Family first time
The line between work and home is fuzzier than ever thanks to COVID-19. Perhaps it’s time to try some corporate techniques in the kitchen.
At a moment when many families around the world are confined to their homes, climbing the walls and searching desperately for fresh techniques to manage household chaos, one proven solution that my family, along with many others, is using comes from an unlikely source: agile development.
It’s no secret that working parents face enormous pressures. Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute asked 1000 children, “If you were granted one wish about your parents, what would it be?” Parents predicted that their children would say, “Spending more time with us.”
They were wrong. The children wished that their parents could be less tired and less anxious.
So how can we reduce that stress and help families to become happier? The single best solution I found may be the simplest of all: hold regular family meetings to discuss how you’re managing your family.
Meet the first agile family
A few years ago, my research brought me to the Starr family home in Hidden Springs, Idaho. The Starrs are an ordinary American family with their share of ordinary family issues. David is a software developer; Eleanor is a stay-at-home mom. At the time, their four children ranged in age from 10 to 15.
Like many parents, the Starrs were trapped in that endless tension between the smooth-running household they aspired to be living in and the exhausting, earsplitting one they were actually in. What the Starrs did next, though, was surprising. Instead of turning to their parents, their peers or even a professional, they looked to David’s workplace. Specifically, to a philosophy of business problem-solving David had studied and taught: agile development. The techniques worked so well for their family that David wrote a white paper about it, and the idea spread from there.
The three questions
The idea of agile was invented in the 1980s in large measure through the leadership of Jeff Sutherland. A former fighter pilot in Vietnam, Sutherland was chief technologist at a financial firm in New England when he began noticing how dysfunctional software development was. Companies followed the “waterfall model,” in which executives issued ambitious orders that then flowed down to harried programmers below. “Eighty-three percent of projects came in late, over budget or failed entirely,” Sutherland told me.
Sutherland designed a new system, in which ideas flowed not just down from the top but up from the bottom and groups were designed to react to changes in real time.
The centerpiece is the weekly meeting that’s built around shared decision-making, open communication and constant adaptability.
Such meetings are easy to replicate in families. In my home, we started when our twin daughters were five and we chose Sunday afternoons as the time for meetings. Everyone gathers around the table; we open with a short, ritualistic drum tapping on the table; then, following the agile model, we ask three questions.: What worked well in our family this week What didn’t work well?.What will we agree to work on this week?
Like most parents, we found our children to be something of a Bermuda Triangle: words and thoughts would go in, but few ever came out. Their emotional lives were invisible to us. The meeting provided that rare window into their innermost thoughts.
The most satisfying moments came when we turned to the topic of what we would work on during the coming week. The girls loved this part of the process, particularly selecting their own rewards and punishments. Say hello to five people this week, get an extra 10 minutes of reading before bed. Kick someone, lose dessert for a month.
Turns out they were little Stalins. Naturally, there was a gap between the girls’ off-the-charts maturity during these 20-minute sessions and their behavior, but that didn’t seem to matter. It felt to us as if we were laying massive underground cables that wouldn’t fully light up their world for many years to come.
So what did we learn?
Empower the children
Our instinct as parents is to issue orders to our children. We think we know best; it’s easier; who has time to argue? And besides, we’re usually right. But as all parents quickly discover, telling your kids the same thing over and over is not necessarily the best tactic. The single biggest lesson we learned from our experience with agile practices is to reverse the “waterfall” as often as possible.
Enlist the children whenever possible in their own upbringing. Brain research backs up this conclusion.
Scientists at the University of California and elsewhere found that kids who plan their own time, set weekly goals and evaluate their own work build up their prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain that help them exert greater cognitive control over their lives. These so-called executive skills aid children with self-discipline, helping them to avoid distractions and weigh the pros and cons of their choices. By participating in their own rewards and punishments, children become more intrinsically motivated.
Parents aren’t infallible
Researchers have found that the most effective business teams are not dominated by a charismatic leader. Rather, members of particularly effective teams spend as much time talking to one another as to the leader, meet face-to-face regularly and allow everyone to speak in equal measure. Sound familiar?
Build in flexibility
Another assumption parents often make is that we have to create a few overarching rules and stick to them indefinitely. This philosophy presumes we can anticipate every problem that will arise over many years. We can’t. A central tenet of the tech sector is that if you’re doing the same thing today that you were doing six months ago, you’re doing something wrong. Parents can learn a lot from that idea.
The agile family philosophy accepts and embraces the ever-changing nature of family life. It anticipates the reality that even the best-designed system will need to be re-engineered midstream.
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Bruce Feiler is an American writer and commentator.
Copyright Harvard Business Review 2020/ Distributed by New York Times Syndicate