TO COPE WITH C-19 YOU NEED A HIGH-PERFORMING FAMILY TEAM

HERE IS HOW TO BUILD IT

Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless

A major proportion of virus transmission takes place via family. One member brings the virus home and infects other family members. They, in turn, may go out and transmit the virus to other people. Getting everybody in the family, adults and children, fully involved and supporting each other in reducing transmissions makes a huge difference not just for the family but for the community around it. However, children, like adults, don’t like being told what to do and reflexively resist doing what is imposed on them. Fortunately both children and adults will follow rules when they are generated with their full participation and they understand their rationale.

Hence the challenge for parents: how to include all family members, both adults and children, in truly productive interactions that will generate effective practices for everybody? The good news is that there are methods used to facilitate inclusion and participation that are so simple that parents can easily use them with their children. Simple means that everybody is learning the methods in the process of using them. Here are a few that are used all around the world and what they can help you achieve. Descriptions and step by step instructions are freely available on the Liberating Structures website.

• TRIZ: will help the family identify counterproductive activities they must stop and decide how. The first step of TRIZ invites the family members first separately and then together to “make a list of all the things you can think of that you personally and we as family could do to make sure Covid-19 infects our family”. This list helps to identify in the second step what the family is actually doing that is counterproductive and then in a final step to decide what to stop and how.
• Min Specs: helps identify what are the absolute “must do’s” and “must not do’s” for each family member to minimize the risk of family infection. The family first makes a list of anything anyone can think of doing and not doing. The list is then whittled down to only the “absolute must’s”
• Troika Consulting: will help any family member to easily get help from others in the family to address any of his/her challenges. Troika can also easily be used virtually on the phone or video conference to get help from friends.
• Conversation Cafe: will help the family to reflect and make sense as a group of what is happening. The invitation would be something like “how do you feel about how we are coping with the pandemic?”. Two rounds are made with a talking stick, followed by an open discussion and the a final round with a talking stick.
• What? So What? Now What?: will help the family do together periodic debriefs that are effective about what is happening and to decide what to do by addressing three questions in turn: What have you noticed? So What are the implications? Now What do we do?
• Wicked Questions: will help to identify what are the paradoxical challenges (two opposite outcomes or strategies that are both wanted) that the family must confront to cope successfully with the pandemic
• Discovery and Action Dialogue: provides a series of seven questions to help to discover how to handle potential risks starting with the question: “when do you know that one of us has done or has faced something that is potentially risky?”
• Agreement-Certainty Matrix: will help to sort infection control challenges into simple, complicated and complex
• Improv Prototyping: will help the family to practice together effective behaviors and to generate improvements step by step
• 15% Solutions: will help to discover and focus on what each family member has the freedom and resources to do.
• What I Need From You: will help all family members to be very clear about what they need from each other as well as what they can expect from each other.
• Simple Ethnography: will help any family member to observe and record actual behaviors outside and inside the home.
• Open Space Technology: to give everybody the opportunity to propose any topic that they wish to be addressed.

How do you get started? There is no other way than to just do it. No matter how strange it may feel it is not difficult and the only way to find out and learn is to do it. 1) Pick, preferably together with your children, one or a couple of the purposes described above that catch your interest. 2) Click on the name of the LS and download the step by step instructions. 3) Specify the exact wording of the invitation. 4) Follow the instructions. Trust them and just do it. Btw children pick it up fastest so you may want to put one of them in charge of the facilitation! 5) Pick another purpose and do it and then do another , etc. Practice makes perfect!

Download the free LS App at the Apple App Store or Google Play