Kids vs. Grown-Ups: Who Masters SCRUM First?

Two groups take their seats across from each other — kids on one side, grown-ups on the other. The question on the table is deceptively simple: who picks up SCRUM faster? One side has decades of experience. The other has nothing to unlearn. Today, we’re here to find out. Place your bet.

The idea surfaced at a previous Agile Parenting event, during a single game that said everything — kids navigated it with ease while the parents fumbled. Watching it all unfold was Christian Alber, a management consultant and former colleague of Brigitte’s, who had come along with his family. He left with an idea: an AgiLego session for the community. We’re glad he did.

Four teams. One winner. The prize goes to whoever builds the best town out of LEGO — but everyone leaves with something. Hands-on experience with agile project management, the kind that shows how creative results happen within constraints, not despite them.

Want in? Drop an email to brigitte@agileparenting.net and let us know how many kids and adults are coming. The more, the better.

And if you’re wondering what to expect — here’s what Robert, one of our previous participants, shared on LinkedIn. Safe to say, it made our day.

The post AgiLego – The Battle! appeared first on Agile Parenting.

One afternoon. One conversation that actually matters.

Most New Year’s resolutions are made alone. This one isn’t. What does a happier, healthier, more fulfilled life look like — not just for you, but for the people you come home to? What are your partner’s ambitions? Your kids’ quiet wishes? This is the space to find out.

If you’re anything like us, January starts the same way every year — a list that’s ambitious before it’s realistic.

The problem isn’t the list. It’s that my next steps might clash with what my spouse’s needs — or quietly complement them. We rarely know, because we rarely ask. Wang Man explored a version of this with her Agile Holiday Planning. Now we’re taking it further.

From fuzzy expectations to goals that actually pull you forward.

Expect hands-on group work — Design Thinking and Gamestorming tools that make the thinking visible. You’ll hear how other families have approached it, what worked, and what didn’t. And everyone in the room contributes: grown-ups and kids alike.

By the time you leave, you’ll have more than good intentions. You’ll have a shared roadmap — what your family wants to achieve by year’s end, documented and agreed upon. Less mental load. More forward momentum.

The workshop draws on Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families — a book that does exactly what we try to do: take the principles that work in boardrooms and bring them home.

The format works best for school-age kids. If you’re bringing younger ones, just let us know — we’ll make sure they’re taken care of too.

As for who it’s for: families, in every sense of the word. Couples, non-traditional setups, chosen families — all equally welcome.

When?

Saturday, February 24, 2024

14:00-18:00

Where?

KITCHEN2SOUL

Schlörstraße 4, München/Neuhausen

Cover Charge?

We charge EUR 30 per family for snacks and drinks.

The post Family New Year Resolution Workshop appeared first on Agile Parenting.

The first Agile Parenting event. And we’re keeping it simple.

Drinks — with or without alcohol, but definitely a little glamorous. Snacks. Good conversation. Agile Games at the heart of it, with activities designed for grown-ups and kids in equal measure. Bring the children.

Agile Games will be at the core of this evening.

We’re expecting a crowd that’s genuinely curious — people who’ve wondered what Wang Man and Brigitte actually mean when they talk about Agile Parenting. But if we’re honest, the most interesting part might be the people in the room themselves.

Play is the highest form of research.

Albert Einstein

Doors open at 6pm — early enough for the kids to join. The evening starts with a short introduction, then moves into games and hands-on learning stations for the whole family. No family in tow? That’s fine too.

Everyone is welcome — as long as you’re curious about what agile can do beyond software development

When?

October 24, 2023

18:00-22:00

Where?

KITCHEN2SOUL

Schlörstraße 4, München-Neuhausen

Find out how this went. What a night! Families showed up, leaned in, and took it seriously — in the best possible way.

You have further questions?

contact us via info@agileparenting.net

The post Drinks & Agile Games appeared first on Agile Parenting.

„Agile Parenting“ is based on the principles of agile project management. It plays with its tools, methods and the radically customer-centric and purpose-driven mindset. When we started it, Agile helped us to get a grip on this challenge: How do we help our kids to enter the world?

The original Manifesto for Agile Software Development was drafted by American IT experts in 2002, as a consequence of industry frustration.

They had experienced too often, that the created software did not meet the requirements that had been defined at the beginning of the project due to

• too little involvement of the future users,
• command-and-control communication instead of open discussion and a
• lack of sincere search for the best solution.

The alternative they were looking for was pure value creation, which meant to them: Sustainable results in short lead time, high morale, safety, quality, customer delight.

Parents also feel frustrated.

