As published in the weekend addition
of one of the Israeli leading newspapers -
HAARETZ
Can agile management techniques,
common in the business world, contribute to the way the family unit and its
members function? Some believe so and are already busy implementing.
Yael
Helek
07.02.2014
12:44
Yuval's (42) career was skyrocketing and he was definitely
on the fast track to success: within five years he had managed to turn from a
simple programmer at a small high-tech company to a director of development
leading more than 50 workers. But while at his company office he felt that he
was dealing with intellectual challenges suitable for his abilities –
translating complex thoughts into sentences that were thoroughly heard and peacefully
drinking his cup of coffee – at home the picture was altogether different. In
those days in which he managed to come home before his four children went to
sleep (the two young daughters were born in the last five years), he almost
regretted not staying in the office to get some more work done. The home was
utterly chaotic: the children (at their parents' request the family shall
remain anonymous, YH) had impossible demands for dinner, they refused to eat
and yelled belligerently at any suggested alternative. They threw their wet
towels on the floor after showering and refused to turn off the TV and go to
bed. When they were under the blankets they suddenly recalled that they had not
prepared their homework and in fact have an important math test tomorrow.
Yuval's wife, a senior civil service executive, was just as
helpless, and when Yuval announced that for the coming week he would be
returning at particularly late hours as he was participating in an intensive
management workshop, she felt very frustrated. She didn't know the management
workshop was about to save their family life.
Shirly Ronen-Harel with a
picture of a family task board: "The manager needs to think as a
parent". Picture: Iliya melinkov
During that week Yuval's workplace was visited by representatives
from a company that provides consultation services in Israel and abroad on the
topic of Agile management, and taught him and his fellow executives the
specific methodology meant for software development companies, namely Scrum. "The
approach is based on teamwork (instead of tasks imposed from the top down), rapid
and early feedback, and thus allows for flexibility and change. In an Agile approach
there are four major position holders: The team – an independent group of
employees responsible for various tasks toward delivery (the sentence that was
etched in Yuval's memory was "Outside of work people
should have free time, and in work they should be free ").
Alongside them is the manager (who is responsible to assist the team meeting
the objectives) and the Scrum Master (who is responsible for conceptual oversight).
These two needs to help the team and keep it motivate. On the other side is the
customer, who presents the objectives and determines priorities."
"Every short one or two week period of work is called
a Sprint, and it includes four meetings. Every day there is a short
synchronization meeting between the team members in which they ask: What have I
done since yesterday? What will I do until tomorrow? What's holding me back?
And at the end of the Sprint period there are meetings dedicated to presenting
the product in its current state, thinking of ways to improve and starting to
plan the next Sprint, while maintaining an overview of the entire project."…
"During one of the long evenings at the workshop it came to me, that this
is exactly what my family needed", says Yuval. "The analogy is almost
obvious – the children are the team. The manager, Scrum Master and client are
the parents. In the computer world it's about money, and in family life it's
about time."
The Adaptive Family
Yuval is not the only one who sees this similarity between
managing a family and managing a company or business. "Most parents feel
that their family life is in chaos, that they have no control over what's happening,
and that they always need to put out fires and be in defensive positions",
says writer Bruce Feiler,
author of The Secrets of Happy Families, in an email interview.
"I think we need to find ways to manage this mess in which our family life
takes place. But if we try to make changes every day, no one will be able to
function. Agile gives us a way to organize our life, so that we can adapt to
changes while maintaining stability. I've been studying happy families for
years, and what I've discovered is that these families have three things in
common: They adapt to changes all the time, there's a lot of talking going on
in them, and besides, these families spend time outside and play
together."
In his book Feiler explains that (translated)
"surveys show that stress is the most troubling issue for parents and
children. A leading cause of stress is change: When children stop suffering
from teething pains, they begin with age two tantrums. Just when they don't
need us to wash them anywhere, they need us to help them deal with online
bullying. It's no wonder that psychologists have determined that the most
important quality of a family is its ability to adapt easily. But does anyone
understand how to do this?" Feiler, who manages his own family
using Agile techniques, believes that the managerial knowledge that has
accumulated in America's leading organizations can also be applied within
families and might very well save them.
