Kanban board for my 12 year old son

Last week my oldest son and I wiped the family whiteboard in our entrance hall and turned it into a Kanban board. The reason for this was that he, my son, was facing a period with a lot of tests at school. He's 12 and in his second year of Gymnasium. And he realised that in the coming weeks there would be a lot of tests as we're approach the end of the 3rd quarter of the school year. There was a slight sense of panic at the time, because he wasn't convinced he could prepare for all tests sufficiently.
So in order to make it more visible to him what needed to be done, and what was already done, we turned the family whiteboard into his Kanban board. With 4 columns (planned, to-do, doing and done) we choose a simple but pragmatic approach. Every gradable homework would be written down on a post-it and we choose the pink post-its for this, it's the 'Grade Ticket'. And the date of the test or on which a paper or report had to be handed in would written on the card as well as some description. The card would be placed in the column Planned. This way we make it visual what's coming up in the next few weeks.

Grade Tickets that need to be worked on are accompanied by Task Tickets, which are either yellow or green, depending on the color of the post-it at hand. This is for every Grade Ticket that my son feels as needed to be worked on. The selection criteria being that he needs to be able to finish all the work to be done before the due date without being overwhelmed with all the work to be done so he still has time to play Rainbow Six Siege and Fortnite Battle Royal with his buddies.

Like I said, we're very pragmatic about this, and I am sure that quite a few of you won't agree that this is a real Kanban Board, but my son and I don't care as long as it works. By being pragmatic, we have every Task Ticket dated as well, meaning that we write the date on which the task should be completed on it. After a week working with the board, this also means that the date means the date on which the task is actually done. The tasks are very simple ones, obviously, because they can be started and completed on the same day. These could be tasks like "Learn the translation of 25 words in Latin" or "Learn to apply the first law of physics in a vacuum". As long as it can be started and finished in a day.

What my son gets from this, is a clear overview of what tests and papers are due at what date. What tasks he needs to work on to study for the test or to hand in a paper. And when to do it. What tasks (still) need to be done today, and what has been done for a particular test. Every time he walks down the stairs because that's where the whiteboard is fitted to the wall, at the end of the stairs. There is no need to open his laptop to check on his assignments in some system provided by school, nor does he need to open his agenda. There is absolutely no need to do anything for him to know what he needs to do. "In yer face visualisation."

What my wife and I get from this, is that we now know exactly what tests he has, and what our son has already done in order to prepare for the test. We get better insights into how he's doing in relation to what he should be doing. Without having to ask all the time, which removes a lot of tension and irritation from our home.

Of course we have implemented some metrics as well. Reason being that this is an experiment so we need to know whether or not this is beneficiary for primarily our son. The metrics we're gathering are first and for all about whether or not our son feels that he is more in control of his tests and papers and the work to be done. We want to know whether the panic-metric is going down in the coming weeks. Another metric we're keeping is how much time he can play Rainbow Six Siege and Fortnite Battle Royal with his buddies. He has a 'screen allowance' of 1 hour on a schoolday and 2 hours on a non-school day. Every day he's able to spend his full allowance is counted and we're interested in whether or not he reaches the maximum possible time playing those games. And then we're keeping track of his grades and are expecting to see the same grades as before or better. Where we do factor in the subjects of the tests and the amount of tests in a single week and so on. So we compare the grades with the final few weeks of the previous periods.

So far we have some results already. First of all, our son is feeling definitely more in control and has greater confidence that he's preparing sufficiently for the tests. One of the reasons is, his words; "because I can now see what I need to do when I come down the stairs so I have less worries that I forget about a test". Another great aspect is that he too is less frustrated because we are not asking him all the time how he's doing with his home work. Already we trust him more and he is receiving more freedom, he's more autonomous, to determine when to do what. So far he has also played through all of his allowance and finished a book. So it seems he does have more time to spare. No grades yet, but we're confident.

So far, our Student's Kanban Board seems to address our son's problems, I guess we do have problem/solution fit. And our son is now using the board without any help and without any significant effort. So I guess we also have product/market fit. (our son is our market in this case).

Arc-E-Tect - Iwan Eising

Disclaimer: This article was cross-posted on the Arc-E-Tect blog and LinkedIn. The text very explicitly communicates my own personal views, experiences and practices. Any similarities with the views, experiences and practices of any of my previous or current clients, customers or employers are strictly coincidental. This post is therefore my own, and I am the sole author of it and am the sole copyright holder of it.

Teach them to fish instead of feed them fish!

Sometimes I blog about the movies I've seen, the books I've read or about the people around me. And every now and again I realise something and choose to share.

Today I had a discussion with my wife about how to motivate children and one thing let to another... inside my head... and I realised that motivation is something that is for all ages. Also, I listened to the Freakonomics podcast about 'grid' which is really insightful.

Anyhow, the discussion was about how to get kids to do what you want them to do although they don't want to do it. A lot to do about school you can imagine. But in general, a lot of my work is about getting people to do stuff that they are not really inclined to do.

Are they lacking intrinsic motivation? Well to be honest, I'm not really buying into the idea that there's something like intrinsic motivation that powers (some) people. Unless it's the motivation to stay alive. Let's be clear, 'intrinsic' means 'by its very nature'. For a more formal definition of intrinsic you should click here.

