“Why do you have a white board hanging in your dining room?”
Question #1 posed to dear friends last week while visiting their new home.
“What does it mean?”
Question #2. The answer produced a compelling three minute explanation of a book they’d read that helped them solidify their families’ strategic plan.
“Can I borrow the book?”
Question #3. Little did I know that their affirmative answer would drastically alter the course of our near future.
The dear friends are huge fans of Patrick Lencioni. They recently read his book called The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family. I asked. They explained. They lent. I read. I shared with Rich. We now have a white board in our kitchen residing comfortably beside our weekly schedule and menu.
Lencioni is a corporate leadership development specialist. He helps businesses improve for a living. What he found was that the families of his corporate executives were struggling with issues of productivity similar to their businesses. The families were more important than work but were getting the leftovers when it came to strategic focus. Sound familiar?
The book is a parable about a fictional family named the Cousins. Lencioni uses story to teach a simple family strategic planning process that involves answering three questions:
1. What makes your family unique? The answer to this is what makes your family different from all others.
2. What are your standard objectives? Patrick calls these “those regular, ongoing responsibilities that a family must pay attention to in order to keep its head above water.”
3. What is your family’s top priority–rallying cry–right now? This is the thing that is the most important thing for your family to focus on for the next two to six months. An example of this would be “Get Joseph healthy.” This would have been our stated rallying cry for October 2009-July 2010.
Lencioni believes that if you evaluate each area in a 10-20 minute marriage staff mtg. each week, your life will begin changing. Each category is given a green, yellow, or red dry erase mark based on the health of that area.
We did it. We are living by it. It’s the honeymoon stage, but I we are hopeful. I said my first really difficult “no” this week after evaluating the request through the grid of our Family Scoreboard (Lencioni’s title for your dry erase board.) I am about to send an email with another difficult “no” tomorrow. The “yes” to my family is worth the “no” to other things that I love very much. Trading the good for the best. Living out our rally cry.
The Street Family Score Board
A. What Makes Our Family Unique?
- Our family motto is Love God, Love Others, and Have Fun! Our life is centered around faith, family and friends. We believe in being passionate and emotionally invested in whatever we do.
B. Our Rally Cry?
Settle the SS Street! Settle, systems, and stability.
The defining objectives of our rally cry are the following:
- Unpacking and settling our nest after living in Colorado for seven months.
- Developing our fall educational plan.
- Creating and implementing our fall ministry plan.
- Creating and implementing our fall weekly schedule and chore system.
C. What are our standard objectives?
- Faith
- Marriage
- Education
- Health
- Finances
- Ministry
- Home Maintenance
The book is an easy, two hour max read. Care to join us?