1.      Families feel stressed due to high workload, social obligations and financial pressure. Maybe more importantly, they feel trapped in routines and social norms which they follow – while being aware that often they do not benefit them.(http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006391/how-one-obscure-word-captures-urban-chinas-unhappiness

• Formal schooling is facing a massive crisis on a global scale. Children just do not learn skills for the 21^st century. They are not prepared for the professions we do not know yet but will be the economic drivers in the future. Most schools do not teach healthy learning habits. They do not foster curiosity. Instead of increasing resilience and solution-orientation, schools make children feel bored and fearful.
• Family life is not how we expected it to be. Too often it is not a save space for everyone, filled with love and laughter, where we can re-charge and relax from our busy lives. Instead, there is conflict, fatigue and un-met needs. More and more parents and children suffer from anxieties and need treatment.

The Agile Manifesto claims that the items on the right are important but the items on the left are crucial.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

https://agilemanifesto.org/

“Responding to change over following a plan” is most likely natural for all families. Who has not experienced packing bags for a highly anticipated weekend getaway and the night before the kindergarten kids starts vomiting? However, the idea behind this item is even bigger. It encourages us to venture forward with as few items as possible on our bucket list and just look where the journey takes us. It encourages us to work with what we have. My child is a gifted artist but I envisioned a career as a lawyer for her. What is better? Item from the left or from the right?

This requires a lot of solution-driven, regular, structured communication. Agile project management has developed a bag of tools to institutionalize this, e.g. KANBAN boards, product backlog, review and retrospective. All of them can be used effectively by agile families.

The manifesto is further explained by the 12 agile principles. Not all are fully relevant in the family context. https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html. These are the ideas we find important:

Self-organization is covered by various principles. In the corporate world as in the family realm, it requires a lot of personal growth by parents and coaching for kids until it really works. When your primary school kid insists on packing her school bag herself and then forgets her snack box, she will be hungry that day or ask her friends to share their snack with them. When your middle-school kid resists studying for a test, parents do not force him, and he gets a bad mark in the end, this will teach him a lesson. Either he embraces the assistance parents are willing to give him or he studies better by himself the next time.

Empowering your children is very important according to Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson They gives tons of scientific evidence why in their book The Self-Driven Child. Kids need to be allowed to fail on their own terms. This is the prerequisite for the deep knowledge that they have control over themselves. This experience actually builds up the frontal cortex in the brain.

Translated into the domain of family life “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” means that what we do needs to serve us as human beings. Some social norms like dressing nicely or keeping proper hygiene can give useful guidance on how to prosper socially and physically. Other unwritten rules, like which clothing brands you have to wear or when it is time for a child to stop playing with their cuddly toys can add pressure or even damage an individual.

Bruce Feller Adapt gives a good example in his TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_feiler_agile_programming_for_your_family?language=ry

Family dinner is a good idea but might be overrated and actually not fit the family situation. Instead of forcing this ritual, it can be better to re-frame it and define the target to spend 10 minutes of meaningful time together every day. This can be any time, not limited to dinner. According to Feller, happy families have an above average ability to adapt.

Furthermore, this item reminds us that it is not possible to draw lines with a ruler when it comes to human beings who are continuously changing. Organizing daily tasks with a KANBAN board might work well for a while and suddenly does not do the trick any more. Instead of forcing the daily standup on everyone it is better to find out how to adjust – or replace – this procedure.

As parents, we often look for proofs that we are doing the right thing. “Working software over comprehensive documentation” can serve as a reminder to focus on the actual outcome. For instance, this can mean that it is more important that my child enjoys playing the piano than winning piano competitions. Another example is not to measure learning success of a child by the hours she studied or the number of pages he read in a book but simply by assessing how much they truly learned and understood.

The idea “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” can be the most radical when applied to family life. The way we live it, it means that we communicate a lot, align expectations and needs of all family members and each member takes responsibility for everyone else. This is the contrary of order-and-control, which is often found in corporate and in family life where one person or group sets the rules and everyone else has to follow, receives and completes tasks. Don’t get us wrong: A top-down leadership style is not necessarily a bad thing and it can be vital in times of crises.

Agile emphasizes teamwork. One of its values is to give power for decisions to those who know best. Most of the time these are not the superiors or line managers but the individuals who execute the task on a daily basis. This challenges the “old normal” of hierarchies. In the context of agile parenting, this means that parents need to learn to trust that children can and should make important decisions for themselves. Children make decisions, the whole family gives constant feedback. For small kids this may mean that they may pick the clothes they want to wear even if this does not exactly reflect the color-coding you had in your mind for the dinner in that fancy restaurant. If children do not practice taking small decisions how can we expect them to take educated big decisions when they are teenagers or grown-ups?

