The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family

When it comes to families, I might define it in a slightly different way. Context is the information and framework we need to make a decision in the most informed, intentional manner possible.

Without context, every decision that confronts us, every situation we encounter, calls for unnecessary anxiety, stressful uncertainty, and unproductive conflict. Which, in turn, makes our lives much more challenging than they need to be.

This is all a shame because running a family, though difficult, should not be complicated. Like most things in life—marriage, parenting, leadership, physical fitness, financial stability—it comes down to mastering a handful of simple concepts, which requires more persistence and dedication than it does intelligence.

In fact, most of us already know what it takes to make our families more effective and sane; we just have this tendency, when faced with a little stress, to forget. As the eighteenth-century author Samuel Johnson once said, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”

None of us would think about running a business without it. Even the leaders of most mediocre companies sit down and try to figure out what their priorities are, how they differ from their competition, and what their unique advantages or disadvantages might be. They don’t just wing it, even if it sometimes looks that way to an outsider.

And in our personal lives we understand the need for context in many of the decisions we make. We don’t buy a car or book a vacation without asking ourselves a series of questions that will give us a framework for making a good decision. We’ll often jot down a list of important criteria. How many people will I be driving? How much money do I want to spend? Would I rather vacation in a hot or cold climate? Do I want to fly or drive to get there? Simple stuff that we instinctively recognize as being necessary in order to be purposeful—and successful—in whatever we’re doing.

And yet most of us go about leading and managing our families with almost no formal context. We don’t take time to explicitly decide who we are, what we stand for, what we want, and how we’re going to go about succeeding and thriving as a family. Why don’t we?

Because we don’t think of our families as the organizations they are, in need of leadership and planning and strategy. We also feel a little awkward or embarrassed by taking a somewhat formal approach to managing our families, deciding that it sounds silly or overly structured. Finally, we somehow fail to see the cost of our chaos, and the connection it has to real problems like poor mental and physical health, financial failure, and even divorce.

And so we go on living context-free lives, taking on every decision and issue in a relatively isolated way, as though it weren’t part of a larger situation. And then we wonder why each day feels like a disconnected, reactive game of survival, a grind without the kind of purposeful progress that we all crave.

Until that changes, until we achieve some simple clarity around the context of our families, no amount of discipline or structure is going to amount to much.

Now if I were reading this book, right about now I would be asking the question, “How long is it going to take to create this context, and how soon before I see any results?” That leads us to the next section.