The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family: A Leadership Fable... About Restoring Sanity To The Most Important Organization In Your Life (J-B Lencioni Series)

by Patrick Lencioni

what we do is extraordinarily simple.”

“What I mean is that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. The key is to know how you’re going to do it and stick to it.”

“Maybe. But what I’m trying to explain is that what’s more important than choosing the right thing is choosing something.

so true!

“That’s the thing about a core value. You never abandon it, even if some people don’t like that about you, or even if it’s inconvenient. How can they tell their new hires that humor is important, and encourage them to incorporate humor in just about everything they do, and then tell them to rein it in every time a customer decides it’s not in good taste? They’re going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

I’m here to say that it is not supposed to be this way, and it is certainly not inevitable. Yes, life should be busy and demanding at times, but it should also be lived with a sense of purpose and sanity that allows us to be the people we’re meant to be. And I don’t think anyone is meant to be perpetually tired and stressed.

Context is the information and framework we need to make a decision in the most informed, intentional manner possible. Without context, every decision that confronts us, every situation we encounter, calls for unnecessary anxiety, stressful uncertainty, and unproductive conflict. Which, in turn, makes our lives much more challenging than they need to be.

Samuel Johnson once said, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”

What makes your family unique? If you don’t know what differentiates your family from others, you won’t have a basis for making decisions, and you’ll try to be all things to all people. 2. What is your family’s top priority—rallying cry—right now? You need to know what the single most important objective is for your family over the next two to six months. Without a top priority, everything becomes important and you end up reacting to whatever issues seem urgent that day. 3. How do you talk about and use the answers to these questions? If you answer the first two questions but don’t use those answers in daily, weekly, and monthly decision-making, it will yield no benefits.

What makes your family unique? Another way to phrase this question is, what differentiates your family from every other one on your block, or at your school, or in your church? Two primary topics help us identify our uniqueness: values and strategy. I’ll explain each of them separately, but want to stress up front that identifying them need not be an overly rigid, complex, or disciplined process. In fact, sometimes just answering the simple question “what makes us unique?” will get you there.

Now I can let some things go that I would have felt guilty about ignoring in the past when everything was equally important. Now our family has real clarity.” And that, in a nutshell, is what this is all about.

The first person I want to acknowledge and thank is my dad, who passed from this earth just before this book was finished. You were a rock throughout my life, Dad, and an unselfish source of time and energy and support. I miss you. And I want to thank my mom who, along with my dad, showed me what it means to be a dedicated parent and to put family before everything else. How you managed our homework, sports, activities, and household I’ll never know. Of course I want to acknowledge my wife, Laura, for your complete dedication to our boys, and your unwavering support for me and my work. Sharing the responsibility for managing our frantic family has been my sleepless privilege, one that I will always treasure.