When Shirly Ronen Harel,
a social worker by training, got divorced, she certainly had to go through some
major adaptation processes. "I had two small children, a divorcee who had
to restart everything from scratch. The children were exposed to this
tension", she says. "I had to find a new apartment, get organized for
a great deal of tasks, one of the most important and challenging ones being the
children. At the time I was working for a high-tech company, and the more I implemented
Agile in the organization I noticed the examples I was using were from the
family world. When I taught a manager to set boundaries I told him, 'Think like
a parent, there are some boundaries you won't cross: You'll always have your
kid wearing a seatbelt in the safety seat even if he screams, but you will let
him choose what to wear in the morning.' Or, for example, when you want to give
your child a sense of growth, you won't start by immediately giving him the
toughest task – doing his math homework by himself. You'll start small, give
him a good feeling of capability." Ronen Harel fell in love with
the methodology and today she works as a personal Agile coach. A book she wrote
together with Dany (Danko) Kovatch, entitled Agile
Kids - Who's the boss of me, was published in digital format in English and Hebrew.
Feiler and his family.
"The girls needs to do pushups for every minute they are shouting and
crying"
An Effective Living Room meeting.
So how does all this work, in practice? "Our daily
meeting is during the family dinner", elaborates Yuval, "It's
important that both parents are present, so my wife and I take care to be a
part of this dinner every day. During the meal we ask 'how was my day
yesterday', 'what I'm going to do until the next dinner', and 'what's holding
me back'. Today my daughter told us she had an exam and it went okay, that she
needs to practice for a dictation in English class, and what's holding her back
is that she has two after-school activities and doesn't have time. It's a very
short meeting, just 10 minutes, meant for family synchronization. Usually the
simpler problems are resolved during the meeting, and the children are the ones
who come up with the solutions.
"A central notion is to successfully develop the
children's ability to solve problems independently. If my 12 year old son has a
problem, I'll answer 'how do you think you can solve this?' I teach my six year
old girl using methods which I also use with my employees. I say to her 'Let's
start from the end. Tomorrow at seven o'clock in the evening there's a family
dinner, how do we reach a situation in which you'll manage to complete the task
despite your after-school activities? Where is your free time?' The vision is
independence, and when the vision is clear, decision-making becomes
easier."
Ronen Harel is also strict about having daily
meetings and conversations with her children. "Even the Supernanny
says it's important to have dinner with your children. So we're saying
something similar, a bit more focused: since we're all gathered together, let's
make this meeting effective. When we start agile it usually start by discussing
the trivial and annoying things, such as why are their socks in the living
room? But slowly this noise desists. In a very short time the children are
already taking responsibility for tasks such as brushing their teeth and
homework and this gathering takes a turn in another direction. It's really a
lot of fun, for the parents as well as the children, to feel that they can
talk, that they are actually being listened to, that there's a place for them.
And then suddenly the boy gets the courage to talk about social problems he's
having, he thinks of solutions, sets objectives, and tracks changes on a
day-to-day basis. True education is from hands-on action, not theory, and we're
here to guide him along the way."
Feiler also stresses the importance of the daily
family meeting: "Out of dozens of ideas we tried out when I was working on
the book, the family meeting was without a doubt the best thing we did. It
opened up a safe space in which we could talk, where we, the parents, aren't
stressed, aren't shouting and don't have one foot out the door. We don't rush
our dinners to reach other tasks. Additionally, we gain information from the
children. It's incredible. I mean, we don't know what they think and feel half
of the time. Another advantage is that once they're part of the process they
become independent. It's good for the family at the present moment, and it's a
major and significant tool for later on in life."
The Task board at Yuval's
and Adi's family. Picture: Tomer Epelbaum
My children have dinner at six. There's no chance to
have a family meeting with both parents present every evening at that hour.
"You have nothing to worry about when it comes to
dinner, and you're certainly not the only family that has a tough time
gathering around the same table at the early evening. But things are better
than you think. It turns out that just ten minutes of meaningful conversation
with your children are enough. For the rest of the dinner time you mostly try
to educate the children or just get the ketchup bottle from the other side of
the table. You can take these ten minutes, situate them anywhere else
throughout the day, and enjoy the same benefits. Try breakfast, or pre-bedtime
snacks. Even one meal during the weekend can help. Nowadays people record their
favorite TV shows and watch them when it's comfortable for them. This could
also work with family time."
"Parents today live through grades given by
teachers", says Ronen Harel, "But using Agile allows parents
to be present all along the way, not just in order to scold the child when he
fails math. It requires giving attention to literature and bible classes as
well, to tooth-brushing and social situations. Overall we're talking about very
short periods of time that produce significant results. The result of focused
attention can be amazing. Very soon you start to receive feedback from school –
the child knows how to explain himself, to divide large tasks into small and
doable tasks, knows how to plan his time."
