Family Agility—It’s Not Just for Homeschooling Anymore

“Isaac! -It’s time for Standup,” I called to my son while clearing our whiteboard of all its colored sticky squares.

With a baffled and appalled look, like that time I served cauliflower tots for dinner, he groaned, “But Mom, it’s Summer Break!” 

“I know, honey. Choosing what we get to do with our day isn’t just for homeschooling. Come on, let’s see how we can make today fun. “

Our foray into Perez Family Agility was certainly born out of homeschool-induced desperation. Agile’s daily Standups, weekly Retrospectives, and the mighty Kanban board were the life preservers I clung-to to keep our covid-quartered household afloat. It seems many of you did, too. It was exciting to see social media light-up with all those adorable images of home-bound youngsters moving their colored sticky notes all over the world.

But now that school was out for the summer, my 9-year-old rightfully questioned, was there still a need for Agile in our family routine? Based on our experiments and experiences, in our house it’s a Thundering YES!

In this article, I've shared just a few of the ways families like yours and mine are using Agile to curb the chaos of daily life and achieve greater happiness in our homes. 

 When Your House is an Epic Mess—Agile Conquers Household Chores

Agile is a Godsend for taming the Dust Monster! Inventive families across the globe have applied Agile to all manner of housework. Agile has been used to inspire toddlers to pick-up their toys, for doing laundry, and getting the house in shape before the in-laws arrive. Parents and partners swear by Agile to increase cooperation and get more done. We'll talk a lot more about Agile and chores in the future, but for now, I’ll share a recent experience that really opened our eyes.

Last week, Isaac and I tested a key premise of Agile--the effect of context switching on task completion. (By context switching, I’m talking about the practice commonly referred to as “multi-tasking.” In reality, humans rarely multi-task. Apart from our autonomic body functions and habitual movements that are more or less subconscious, our brains aren’t wired to carry-out more than one complex function at a time. Rather than multi-tasking, we context switch--bouncing back and forth between tasks and tools. According to experts, we pay a steep price in lost productivity for our context switching ways. It takes our minds additional time to refocus with each jump, so in the end, it takes longer to get things done. While this seems to make sense, Isaac and I wanted to see for ourselves. 

To kick-off our weekends, the Perez family celebrates “Friday Family Fun Night.” It’s been our ritual for years. We play games, stay up late, and have pizza in our Lightning McQueen tent. Over time we’ve added-on to our little pop-up tent which has morphed into a sprawling fort. Out tent forts now span multiple rooms and incorporate folding tables, cardboard boxes, and tons of blankets and sheets. Some have even been two-stories tall. Needless to say, they're way more fun to set-up than to tear-down.

We timed ourselves twice. The first time we tore down the tent just like normal without any particular system. It took us 8:32 minutes (512 seconds) to fold all the blankets and put them away. The second time, we followed the Agile practice of minimizing the number of times we switched tasks. So during our second go-around, we gathered all the bedding into one place, folded each blanket one after the other, and then stored all the bedding away all at the same time. Without making any attempt to hurry, the same task took us 5:50 minutes (350 seconds). That’s an improvement of nearly 32% just by sustaining our focus on one activity at a time, or put another way, by limiting the amount of “Work in Progress" we completed.  WIP limits are a key Agile success factor credited with significant increases in speed, productivity, and quality. Isaac and I plan to conduct more extensive WIP tests in the future, but gotta admit, so far I’m a fan!

Kanban ‘Can Do’—Crushing Family Events & Projects

Much as with housework, Agile offers powerful tools and techniques for coordinating family events and projects. Task visualization devices like Kanban boards are fantastic for organizing large projects. Kanban boards show the flow of work over time as it moves through various stages like TO-DO to DOING to DONE. With children, Kanban's game-like quality can even make the effort fun!

Kanban boards have been used to orchestrate countless family events and projects. Here are some of them below:

• ·       Throwing Family Parties & Holiday Feasts
• ·       Weight Loss, Nutrition, and Meal Planning
• ·       Getting Kids Ready in the Morning
• ·       Managing Bedtime Routines at Night
• ·       Home Selling & Buying
• ·       Moving & Relocation
• ·       Wedding Planning
• ·       Birth or Adoption Planning
• ·       Legal Matters & Divorce (Regrettably)
• ·       Home Remodeling
• ·       Garage Sales
• ·      Coordinating dependent, ‘differently-able,’ ill, or elderly family care

• ·       Running a Lemonade Stand
• ·       Family Community Service
• ·       Passion Projects--starting a club, authoring a novel, tracing your genealogy, etc.
• ·       Smoking Cessation (personally don't know how well it works—anyone?)
• ·       Marathon Training & Competitions
• ·       Job Search & Networking
• ·       College Prep & Applications
• ·       Tax Management & Estate Planning
• ·       Gardening & Horticulture
• ·       Landscaping
• ·       Building a Barn, Shed, Tree House, or Garage
• ·       Refurbishing a Car, Boat, or Other Vehicle
• ·       Going Camping
• ·       Travel & Vacation Planning
• ·       (And, of course…Homeschooling!) 