But that's not important. What is important is to figure out how to motivate your kids to do something they would rather not do but you feel that they should do... I think that's every parents challenge at some point.
The obvious thing to do is one that has the most immediate result: Reward them for doing the work. But I feel that there's two good reasons not to do this.
1. It ingrains a sense of only doing something when there's a reward.
2. It makes something you feel should be 'normal' as something that is 'special'.

So my thoughts on this have changed since recently. Not to say that I was and am always a proponent of the positive view on things. Meaning that instead of punishing undesired behaviour, you should compliment on desired behaviour.

But nowadays I try to figure out what it is that my kids want, especially what they try to achieve and try to figure out what's holding them back. That could be anything, could be a lack of time, knowledge, abilities or funds. Point in case, my oldest son wants to buy a Game PC, one that allows him to play Ark: Survival on the highest detail level without any lag. Awesome were it not that these PC's are fairly expensive. Too expensive for him to buy at this point in time and since he's to young still to have a job after school, there's not really a way for him to earn some money and save up for the PC.
One way to address this as a parent is to use his desire for a Game PC to make him get good grades in school. Not to say that he's doing poorly in school, quite the opposite, he's doing really well at school. He might do better if he studied harder. My view is that his grades are excellent but I would like him to learn how to put in some effort to achieve something. The caveat here is that if we reward him with higher grades, I'm sure that he still isn't putting in the effort but does get rewarded. So, we could reward him for putting in the time for school. Spend more hours on his homework would earn him a reward, but that's still not really helping. Why would he spend more time on his homework if he's already doing well? Valid question with no real good answer in my point of view.
But there's a different approach to it, one that I think is favourable over rewarding. That's empowering.

So, he wants a Game PC and needs some money to buy the PC. He's too young to get a job so, there's a practical problem for him there. We want him to learn to put in some effort into achieving something, but the lesson we want to teach is that in order to achieve his goals he needs to put in some effort. So instead of helping him to achieve his goal of getting the funds for his PC, I help him to be able to get the funds. Sort of teaching him to fish, instead of getting him his fish.

How does this work?

He wants to earn money and his idea is to write an App and make millions with it. Although 250 Euro would be enough for now. So I teach him how to develop an App, with the promise that I will give him a loan that he can pay back with the revenu of the App, so he doesn't need to wait for the App to make a ton of money before he can buy the PC. I know from experience that having an App and make money out of it, is not a trivial task. And him developing the App is already the effort we want him to put in, it's the lesson to be thought.
So he'll get an interest free loan that will be paid for by the proceeds of the App. And the deal is, that he needs to think carefully about the App because the better the business model behind the App, the bigger the loan he can get. Things like "why would somebody want the App?" and "How to make money with the App?" are important.

So he'll get the money for his PC, if he puts the work into it. And what do we get? A son that understands that he's got his own success in his own hands, provided he's willing to work for it.

I call this "motivation by empowerment", it's the classic "teaching to fish instead feeding fish".

So does it work? I think so, because in the past week we've spend quite a bit of work together on programming, he's doing the work, I help him when needed. He's doing it, because he understands that it will allow him to develop the App. Of course he's not complaining that much, after all he gets to spend more time on his laptop than the one hour a day he's allowed to. There's the immediate reward for you: Embrace the empowerment and you'll get rewarded. It's the short term reward with the long term reward. But he's not free to do what he wants on the laptop, nope, he has to work for his App.

Back to the real world, work. A big chunk of my day to day work is making sure that my clients change their way of working, their culture, their methods and processes. There's no point in doing it for them, build their systems, thinker about their new processes and so on. Doesn't work that way, because once you leave, your achievements leave with you. Instead I focus on the fishing and do not care about the fish. No point for me to draw conclusions, instead I help my clients to conclude. It's a matter of empowering instead of anything else.

Yin and Yang, that's exactly who we are...

... it's just not clear who's who. By 'we' I mean my wife and I.

This morning I realised that my wife and I, as parents, are pretty much all the time in a perfect equilibrium. Perfectly balanced. For some reason, there's always the balance between mission command parenthood and mission control when it comes to our two kids.

As I've written before, I'm blessed with two amazingly awesome sons, at the time of this writing age 11 and 9 and a one-in-a-trillion wife, who is at the time of this writing still as young at heart as ever.

So this morning as pretty much all of the time we deal with one of the kids, one of us took the role of the strict and firm parent and automagically the other became the parent showing the patience and understanding. The result, a son that clearly knew what was expected of him, and was perfectly aware of the fact that he could rely on the support troops, the cavalry if you wish, when push came to shove.

Yup, my wife and I, Yin and Yang. Sometimes she's one and I'm the other, most of the times it's the other way around. And every now and again, we're confused and are both Yin. Or Yang for that matter.

The really nice thing about all of this, is that whenever I'm in doubt whether I handled some situation with either of the boys the right way, I know that there's a mom that will balance things out.


It's nice to be Yin, or Yang, when you know that there's a Yang, or Yin.

Iwan