介绍:
Bruce Feiler is the author of "The Secrets of Happy Families," and the writer/presenter of the PBS miniseries "Walking the Bible."
*Why you should listen
Bruce Feiler is the author of nine books, including Walking the Bible, Abraham, and America’s Prophet. He is also the writer/presenter of the PBS miniseries Walking the Bible. His book The Council of Dads tells the uplifting story of how friendship and community can help one survive life’s greatest challenges. Most recently Feiler published The Secrets of Happy Families, in which he calls for a new approach to family dynamics, inspired by cutting-edge techniques gathered from experts in the disciplines of science, business, sports and the military.
Feiler’s early books involve immersing himself in different cultures and bringing other worlds vividly to life. These include Learning to Bow, an account of the year he spent teaching in rural Japan; Looking for Class, about life inside Oxford and Cambridge; and Under the Big Top, which depicts the year he spent performing as a clown in the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus.
Walking the Bible describes his perilous, 10,000-mile journey retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert. The book was hailed as an “instant classic” by the Washington Post and “thoughtful, informed, and perceptive” by the New York Times.
*Transcript
So here&`&s the good news about families. The last 50 years have seen a revolution in what it means to be a family. We have blended families, adopted families, we have nuclear families living in separate houses and divorced families living in the same house. But through it all, the family has grown stronger. Amy Tan says the family they have today is as strong or stronger than the family they grew up in.
Now, here's the bad news. Nearly everyone is completely overwhelmed by the chaos of family life. Every parent I know, myself included, feels like we&`&re constantly playing defense. Just when our kids stop teething, they start having tantrums. Just when they stop needing our help taking a bath, they need our help dealing with cyberstalking or bullying.
And here&`&s the worst news of all. Our children sense we&`&re out of control. Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute asked 1,000 children, "If you were granted one wish about your parents, what would it be?" The parents predicted the kids would say, spending more time with them. They were wrong. The kids&`& number one wish? That their parents be less tired and less stressed.
So how can we change this dynamic? Are there concrete things we can do to reduce stress, draw our family closer, and generally prepare our children to enter the world?
I spent the last few years trying to answer that question, traveling around, meeting families, talking to scholars, experts ranging from elite peace negotiators to Warren Buffett&`&s bankers to the Green Berets. I was trying to figure out, what do happy families do right and what can I learn from them to make my family happier?
I want to tell you about one family that I met, and why I think they offer clues. At 7 p.m. on a Sunday in Hidden Springs, Idaho, where the six members of the Starr family are sitting down to the highlight of their week: the family meeting. The Starrs are a regular American family with their share of regular American family problems. David is a software engineer. Eleanor takes care of their four children, ages 10 to 15. One of those kids tutors math on the far side of town. One has lacrosse on the near side of town. One has Asperger syndrome. One has ADHD.
"We were living in complete chaos," Eleanor said. What the Starrs did next, though, was surprising. Instead of turning to friends or relatives, they looked to David&`&s workplace. They turned to a cutting-edge program called agile development that was just spreading from manufacturers in Japan to startups in Silicon Valley. In agile, workers are organized into small groups and do things in very short spans of time. So instead of having executives issue grand proclamations, the team in effect manages itself. You have constant feedback. You have daily update sessions. You have weekly reviews. You&`&re constantly changing. David said when they brought this system into their home, the family meetings in particular increased communication, decreased stress, and made everybody happier to be part of the family team. When my wife and I adopted these family meetings and other techniques into the lives of our then-five-year-old twin daughters, it was the biggest single change we made since our daughters were born. And these meetings had this effect while taking under 20 minutes.