Among their most popular and exciting applications, Kanban boards are incredibly useful for planning family vacations and travel. Because visualization is beneficial for team collaboration, keeping priorities top-of-mind, revealing bottlenecks, and keeping track of large numbers of tasks, Kanban has helped prevent many a family trip from turning sour. By combining tools like Kanban boards with Agile principles like valuing personal interactions over processes and being flexible over stubbornly following a plan, family events and vacations can be the best of times the way they're intended to be.

To illustrate, a friend of mine created a Kanban board on Trello to track over a year’s worth of planning and coordination for her family’s first trip to Disney World. She planned the trip with her family of four, her brother's family, their retired parents, and a few other adult relatives, all of whom live in different parts of the country and would be coming and going at different times. Jen found her family's online Kanban board invaluable for keeping on top of the mountain of work required to coordinate the travel and entertainment needs of so many people. With multiple reservation and deposit deadlines to juggle, multiple family members taking-on different aspects of the planning, and the sheer volume of logistical details to keep straight if you want to make the most off that once in a lifetime full family visit to 'The Happiest Place on Earth,' Kanban allowed Jen and her family to work at a sustainable pace, collaborate effectively, and check the status of everyone's progress on the tasks they had volunteered to handle at a glance. And guess what--they had a fantastic time. Bibbity Bobbity Boo!

Sample Trello Disney Planning Board

I Now Pronounce You Married & Agile

But what if we don't have children? Is Agile of any benefit to me? To us?

While I can’t speak to the magic of Agile nuptials (know anyone?--lol), I believe in Agile’s ability to enhance relationships. Agile emphasizes respect and trust-building behaviors that promote feeling emotionally safe with one another. High levels of trust and relationship safety undoubtedly enhance team communication, creativity, and problem solving. Trusting partners are better able to call-out elephants in the room and to have the many difficult but necessary conversations that keep marriages healthy.

A couple’s ability to work as a team is further enhanced when partners proactively step-off the hamster wheel of Constant Doing to have intentional conversations about what, why and how they’re doing it. This includes deciding what matters most to them, prioritizing, making choices based on their most important shared values, allocating resources toward those choices, deciding what to cut, and determining how they intend to work together to achieve their goals over a given period of time 

Likewise, the Agile practice of Retrospection packs the power to strengthen relationship bonds and keep marriages on track. Taking time for periodic Retrospectives (time set aside for thoughtful reflection on the quality and intricacies of marriage and family life) demonstrates respect for the relationship. Retros also help spouses do more of what’s working, less of what isn’t, and agree on goals to continuously improve the quality of their relationship. They can also be opportunities for bonding and date time, things that are so nourishing to the health of a marriage. When you consider how frequently we hear stories about couples who just drift apart--living separate lives, losing their loving connection, or failing to address uncomfortable issues until they’ve become crises too big to ignore--I have to believe that establishing a rhythm of planning, acting, and reflecting on the family-team’s activities, goals, and values can only serve to enrich marriages.

To explore Agile and Matrimony further, I recommend Raj Motwani‘s article “How Agile Saved My Marriage” (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-agile-saved-my-marriage-raj-motwani-csp-sm-acsm-cspo/?trackingId=vo31yp1jQeyymHIYQdI5LA%3D%3D).

Check it out--you’ll be glad you did!

In Conclusion

In conclusion, no matter what your crew cooks-up, Agile isn’t just for homeschooling anymore. And whether you have children or not, are married or not, most of us have families in one form or another. All types of families have successfully applied Agile to a wide variety of activities including cleaning the house, throwing family extravaganzas, organizing summer getaways, and much much more. Similarly, Agile tools and techniques have been put to the test by families to deepen connections, facilitate communication and enhance teamwork—and really, who couldn’t use more of that?

How has your family applied Agile? We'd love to hear about your Family Agility experiences in the ‘Comments’ below.

If you'd like to further explore how Agile can help tame the madness and increase harmony in your home, we’d love for you to join us at Family Agility Network: 

https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/12383737/