I've found the life of a parent to be suffused with process changes. This is partially the natural result of constantly changing kids. They keep getting bigger and older and developing new skills (some helpful, some not). It's also a function of my and my wife's constant pursuit of the elusive orderly, stress-free, reasonably clean, not-quite-so-tiring household. Our interest in predictability and stability is beset, on one side, by our highly variable children and, on the other, by our own varying approaches to those children.
Given that, it is probably inevitable that I’ve started noticing connections between my professional and personal lives. And I want to be careful with the analogy. Children are not processes to be optimized, parenting is not a technical problem waiting to be solved with just the right tools, and adults are not simply larger versions of children. The comparison is interesting to me only insofar as both settings involve real people with their own perspectives, motivations, frustrations, and need for autonomy.
I’ve thought about these connections plenty of times in passing, but, in the spirit of taking this probably a little too seriously, I wanted to step back and explore some of the most useful overlaps I’ve found between parenting and process improvement.
The best change management happens before the change
With advanced notice, all things are possible
I, like most parents, am no stranger to the task of getting people to do things they do not want to do. And I, like most people, generally wish to avoid the interpersonal friction that arises from this tension. Hands down, the technique that most predictably lowers resistance is advanced notice. I can hardly overstate the difference between abruptly turning the TV off and prefacing it with "TV is going off in 5 minutes." The power of that five-minute heads-up in staving off an all-out war has left me feeling like a seasoned diplomat successfully negotiating a peaceful transfer of power. Whenever we're making plans or changing something around the house, I've begun jokingly-but-not-jokingly repeating the refrain, "With advanced notice, all things are possible."
I think adults are no different here. Advanced notice gives us time to process a change before we have to act on it. It gives any initial feelings of resistance the chance to soften, gives us room to ask questions, and helps us feel like we've been kept in the loop rather than surprised by a decision that has already been made. Even when a change itself is non-negotiable, knowing what is coming can make it feel more manageable. That can apply to something as small as changing a team routine or as significant as redesigning a process or adjusting responsibilities. The more a change affects someone’s day-to-day experience, the more valuable it is to give people time to see it coming.
Nemawashi, toddler edition
Of all the Lean Six Sigma acronyms, jargon, and reverently adhered-to Japanese terms, "Nemawashi" is by far my favorite. Nemawashi, which literally means something like “preparing the roots,” is the practice of socializing a proposed change or decision ahead of time, so people have a chance to understand it, react to it, and shape it before anything becomes official.
I practiced Nemawashi the other day when we ran out of bananas, which I knew would devastate my toddler, who is a bananas-for-breakfast-or-bust kind of girl. Rather than live in fear of the inevitable, I just mentioned to her, very casually, that we don't have any more bananas! We'll have to eat something else for breakfast tomorrow. This took her a minute to process, but once she'd mulled it over, she asked, "Go to the store to get more bananas tomorrow?" Crisis averted.
The source of Nemawashi's value lies in its informality. Rather than making an announcement or declaration, you're tacitly inviting the other person's thoughts, concerns, and questions. That naturally helps build buy-in, and consensus-building is one of the primary benefits of Nemawashi-ing, but just as importantly, it can surface useful feedback you would not have gotten otherwise. You can then use that feedback to shape the eventual change so it works better for the people who actually have to live with it.
Involvement and the spirit of experimentation
Another lesson I keep relearning is that change tends to go better when people have some role in shaping it. The relationship is probably not perfectly linear, but more involvement means less friction. Both kids and grown-ups are more willing to try something when they have had a chance to question it, influence it, or test it for themselves.
A useful way to foster that involvement is to frame a change as an experiment instead of a decision. "Let's try this for two weeks and see what happens" is a much easier thing to hear than "this is how we're doing it now." A trial period does two things a mandate doesn't: It makes the change feel reversible, which lowers the stakes of agreeing to it in the first place, and it gives the person a defined moment to weigh in on how it went, instead of just being told to live with it indefinitely.
I have learned to lean on this constantly with my kids. When I tried to scale back how involved our bedtime routine had gotten, mostly to buy my wife and me back a little evening time, my daughter treated the proposal as a personal betrayal. Framing it as a one-week trial instead of a permanent change was what got her on board: if she hated it, we'd go right back to the old way. She didn't, and neither did we.
Of course, the framing works even better when you build the trial together instead of just announcing it. That's nemawashi again, just applied to the trial itself: ask what's actually worth testing, what success would even look like, and what should happen if it doesn't pan out. You usually end up with a better experiment and a more willing participant, often from the same conversation.
Of course, not every change is actually temporary and not every decision is up for a vote. But when there is room to involve people in testing, learning, and adjusting, that room is usually worth using.