"On New Year's Eve everybody announces 'I'll stop
smoking!' and it lasts exactly two weeks. One of the most useful principles of
Agile is visualization. The presence of the objective creates greater attention
of it. When the objectives are small enough, not just for the two-week Sprint
but also to day-to-day tasks, and when you examine them and allow yourself to
change within cycles of feedback from your environment, you can really make
progress and create significant changes."
"We look back, learn and reach conclusions", says
Yuval, also stressing the process that is a built-in part of the method,
"In Friday night dinners we have a review meeting at the end of a Sprint.
In this meeting each child presents last week's results – grades, a new dance
the girls learned. It doesn't have to be tangible. Sometimes they take it upon
themselves to speak with their teacher about a certain difficulty, or commit to
mutual assistance between the brothers. More than that, they learn how to plan
ahead, to be committed to the tasks of their choice, to speak in front of an
audience, to listen. We're six people, and thus element of how to talk and
listen even if you're not interested, is meaningful. We sit and think together
in a retrospective process, how we as a family can improve next time. How many
families do you know who do this?"
After all it's just a technique, don't you need
something more substantial than a managerial methodology to make changes?
"The technique leads the mindset. They say 'a diet
starts at the supermarket', and this also applies to family life, the
foundation is correct planning. Managers are taught that employees – and this
is exactly the same with children – have motivation buttons. You need to get to
know them and develop them through these buttons. It's not easy, as a manager
and a father, to set aside your ego in order to nurture inner motivation. You
need to be willing to pay the price patiently and make sure that mistakes that
do happen won't be critical, mistakes within reasonable boundaries. My daughter
didn't do her homework. I didn't have a fight with her about it, I just waited.
When she came to me a bit miserable because the teacher yelled at her, the
motivation to act was hers. The procedure gives a very good foundation and of
course you have to back it by the willingness to listen and be there."
So ideally your children are free to do as they please,
and you don't really have an idea of what that is?
"One of the nice things in this system is methods of
visibility. Once a team is independent, one of the problems managers face is
that they lose the visibility of things that are happening and it's difficult.
You're responsible for a project, you let the team be independent and don't
have a clue what they're doing for two weeks. The child commits to preparing
his homework until 7 PM, and despite this freedom you know that you're his
safety net, you don't want him to fail. One of the things we encourage with teams
and children is to display by pushing, the child needs to push the information
instead of the parent nagging him for it. A simple technique is a board with
three columns: what I'm planning to do this week, what I'm working on now, and
what I've finished. You place the board in a central location in the house, we
keep it in the kitchen, I pass by there and understand what's happening – the
board has sticky notes with little stores ('math exam'), I look at the column
and know what's going on with the child. I also use other means: whoever comes
home takes his backpack with him to his room. Whoever finishes his homework
places the backpack ready for tomorrow at the entrance to the house. I check
where the backpack is and know what's going on."
Have you become a better parent?
"One of the significant benchmarks in Agile is how
many times you said 'do it because I told you so, because I'm the boss' or how
many times you've raised your voice at your employees. This is also true in the
family. To become a better parent you need to be patient and not play the
parent card whenever you encounter some difficulty. You need to leave
communication channels open, and allow the child to make mistakes and feel that
it's legitimate to do so – he has the freedom, and from mistakes you learn and
get back on your feet."
Feiler also stresses the aspect of the independence
that the method gives children. "Our instinct as parents is to tell our
children what to do. It's easy, and usually we're also right. But as an
educational tool, it's not great. Recent studies of the brain show that when
children set their own goals, build their own schedules and evaluate their own
work, this leads to development in their prefrontal cortex and in the long term
they become people with better control over their lives.
"We decided to let our daughters choose their own
rewards and punishments. He have weekly family meetings in which we discuss two
issues we worked on, for example, overreaction. We ask our girls: what will
motivate you to act? And they choose – if they overreact for less than five
minutes they can spend the night at a friend's house, and if they do it for
more than fifteen minutes, they need to do push-ups for every minute of
tantrums and crying. The thing is that if we want our children to gain good
decision making skills, we need to enable them to practice when they're
young."
A Meal, a Revolutionary Concept.