So what is Agile, and why can it help with something that seems so different, like families? In 1983, Jeff Sutherland was a technologist at a financial firm in New England. He was very frustrated with how software got designed. Companies followed the waterfall method, right, in which executives issued orders that slowly trickled down to programmers below, and no one had ever consulted the programmers. Eighty-three percent of projects failed. They were too bloated or too out of date by the time they were done. Sutherland wanted to create a system where ideas didn&`&t just percolate down but could percolate up from the bottom and be adjusted in real time. He read 30 years of Harvard Business Review before stumbling upon an article in 1986 called "The New New Product Development Game." It said that the pace of business was quickening -- and by the way, this was in 1986 -- and the most successful companies were flexible. It highlighted Toyota and Canon and likened their adaptable, tight-knit teams to rugby scrums. As Sutherland told me, we got to that article, and said, "That&`&s it." In Sutherland&`&s system, companies don&`&t use large, massive projects that take two years. They do things in small chunks. Nothing takes longer than two weeks. So instead of saying, "You guys go off into that bunker and come back with a cell phone or a social network," you say, "You go off and come up with one element, then bring it back. Let&`&s talk about it. Let&`&s adapt." You succeed or fail quickly. Today, agile is used in a hundred countries, and it&`&s sweeping into management suites. Inevitably, people began taking some of these techniques and applying it to their families. You had blogs pop up, and some manuals were written. Even the Sutherlands told me that they had an Agile Thanksgiving, where you had one group of people working on the food, one setting the table, and one greeting visitors at the door. Sutherland said it was the best Thanksgiving ever. So let&`&s take one problem that families face, crazy mornings, and talk about how agile can help. A key plank is accountability, so teams use information radiators, these large boards in which everybody is accountable. So the Starrs, in adapting this to their home, created a morning checklist in which each child is expected to tick off chores. So on the morning I visited, Eleanor came downstairs, poured herself a cup of coffee, sat in a reclining chair, and she sat there, kind of amiably talking to each of her children as one after the other they came downstairs, checked the list, made themselves breakfast, checked the list again, put the dishes in the dishwasher, rechecked the list, fed the pets or whatever chores they had, checked the list once more, gathered their belongings, and made their way to the bus. It was one of the most astonishing family dynamics I have ever seen.
And when I strenuously objected this would never work in our house,
our kids needed way too much monitoring,
Eleanor looked at me.
"That&`&s what I thought," she said. "I told David, &`&keep your work out of my kitchen.&`& But I was wrong."
So I turned to David: "So why does it work?"
He said, "You can&`&t underestimate the power of doing this." And he made a checkmark. He said, "In the workplace, adults love it. With kids, it&`&s heaven." The week we introduced a morning checklist into our house, it cut parental screaming in half. (Laughter) But the real change didn&`&t come until we had these family meetings. So following the agile model, we ask three questions: What worked well in our family this week, what didn&`&t work well, and what will we agree to work on in the week ahead? Everyone throws out suggestions and then we pick two to focus on. And suddenly the most amazing things started coming out of our daughters&`& mouths. What worked well this week? Getting over our fear of riding bikes. Making our beds. What didn&`&t work well? Our math sheets, or greeting visitors at the door. Like a lot of parents, our kids are something like Bermuda Triangles. Like, thoughts and ideas go in, but none ever comes out, I mean at least not that are revealing. This gave us access suddenly to their innermost thoughts. But the most surprising part was when we turned to, what are we going to work on in the week ahead? You know, the key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves, and it works in software and it turns out that it works with kids. Our kids love this process. So they would come up with all these ideas. You know, greet five visitors at the door this week, get an extra 10 minutes of reading before bed. Kick someone, lose desserts for a month. It turns out, by the way, our girls are little Stalins. We constantly have to kind of dial them back. Now look, naturally there&`&s a gap between their kind of conduct in these meetings and their behavior the rest of the week, but the truth is it didn&`&t really bother us. It felt like we were kind of laying these underground cables that wouldn&`&t light up their world for many years to come.
Three years later -- our girls are almost eight now -- We&`&re still holding these meetings. My wife counts them among her most treasured moments as a mom.
So what did we learn? The word "agile" entered the lexicon in 2001 when Jeff Sutherland and a group of designers met in Utah and wrote a 12-point Agile Manifesto. I think the time is right for an Agile Family Manifesto. I&`&ve taken some ideas from the Starrs and from many other families I met. I&`&m proposing three planks.
Plank number one: Adapt all the time. When I became a parent, I figured, you know what? We&`&ll set a few rules and we&`&ll stick to them. That assumes, as parents, we can anticipate every problem that&`&s going to arise. We can&`&t. What&`&s great about the agile system is you build in a system of change so that you can react to what&`&s happening to you in real time. It&`&s like they say in the Internet world: if you&`&re doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you&`&re doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that. But to me, "adapt all the time" means something deeper, too. We have to break parents out of this straitjacket that the only ideas we can try at home are ones that come from shrinks or self-help gurus or other family experts. The truth is, their ideas are stale, whereas in all these other worlds there are these new ideas to make groups and teams work effectively.
More transcript please see: http://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_feiler_agile_programming_for_your_family/transcript?language=en