Most importantly, fluid collaboration requires that team members work together daily. It is a reminder to have quality conversations every day beyond “how was your day?” Instead, they can cook and clean together, craft, draw or plan the next holiday together (link zu agile holiday). At home and at work the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Simplicity. The art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential: eliminate waste, build quality in. For families this can mean the adoption of minimalism: Why drive your child to school when she can take a bus? Why travelling overseas as appropriate for people of our status when everyone in our family would have more fun by just renting a cottage in the mountains? Why searching for your keys every morning instead of having the routine of putting keys at the same spot every time you enter your home? Why buying an extra wardrobe for all those clothes instead of sticking to a capsule wardrobe where you can mix and match everything and need much less?

The 12 Agile Principles do not explicitly cover our love for Experiment J. This is hidden within principle 1 and 3. Agile projects in the corporate world aim at producing an MVP, a minimum viable product as soon as possible. They start with a workable solution and only later add features as they learn about their customers’ additional needs and desires. The basic truth behind this: It is better to benefit from an 80% solution quickly – and then take it from there – than never reach the perfect 120% solution.

Most importantly, the Agile Principles emphasize Excellence and Sustainability. In the corporate world agile often is a pretext for sloppiness and lack of focus and planning. This is a crass misunderstanding. The product idea of a happy family where everyone can develop according to their talents and aspirations is a massive goal that does not allow half-heartedness.

If you are practicing agile parenting, please let us know why you do it and how. We are always thrilled to learn more. There is so much inspiration out there!

The post This Is Agile Parenting: Apply Best Practices From Work And Observe Positive Impact At Home appeared first on Agile Parenting.

Wang Man has been my management consultancy colleague and friend for over a decade. She is a passionate admirer of Elon Musk and, more broadly, anyone with the audacity to wear a wizard hat. Over the first round of cocktails, she made her position clear: Covid-19 was going to change everything.

I, being a fan of anything playful without veering into the truly silly, argued the opposite: everything would stay exactly the same. It was shaping up to be a good evening. I could tell.

We talked about homeschooling. For both of us, it had been the most disruptive thing to happen to family life since the birth of our children — and yet, all things considered, we felt we’d handled it reasonably well. Better, certainly, than the families living in a state of permanent crisis: panicking tiger mums, exhausted kids, screaming matches that stretched past 10pm. Or the ones who had quietly stopped opening the daily emails from school at some point, having decided that peace and harmony at home outranked keeping up with academic expectations.

These were the main challenges

Over drinks, we started sharing — and quickly realised we’d been wrestling with the same things:

• The school day had vanished, but the working day hadn’t. Fitting eight hours of work around children who needed care and attention all day was exhausting — to put it mildly. And for kindergarten and primary school kids, being at home with mum sent one very clear signal: holiday! Not “school, just at home.”
• Teaching is a profession. We are not teachers. As management consultants, “fake it till you make it” is practically in the job description — looking convincing while doing things you’ve never done before is a core skill. But unpacking the worksheets our daughters received daily was genuinely hard. How exactly does one explain expressive language in creative writing? My own experience at a German state primary school, four decades ago, had taught me mainly to avoid spelling mistakes.
• And then there was everything else. A mysterious disease. Closing borders. Quarantine. Regulations that shifted by the week. A pervasive sense of insecurity that seeped into every corner of life.

And these were the bonuses

But the picture wasn’t all dark. Over that second round of cocktails, we found ourselves listing the unexpected upsides too.

• Spending so much time together meant getting to know each other in ways that normal life rarely allows. My daughter disagrees with this assessment — when I put it to her, she pointed out that she had always known me perfectly well 😉 . But for me, many of the deepest conversations I’ve had with her — a girl quietly slipping from childhood into her pre-teen world — could only have happened under these circumstances.
• We both came to cherish the new, unhurried pace of everything. The more organic shape of our days dissolved most of the usual stress. Kids could sleep in. The morning rush disappeared. Schoolwork got done by early afternoon, leaving the rest of the day for playing with friends, spontaneous ice cream when a piece of creative writing had gone particularly well — or particularly badly. Less social pressure for the children.
• No competition in the classroom, no playground conflicts, no teacher losing their nerve at the front of the room.
• Better food, slower meals. With time to actually cook, we stopped ordering in and started celebrating the simple pleasure of a proper dinner together. The stomach problems my daughter had suffered for years quietly disappeared. Sitting down to eat as a family at the end of a long day of homeschooling and home office turned out to be one of the warmest parts of the whole experience.

