An Idea for Our Time?: Family Standup

During these trying shelter-in-place times, our family has adopted a habit from my job: a daily standup.  I work on a software development team, and in software development, especially when using agile methods, teams gather daily for a short, structured meeting called a standup.

The format seeks to correct the ills of longer, less frequent meetings.  It gets straight to the point and maximizes shared knowledge.  It's also designed to identify (as a first step to overcoming) "blockers."  A blocker may take many forms, but it does like it's named: it blocks someone from completing a task that they want to/have to/are trying to do.

Also in the eponymous theme, in standup, we stand up.  Not settling into chairs underscores how quickly the meeting is supposed to go.  

The team goes around in a circle and answers three simple questions:

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What am I going to do today?
3. What (if anything) is blocking me?

It's important that everyone in the meeting, regardless of their role, answers all three questions.  It's about transparency and acknowledgment that we all need to know what we're all working on in order to make individual and shared decisions and to support each other.

So during COVID-19 home confinement, we have adopted this idea for our family.  We read about the idea several years ago in Bruce Feller's The Secrets of Happy Families.  He described a weekly version of the meeting that his family had adopted.  He extolled how the every-person-speaks nature of the meeting gave voice to his children.  Sometimes, kids don't get to talk, and parents don't have to share what's going on with them.  Standup can help.

We've been gathering at 9:30 (30 minutes after the teenagers have to be awake) to step through our version of standup.  Other families might do something different, but here's what we do:

• We go through the form for Family Prayer in the Morning from the brand-new 2019 Anglican Church in North America Book of Common Prayer.  We include one verse of a favorite hymn, and we pray prayers of gratitude or asking for help for ourselves or others. It helps us remember our place in the universe and the source of our hope.
• The boys report on what they did yesterday, and what they plan to do today in self-guided academic exploration and how they plan to get outside.
• We go over household chores that the boys need to do during the day.  Where there are options, they divvy them up among themselves.
• We identify any blockers and very quickly brainstorm the next thing we can do to clear that blocker.
• The parents report on when they will be on calls and video conferences so that everyone knows when wi-fi bandwidth might be both taxed and important. Our kids haven't stated getting school assignments yet, but they will soon, and wi-fi might become the issue for us that it is for others already.
• We review any evening details that need to be discussed like shared dinner prep plans or any plans we have as a nuclear family or to Zoom with family or friends.
• We finish with a group hug.

The group hug wasn't originally part of it.  That's another beauty of standup: the members of the meeting can suggest ways to tweak the meeting to optimize it for everyone.  My Competent Wife proposed that addition.  We also found that we needed to bump our younger son's wake-up time earlier because he eats breakfast slowly.  Standup works when everyone arrives on time and ready to engage.  

And when it's over, we move on informed, unblocked, and ready to go about our day.