"I don't think running an organization and managing a
family is exactly the same thing, but the very notion of having a shared family
dinner, you can call it a meeting or a gathering or whatever, is revolutionary
for most Israeli families today", says parenting guru Michal Dalyot who
runs the Michal Dalyot Center, in
a phone interview. "A family in which all household members (preferably
including both parents, but even one of them) sit down to have a shared meal
four times a week is very rare in the current Israeli landscape. The young
children eat in front of the television set, the slightly older ones eat in
front of the computer and even if one of the parents is home at the time he's
busy: the mother is answering emails, the father is making lunch for
tomorrow."
Dalyot elaborates that "studies have found a
clear correlation between people's success in different parameters in their
life and the number of shared family meals they were present in during
childhood. Personally, I always had dinner with my four children, and when my
husband could he would join us. This idea, to look each other in the eye and
talk, without screens, without rushing anywhere, is very good."
"In Israel today there is no parental presence in the
household. The parents are very busy: working and often studying as well. What
little time is left to spend with the children, they're forced to devote to
daily rituals: showers, homework, chauffeuring, and there's no availability for
the essentials of values and emotions. We can make time for these things by
using managerial techniques: the household is an organization managed by the
parents. This organization needs to function efficiently in order for this
small community, which includes four or five members, to work properly.
"A family meeting is not an easy thing to manage. It
requires serious work to prevent this meeting from becoming a fight: 'I
expected you to do and you didn't', 'you were supposed to take care of that and
didn't'. You need to come from a place of empathy and acceptance: 'why didn't
we succeed?' 'Maybe we need to switch tasks?' Remember, we're parents, not a
manager who gets up and goes somewhere else at the end of the day. It's
important to remember that unlike in an organization, management can't remain
dry. The household is not just tasks and daily quantitative output. True, we
can manage our schedules and set a time for each child in advance, but it's
important to remember to hug and kiss and mostly remain extremely flexible.
Sometimes the child falls ill, sometimes his class is cancelled, there should
be a lot of room for understanding changes."
Michal Dalyot. Make sure the
meeting will not become a battlefield. Picture: Eldad Refaeli
The
Challenge: Letting Go.
The
families of Yuval and Shirly gained happier family life. Could it
be that the tech crowd has once again been granted, even coincidentally, a
better life, while simple workers and their families remain outside of the
circle of beneficiaries? Dr.
Sivanie Shiran, an organizational consultant who specialized in
clinical psychology, says that "a lot of money was invested in developing
leadership in business people, and in recent years we've learned a lot about managing
and dealing with people with different personalities. Most of the lessons that
were learned from all these years of research were taken to places that could
pay for them, generously, to large companies and businesses. The family was left
out of the picture and did not have a chance to make use of most of this
knowledge. It's too bad and is a very sad statement about the places in which
we decide to invest money and resources.
Dr. Sivanie Shiran. "the
family is our first team". Picture:
Gadi Dagon
"The family is the first team we belong to, our early experiences
within this group dynamic will later affect our ability to function in any
other team – professional or personal. A person doesn't see reality
objectively, but from his very personal viewpoint. Our early experiences create
the glasses through which we see the world, interpret it and communicate with it.
The way in which our first authority figures acted towards us, our
internalization of how to deal with authority, and our ability to trust others
are very much reliant upon our initial experiences in the nuclear family."
How can families make use of organizational management techniques?
"Two central themes that were developed in organizations and can be
very helpful for families are better evaluation abilities and consequently
preventing future problems. Organizational psychology has developed fairly
efficient tools to discover people's natural tendencies: how they read data,
how they organize it, what motivates them. Organizations use these types of
evaluation questionnaires to characterize managerial styles and enable managers
to work in cooperation with employees who have different styles. If I'm the
thinking type and you're the feeling type, we'll have to talk to each other
differently in order to convince and solve conflicts.
"This mapping can be very beneficial for future parents. They can
understand things related to their natural tendencies and the way they act.
Where do they get their information from? How do they process it? How do they
make decisions? How do they gather energy? Should they be around other people
or gather themselves inwards? When they have all this information, future
parents can understand where there might be points of difficulty in the future
and prevent problems from developing. But these questionnaires and analysis
only reach clients who pay a lot of money, mostly businesses and not families,
and certainly not in future-oriented preventive work."
Still, is this knowledge the crux of the matter? Maybe the fact that
parents spend too little time with their children and are under immense
pressure is the actual problem, and not some managerial vision or other?
"There's no doubt that family life in the modern world is a very stressful
affair, and parenting has become a nearly impossible mission", says Shiran.