Trust your daughters to get the job done

The upsides were real — but so was the pressure. We still had to make homeschooling work while continuing to deliver professionally. There was no alternative but to:

1. Hand real responsibility for their own learning to our daughters. Daily micro-management simply wasn’t possible — and, as it turned out, wasn’t necessary.
2. Step back from being the go-between with teachers. The girls communicated directly — by Zoom, by email — and managed it themselves.
3. Give them full access to everything they needed. Devices, passwords, tools. They downloaded Zoom and MS Teams themselves, connected the new colour printer themselves, and got on with it.

Somewhere between the first drink and the second — at a bar that prided itself on ingredients rooted in traditional Chinese medicine — it hit us both at the same time…you know… this is like Agile…

What we were doing is Agile Parenting!

That same evening, we discovered we had quite different agile parenting styles.

Wang Man is a SCRUM parent at heart. During homeschooling, she had divided Sophie’s tasks into two categories: compulsory and optional. The rule was simple — compulsory tasks done by Friday, every week. Optional tasks, academic but enjoyable, were entirely at Sophie’s discretion.

The logic was elegant. The idea was that three days of consistent work would be enough to clear the compulsory tasks, leaving the rest of the week open — for playing, or for the optional pile if Sophie felt like it. At the start of each week, Wang Man and Sophie would go through the tasks together, align on the expected outcomes, and sketch a rough plan for the week ahead.

After that, Sophie was on her own. She could reschedule, reshuffle, and reorganise as she saw fit — as long as the Friday rule held. Wang Man had given her a recommendation and the freedom to ignore it. The decision was Sophie’s.

SCRUM and agile values

Looking back, my own starting point wasn’t SCRUM — it was the agile values themselves. Not a conscious choice; just the mindset I’d spent years helping companies adopt, quietly finding its way into how I managed homeschooling.

The Agile Manifesto was born out of frustration. In the 1990s, software projects ran on the waterfall model — rigid, sequential, and stretched over years. The result was often perfectly executed software that arrived too late, delivered into a world that had moved on since the project began. These are its core ideas:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

n practice, this meant treating the school’s materials as a guideline, not a rulebook. The point of homeschooling — and the freedom it unexpectedly offered — was to fill gaps, work at Antonia’s pace, and play to her strengths. Assignments we didn’t find valuable simply didn’t get done. Instead, we wove other things in — improving her German, for one, became part of the daily rhythm.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Everything Antonia did, she did for herself — not for the school. “Learner of the week” competitions, designed more to signal effort than measure it, we ignored entirely. The only metric that mattered was whether she would meet the academic level expected at the end of Grade 4.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Homeschooling wasn’t just a upheaval for us — it was hard on the teachers too. Zoom calls instead of a room full of children, no real-time read on how anyone was feeling. I encouraged Antonia to make the most of the few touchpoints she had. Most of the time, she was the only student showing up to her Chinese class. Which made her all the more determined to be there every Friday at noon — to show her teacher she was appreciated, and to offer a small moment of human warmth at a time when everyone was quietly starving for it.

Responding to change over following a plan

• Sometimes you start the week full of ambition — only to discover that some tasks are harder and slower than expected, and the plan needs to shrink.
• Sometimes the weather is simply too good to ignore. Air quality below 50 PM2.5, sunshine, friends outside. That’s not a distraction — that’s childhood.
• And sometimes a small assignment unexpectedly becomes something worth following all the way — growing from a quick task into something that fills the entire day, right up until dinner.

Whenever changing the plan felt like the right call, we changed it. The plan existed to structure the day — nothing more.

In practice, every morning started with a realistic look at what could actually be achieved. When something needed to shift later on, we talked it through: skip the task entirely, scale it down, or move it? My aim was to give Antonia enough ownership to make some of those calls herself. I had a job to do and meetings to attend — I couldn’t watch her every minute. A strong sense of responsibility for her own learning wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the whole point.

Wang Man and I left that bar feeling genuinely excited. We decided to explore how far agile and SCRUM could go, applied more deliberately and with more structure — and gave it a name: Agile Parenting.

That’s how it started.

The post How It All Started: Wang Man and Brigitte Hacked Parenting 4.0 appeared first on Agile Parenting.

My friend Eryka, remarkable as always, told me this.

She grew up in the 1980s on a farm in rural Poland. Her parents kept the equivalent of around €1,000 in a drawer. When Eryka or her sisters needed money — for themselves, for something they wanted — they went to the drawer, took what they needed, and wrote it down on a slip of paper. Date, amount. That was it.

Their parents never asked what it was for.

And the girls never abused it. Never took more than they needed. Never spent it carelessly.

The post Pocket Money: Trust Is the Starting Point for Everything appeared first on Agile Parenting.