It seems is not enough that Agile has colonized our offices with sticky notes, buzzwords, and interminable “stand-ups” that most of the time are good for nothing. Some propose it to breach the final frontier of inefficiency: your family. It never stops amusing me—in a twisted way—when reading and re-reading “The Agile Family”, an insufferable rendition of corporate jerkoff, inexplicably published in a (supposedly) prestigious magazine like Harvard Business Review. I want to believe, published while the editor was on vacation or sick leave. The nonsensical thesis almost sounds like satire. I have to admit, I had to do some googling to check if the author was not just publishing this on April Fool’s.
The idea is laughable and somewhat unsettling: run your household like a failed software team. Define weekly family sprints and set goals. Celebrate retrospectives to identify “what worked well” and “what didn’t”. Set goals and impose OKRs to *checks notes* your kids.
In his worldview, parenting is not a naturally messy human relationship, but a process to be streamlined. Children are no longer children; they are team members who must set goals. By the time your eight-year-old has learned to tie their demand for more iPad to certain agreed objectives, you’ll realize you’ve replaced parental authority with an open invitation to negotiate everything like a procurement contract. Good for raising lawyers, maybe.
There’s a deeper pathology at play here: the assumption that the tools of corporate “productivity” (note the quotes) are universal tools capable of fixing anything from a failing product launch to your children’s habit of leaving socks on the stairs. This is management-consulting hubris distilled into family life, as if the intimacy of home could be optimized the same way you’d shave three days off a software release cycle. Never mind that most Agile transformations in the workplace are vapid ceremonies whose main achievement is the production of more Agile coaches.
The truth is that Agile already fails spectacularly in many corporate settings, precisely because humans aren’t Kanban cards or tokens in a Petri net. In those contexts, the framework metastasizes into an endless series of process meetings whose only deliverable is more process. Now, imagine importing that dynamic into a home.
One suspects the real audience for the “Agile Family” pitch isn’t children at all but parents so fully absorbed into corporate culture that they can’t stop speaking its language even after logging off. Sometimes the best thing a family can do is abandon the sprint, cancel the meeting, and go eat ice cream.
A family is not a product. It doesn’t need a roadmap, it doesn’t need a backlog, and it certainly doesn’t need to be run like an underperforming dev team. It needs time, space, and the freedom to be gloriously inefficient. The tragedy is that the people who most need to hear this are too busy running a retrospective on last week’s dishwasher-unloading process improvements.
Leon Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina tells the story of the Oblonsky family. Stepan “Stiva” Oblonsky’s marriage is in crisis because his wife, Dolly, has discovered he’s been having an affair with the governess. The household is in disarray while Dolly is refusing to speak to him, the children are unsettled, and Stiva is more concerned with escaping the awkwardness than repairing it. The story starts with a powerful reflection:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.