"Doubtless organizations today don't make it easy to develop a life
outside of the organization. People struggle to find the magic pill, the new
technique, the amazing tip that makes everything possible. It's not likely to
happen. Some techniques can ease the situation, but this problem runs
deep."
Why can't people manage to make changes in their families?
The challenge is not to learn the information, or learn a new model. The
challenge is to let go, or be aware of the models we already have and that we
developed throughout our lives. In organizations too, people read the bestsellers
that tell them how management is supposed to be done, what will cause things to
work properly, but it only gets them that far. This is also true for families.
There is a reason that people don't apply all this good advice. It sounds so
obvious, so why not just adopt it into our lives? There are deeper reasons,
because of which people haven't managed to do this so far and they will return
to their previous behavior as they have done until now."
Contrary to Shiran, Ronen Harel insists on being optimistic in
declaring "Anyone can do it. Without a doubt. One of the families I
coached was an ultra-orthodox Jewish family with ten children. Everything there
is very complicated - who wakes up who in the morning, who makes whose sandwich
for school. A whole system, one that you can drown in if it's not organized
correctly. They drank these organizational ideas with a great thirst and since
then are successfully applying the method. As far as you can get from
high-tech, but as you can see, also very close."
What is an Agile Family?
·
Daily family meeting at
dinner or any other time, in which 10 whole minutes can be devoted to family
conversation: What are the plans for today? What have we done yesterday? Where
do expect difficulties?
·
A family board with tasks
that need to be completed, that are being worked on right now and that have
been completed.
·
Weekly review meeting in
which three main questions are discussed: In which tasks did we succeed this
week? In which tasks did we not succeed this week? What do we want to work on
next week?
The Goal: a Full Split
At the entrance to Yuval and his wife Adi's home, a family villa in a
settlement in the Sharon plain, two school backpacks stand. It looks like an
ordinary affair, maybe even a bit of a mess, but in this house everything is
part of a system: When I arrive, at evening time, we enter the kitchen. Like in
most families, this is the heart of the house, and here they show me the core
of their activity – a big colorful project board. Under things we want to do:
preparing costumes for Purim, birthday gifts for Grandma, learning how to make
sushi. Under things we're working on: riding a bicycle, organizing the kitchen.
Under things we have done: preparing the backpack for tomorrow, paying
insurance bills.
Later the children lead us through the tour of the house, and show me
their personal task boards. Every child, from age three, receives a board here,
sets objectives for himself, tracks his progress and does everything in his
power to complete them. At first this is small and essential personal habits
(tooth brushing and making the bed), or tasks such as attempting to do a full
split, preparing bracelets from rubber bands and signing the school report
cards. But now, in the advanced section, one of the bigger projects that the
older children are working on (9 and 12) is planning the family vacation. The
destination was chosen in a family meeting, and the task of planning was given,
mostly if not entirely, specifically to the family members who have never
ridden an inter-city bus on their own yet.
The children are happy to explain: "We're a crazy family. It's not
always fun to plan everything, to think about stuff. Sometimes we just want to
be free, to live in a normal house, where you eat dinner in front of the
television and your parents aren't sure if you have a test in math or bible
studies tomorrow." Yuval nods and legitimizes: "I don't want to raise
children who do what they're told. When they rebel I'm actually happy. Let them
try things out, choose what's best for them on their own."
So when they want some time off you shut down the task board?
"Certainly. And then they forget to do thing, fail in a dictation,
and take the board out themselves."
Still, what do you get from all this?
The 12 year old answers that "I learn about myself. In the
beginning I would fill the board with tasks. All the things I wanted to do, all
my dreams. I would try to run six projects at the same time – studying for a
test, learning to surf, becoming better at helping around the house,
remembering to call my grandmother on Friday, and more and more. And I thought
this board wasn't working. I'm writing all these things and not managing to do
them. I took me time to understand that I can do maybe three things at
once."
And his father adds "In martial arts they say 'rest during the
battle'. The problem with the modern world is that people are always adding
more and more tasks and more and more pressure, and then they break. That's not
particularly smart. What's smart is to acknowledge the boundaries of your
abilities, to manage to prioritize and complete tasks from start to finish."
What do your friends have to say?
The 9 year old answers that "everyone's doing it here now. It's not
only us anymore. My friends used to think it's weird. I don't always want to
sit down and talk with my parents at dinner and sometimes I don't even want to be
home in time for dinner, but after the family meeting I'm always happy I was in
it. It helps me want to do things."
