Thanks for reading The Nonlinear Life, a newsletter about navigating life's ups and downs. We're all going through transitions, let's master them together. Every Monday and Thursday we explore family, health, work, and meaning, with the occasional dad joke and dose of inspiration. If you're new around here, read my introductory post, learn about me, or check out our archives.
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At a moment when many families around the world have seen their routines obliterated, are climbing the walls, and are searching desperately for fresh techniques for managing their household chaos, the single best solution I know may be the simplest of all: hold regular family meetings to discuss how you’re functioning as a family.
In the 20 years I’ve been researching families, perhaps the most memorable research experience I've had is still one of the earliest. A few years ago, I went to visit the Starr family in Hidden Springs, Idaho. The Starrs are a typical American family with their share of typical American family issues. David is a software developer; Eleanor is a stay-at-home mom. Their four children at that time ranged in age from 10 to 15.
Like many parents, the Starrs were trapped in that endless tension between the sunny, smooth-running household they aspired to be living in and the exhausting, ear-splitting one they were actually living in. “I tried the whole ‘love them and everything will work out’ philosophy,” Eleanor said. “but it wasn’t working. ‘For the love God,’ I said, ‘I can’t take this anymore.”
What the Starrs did next, though, was surprising. Instead of turning to their parents or their peers, the Starrs looked to David’s workplace. Specifically, to a system called agile and its idea of weekly meetings. The system worked so well for their family that David wrote a white paper about it, shared it with the internet, and the idea spread from there.
When my wife, Linda, and I incorporated this blueprint into our home, weekly family meetings quickly became the single most impactful thing we introduced into our lives since the birth of our children. And they became so in under 20 minutes.
The idea of agile was invented in the 1980s. A former fighter pilot in Vietnam named Jeff Sutherland was the 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 from above 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 and some colleagues 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. [You can view my TED Talk on this topic below.]
Such meetings are easy to replicate in families. In my home, we started when our twin daughters were five and chose Sunday afternoons. Everyone gathers around the breakfast table; we open with a short, ritualistic drum tapping on the table; then, following the agile model, we ask three questions.
From the very beginning, the most amazing things started coming out of our daughters’ mouths. What worked well in our family this week? “Getting over our fears of riding a bike,” “We’ve been doing much better making our beds.” What went wrong? “Doing our math sheets,” “Greeting visitors at the door.”
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 family 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 particularly loved selecting their own rewards and punishments. Say hello to five people this week, get an extra ten minutes of reading before bed. Kick someone, lose dessert for a month. Turns out they were little Stalins; we often had to dial them back.
Naturally, there was a gap between the girls’ off-the-charts maturity during these 20-minute sessions and their behavior the rest of the week, 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. Ten years later, we’re still holding these family meetings every Sunday. Linda counts them as among her most treasured moments as a mom.
So, what have we learned?
1. Empower the children. Our instinct as parents is to issue orders to our children. We think we know best, and we’re usually right! There’s a reason few systems have been more waterfall than the family. 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 we can. Enlist the children whenever possible in their own upbringing.
2. Parents aren’t invincible. Another instinct we have as parents is to build ourselves up, to be Mr. or Ms. Fix-it. This instinct is particularly strong among dads, in my experience, who love little more than swooping in at the end and solving the problem. But abundant evidence suggests this type of leadership is no longer the best model. Researchers have found that the most effective teams are not dominated by a charismatic leader. Instead, members speak and contribute in equal measure.
3. Build in flexibility. Another assumption parents often make is 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. The agile family philosophy accepts and embraces the ever-changing nature of family life. It’s certainly not lax; think of all the public accountability—and it’s not “anything goes,” either. It anticipates that even the best-designed system will need to be re-engineered midstream.
An Agile family task board.
As I was leaving the Starrs’ home, I asked Eleanor what she thought was the most important lesson I should learn from the first agile family.
“In the media, families just are,” she said. “But that’s misleading. You have your job; you work on that. You have your garden, your hobbies, you work on those. Your family requires just as much work. The most important thing agile taught me is that you have to make a commitment to always keep working to improve your family.”
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You might enjoy reading these posts:
Or these books: Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and Council of Dads.
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