through technology and processes. He frames it as a mindset as much as a method.

So visioneering is also an attitude to the world. If you just think about the past and the present, you're limited in terms of what your potential is.

— Nicolas de Santis, Wealth Office

The relevance to families is direct. De Santis works with families that own large corporations, and he observes that visioneering is not taught in schools or business schools. When a family meets to discuss its future and legacy, the conversation rarely reaches far enough ahead. Its range is set by what the family has already done.

So for us, visioneering is a way for a family to reinterpret their mission and purpose towards the future.

— Nicolas de Santis, Wealth Office

Thinking at the right scale

De Santis's prescription is to think at a larger scale than feels comfortable. To open minds, he sometimes starts from the furthest horizon available: the knowledge that the planet will eventually be consumed by the sun, billions of years from now, and the question of what humanity should invest in to continue beyond it. The exercise is deliberately extreme. Its purpose is to break the short-term thinking he believes holds many families back.

So I believe that even if you say I'm thinking big, think much bigger. Because the dimension of what you want to build will then dictate the ambition of your challenge.

— Nicolas de Santis, Wealth Office

Macfarlane connects this to a broader Wealth Office theme. Family capital can take longer time horizons and a different view of risk than institutional or government capital. In his view, continuity achieved by being overly conservative can begin to look like stagnation in an age of technological opportunity. He suggests that wealth and business-owning families may carry a duty to act as catalysts for technologies that improve human life.

Two lenses for new ventures

Visioneering becomes practical through two questions. The first concerns the world's challenges. De Santis argues that solving a major challenge, such as longevity, is a route to building a great business, because the size of the problem implies the size of the industry. The second concerns disruption. A new venture either improves an existing service, often one that is not up to standard, or creates something that does not yet exist and whose market cannot yet be measured.

His own career illustrates both. Opodo set out to disrupt large travel companies that were not offering a good service online, by connecting directly to hotels, car hire firms and airlines to improve pricing. The digital currency project he joined aimed to create the first digital currency of the web at a time when nobody was asking whether one was needed. De Santis admits that finding things to disrupt is hard. The test he applies is whether a venture improves something for business and for humanity at the same time.

For a family, this leads to an uncomfortable audit. De Santis suggests that some families hold businesses that still generate cash but are no longer fit for purpose or providing enough value. Their future investment, he argues, could be directed towards the challenges the family can help solve through new businesses, alongside the charitable work many already do.

De Santis adds a further discipline that runs against much management advice. Many chief executives talk about simplifying. He accepts that processes can be simplified, but argues that complexity itself is the key to future value.

If you don't like complexity, you're not going to understand the world. You have to embrace complexity.

— Nicolas de Santis, Wealth Office

In his account, visioneering is the practice of understanding that complexity into the future and making the most of it. Families that reduce their strategy to what is simple and familiar are likely to remain where they are.

The next generation's role

The final test of visioneering is who carries it. Macfarlane describes a seminar at Oxford with next-generation members of business-owning families, all of whom were more interested in impact and purpose than in accumulation. Asked what such a person should do, de Santis gives a grounded answer. Get your hands dirty. Work hard, which he notes is already unusual among some wealthy heirs. Draw on the values that brought the family to where it is. Focus on value creation in the future, which will lead to questions about how healthcare and other systems could be improved with new technology.

Visioneering, in the end, asks a family to treat its history as a starting point. The ambition it chooses for the next generation will shape what that generation builds.