Developing capability means learning to love the mess
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the mess
A few weeks ago, my daughter asked how she could help me cook dinner. There weren't many kid-friendly tasks involved in that particular meal, so I was tempted to give her some harmless busywork. Then I realized she could take a stab at pouring rice into a pot of boiling water.
This was one of many moments when I was already anticipating the mess she was about to make and internally cringing, while hoping none of it showed up in my tone or body language (it probably did). In any case, she brought her step stool to the stove, scooped a cup of rice, and promptly spilled most of it all over the stovetop. I told her it was no big deal, and we carefully cleaned up the rice together. Still, I could tell she was a little embarrassed.
When she tried again, she entered a zone of total focus. She moved more slowly. She used both hands. She was completely absorbed in the task. Not a single grain of rice was lost.
It has taken a lot of practice to embrace these inevitable first-time messes. Luckily, what often comes after them — extra focus, determination, and care on the next attempt — has generally been worth far more than whatever cleanup came before.
This same basic tension shows up in coaching. If you already know the answer, it is usually faster and cleaner to step in, explain what to do, or simply do it yourself. But if the goal is to develop someone else's capability, that shortcut can be surprisingly expensive. People need chances to think, make judgments, try things, fail, and learn from what happens. A coach who supplies every answer might solve the immediate problem while doing little to prepare for tomorrow's problem.
Most people understand this idea on paper, but putting it into practice is harder than it sounds. The instinct to intervene usually comes from a perfectly reasonable place: you can see the mistake coming, you know the real-world stakes, and you know how to prevent it. There is also a kind of present bias at work. The short-term costs of letting someone struggle are immediate and visible, while the long-term gains in capability are harder to quantify and far from guaranteed. Good coaching requires resisting that pull just enough to leave room for productive struggle, while still stepping in when the consequences of failure are too high.
Design the system around the people who use it
One of the more humbling lessons of parenting is how often a recurring behavior problem turns out to be, at least in part, a design problem. I wasted an embarrassing amount of breath cajoling my oldest to put her dirty clothes in the laundry hamper before realizing that the hamper was simply too far from where she typically changed. Moving it was all it took to produce near-total adherence to protocol.
This is a useful instinct in process improvement, too. When people repeatedly fail to follow a process, forget a step, or use a workaround, it's a signal to investigate the process itself. Rather than assume that the people involved need more training, or more discipline, or yet another reminder, it is often more useful to ask questions like, "Is the desired behavior obvious? Is it easy? Does it fit naturally with the way the work is actually done? Are we asking people to compensate for a poorly designed system with their memory and vigilance alone?"
Parenting has made this idea feel very concrete to me. We have had much better success when we make the environment support the behavior we want: putting kid plates and silverware within small hands' reach, making the pull-out trash bin easier to open, and keeping frequently used things close to where they are actually used. None of this eliminates the need for clear expectations or age-appropriate teaching. It just shifts some of the burden away from repeated reminders and toward a system that quietly makes the right thing easier.
There is also something slightly absurd about expecting a four-year-old to adapt herself to a badly designed household system and then becoming frustrated when she does not. The same can be true at work, even if we are less willing to admit it. If a process depends on everyone remembering the right thing at the right moment, every time, it may be asking too much of the people involved. So a question I now find myself asking more often, both at home and at work, is: what would make the right thing easier to do?
Also — I'm aware that none of these ideas are new, and I certainly cannot claim to have discovered them. Parenting has simply given me an especially active laboratory for internalizing them, complete with short feedback loops, rapid PDCA cycles, and extremely vocal customer feedback.
Improvement requires respect for the person inside the process
Frustration and resistance are often useful information. Kids notice when they are being controlled rather than included and will let you know, one way or another. Adults may be more restrained, but the same principle applies at work. The people closest to a process know things about it that you do not, and their frustration may be telling you something important about the system.
Parenting also provides a daily reminder that "best practices" have limits. What works beautifully for one child can fail utterly for another, despite the same parents, the same house, and roughly the same rules. Process improvement has the same challenge. Consistency matters, but so does adapting to the actual people using the process. Sometimes a "best practice" just has an n of 1.
Optimize a little less, learn a little more
Taken together, I hope these lessons are fairly simple: give people notice, explain why, involve them, let them try, allow some productive mistakes, and design environments around how people actually behave. They sound like process improvement principles, but in many cases, they are also just reasonable ways to treat people.
None of this means our house runs like Toyota. There are plenty of failed experiments, abandoned or inconsistent routines, and moments when all of these ideas go out the window because everyone needs to put on their shoes and get in the freaking car. But parenting has made me less convinced that good process improvement is about tools, and a LOT more convinced that it is about creating conditions where people can understand, participate, learn, and succeed.
