Book Report: The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family – A Leadership Fable… about restoring sanity to the most important organization in your life By Patrick Lencioni
Patrick Lencioni consults CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, and he writes a fable based around helping businesses (which he does in his real life), determine why they are unique and then figure out what is their most pressing issue while still maintaining other aspects of their business, using a simple grading system in 10-15 minute office meetings weekly to evaluate effectiveness and to help re-evaluate concept(s), and applying this to the most important organization… the family.
The story begins with the fictitious husband making the remark that “if his clients ran their companies the way we (he and his wife) ran their family, they’d be out of business”. His wife takes offense to the remark and sets out to use her husband’s work model and apply it to their and other families that she sees struggling with the amount of activities in their weekly schedule. Running around like “chickens with their heads cut off”, doing good, worthwhile things but not leaving them fulfilled, stressed, reactive, scattered, frantic and chaotic.
His wife, after some initial struggle comes up with a functional model that begins with identifying why the family is unique. Then she has families determine what is their top priority, to be accomplished in the next 2-6 months. From there 5 or 6 things are identified as what needs to happen to accomplish this 2-6 month family goal while maintaining standards like adventure, finances, health (exercise), faith (battling daily), education, and marriage (dates). This is evaluated weekly using a color for each of these things using red (bad), yellow (okay), and green (accomplished/ahead of schedule) in about a 10-15 minute meeting and then shared with the entire family.
This book has come across my reading material at a time when I feel as the father and leader of our family (CEO of the family) that we need something like this to help prioritize and refocus our family on one common goal rather than going in 20 different directions and going no where, all unintentionally. And it gives us an easy assessment system to be carried out weekly in 10 minutes.
