This is part of a series of lessons I have taken from my collaborative decision-making practice and applied to family life.
Meeting Purpose – Alignment on a Training Strategy
Meet Tilly. She’s the sweetest and smartest puppy dog you’ll ever meet. (I may be biased.) She fit easily into our family rhythm, nurturing us each individually in ways we didn’t know we needed.
On Day 2, she learned her name, to come when she was called, to sit, and to lay down. On Day 4, she learned to escape through the living room gates. On Day 5, we needed to set a family strategy for training. She was starting to show signs of teething, we wanted to set a foundation for potty training, and we needed to provide her with the combinations of activity, mental challenges, and rest that she needs to grow. To do these things, we needed a consistent pattern across all humans in the house.
Meeting Agenda – Tell, Share, Plan
The meeting followed the flow of every other meeting, but this time the “First Item on the Agenda” was a mix between human cuddles and puppy scratches. It was adorable and lasted for many encores.
By the seventh round of cuddles+scratches, we were able to focus on our purpose and follow the Tell, Share, Plan process:
- Telling: In this meeting, there wasn’t much that needed top-down telling. Instead, we let the older kids “tell” the group what they’ve learned about puppy training.
- Sharing: We did a few rounds of sharing. First, we reflected on things Tilly did really well. Then, we brainstormed behaviors that needed a little work.
- Planning: To get to the planning stage, we wrote out the behaviors we wanted to focus on in the next phase of training (headers in blue marker). Then we discussed ways we might go about each one (lists in red marker).
- Recap: In this meeting, it was especially important to review our final strategies. There was a lot of content, so we took notes on a whiteboard to help us keep track (in words and in pictures – not all of my kids can read).
Meeting Results – Alignment & Commitment
As with many of our Kid Meetings, this meeting gave us the gift of collaboration. We practiced patience and deep listening to each other. We were praised for our achievements, individually and collectively. We deepened our connections to each other and to Tilly by telling stories about her first few days in our home. We talked about how super-smart she is and felt encouraged to nurture that intelligence. And in doing so, we practiced empathy for Tilly’s perspective and our responsibility to her.
Both parents and kids shared freely during the meeting. Dad and I came in with a few priorities in mind, but the kids shared most of those on their own without our prompting. I believe this really helped them feel a sense of ownership and a commitment to our collectively adopted strategy.
Beyond that, we did what we came to do: we created a list of strategies we would all use to help Tilly grow. With each priority behavior, we had deep discussions about why it was important, what could happen if she didn’t learn good behavior from a young age, and what techniques might be effective. And ultimately, we came to a list of training techniques to be used family-wide.
It may be too soon to tell the impact this particular meeting will have on Tilly’s development. But I don’t think it’s too soon to reflect on what it means for how our family works together. We left with a shared understanding that training Tilly is a collective effort: we all need to be consistent with her so that training doesn’t fall to just a few people. And a shared understanding creates buy in and commitment, the keys to creating any lasting change in the world.
Mia L. Arter Consulting 