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So here's the good news about families.

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The last 50 years have seen a revolution

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in what it means to be a family.

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We have blended families, adopted families,

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we have nuclear families living in separate houses

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and divorced families living in the same house.

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But through it all, the family has grown stronger.

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Eight in 10 say the family they have today

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is as strong or stronger than the family they grew up in.

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Now, here's the bad news.

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Nearly everyone is completely overwhelmed

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by the chaos of family life.

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Every parent I know, myself included,

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feels like we're constantly playing defense.

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Just when our kids stop teething, they start having tantrums.

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Just when they stop needing our help taking a bath,

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they need our help dealing with cyberstalking or bullying.

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And here's the worst news of all.

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Our children sense we're out of control.

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Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute

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asked 1,000 children, "If you were granted

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one wish about your parents, what would it be?"

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The parents predicted the kids would say,

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spending more time with them.

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They were wrong. The kids' number one wish?

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That their parents be less tired and less stressed.

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So how can we change this dynamic?

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Are there concrete things we can do to reduce stress,

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draw our family closer,

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and generally prepare our children to enter the world?

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I spent the last few years trying to answer that question,

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traveling around, meeting families, talking to scholars,

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experts ranging from elite peace negotiators

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to Warren Buffett's bankers to the Green Berets.

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I was trying to figure out, what do happy families do right

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and what can I learn from them to make my family happier?

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I want to tell you about one family that I met,

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and why I think they offer clues.

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At 7 p.m. on a Sunday in Hidden Springs, Idaho,

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where the six members of the Starr family are sitting down

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to the highlight of their week: the family meeting.

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The Starrs are a regular American family

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with their share of regular American family problems.

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David is a software engineer. Eleanor takes care

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of their four children, ages 10 to 15.

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One of those kids tutors math on the far side of town.

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One has lacrosse on the near side of town.

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One has Asperger syndrome. One has ADHD.

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"We were living in complete chaos," Eleanor said.

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What the Starrs did next, though, was surprising.

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Instead of turning to friends or relatives,

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they looked to David's workplace.

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They turned to a cutting-edge program called agile development

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that was just spreading from manufacturers in Japan

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to startups in Silicon Valley.

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In agile, workers are organized into small groups

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and do things in very short spans of time.

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So instead of having executives issue grand proclamations,

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the team in effect manages itself.

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You have constant feedback. You have daily update sessions.

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You have weekly reviews. You're constantly changing.

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David said when they brought this system into their home,

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the family meetings in particular increased communication,

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decreased stress, and made everybody

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happier to be part of the family team.

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When my wife and I adopted these family meetings and other techniques

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into the lives of our then-five-year-old twin daughters,

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it was the biggest single change we made since our daughters were born.

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And these meetings had this effect

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while taking under 20 minutes.

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So what is Agile, and why can it help

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with something that seems so different, like families?

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In 1983, Jeff Sutherland was a technologist

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at a financial firm in New England.

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He was very frustrated with how software got designed.

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Companies followed the waterfall method, right,

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in which executives issued orders that slowly trickled down

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to programmers below,

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and no one had ever consulted the programmers.

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Eighty-three percent of projects failed.

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They were too bloated or too out of date

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by the time they were done.

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Sutherland wanted to create a system where

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ideas didn't just percolate down but could percolate up from the bottom

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and be adjusted in real time.

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He read 30 years of Harvard Business Review

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before stumbling upon an article in 1986

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called "The New New Product Development Game."

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It said that the pace of business was quickening --

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and by the way, this was in 1986 --

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and the most successful companies were flexible.

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It highlighted Toyota and Canon

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and likened their adaptable, tight-knit teams to rugby scrums.

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As Sutherland told me, we got to that article,

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and said, "That's it."

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In Sutherland's system, companies don't use

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large, massive projects that take two years.

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They do things in small chunks.

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Nothing takes longer than two weeks.

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So instead of saying, "You guys go off into that bunker

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and come back with a cell phone or a social network,"

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you say, "You go off and come up with one element,

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then bring it back. Let's talk about it. Let's adapt."

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You succeed or fail quickly.

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Today, agile is used in a hundred countries,

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and it's sweeping into management suites.

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Inevitably, people began taking some of these techniques

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and applying it to their families.

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You had blogs pop up, and some manuals were written.

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Even the Sutherlands told me that they had

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an Agile Thanksgiving,

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where you had one group of people working on the food,

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one setting the table, and one greeting visitors at the door.

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Sutherland said it was the best Thanksgiving ever.

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So let's take one problem that families face,

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crazy mornings, and talk about how agile can help.

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A key plank is accountability,

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so teams use information radiators,

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these large boards in which everybody is accountable.

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So the Starrs, in adapting this to their home,

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created a morning checklist

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in which each child is expected to tick off chores.

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So on the morning I visited, Eleanor came downstairs,

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poured herself a cup of coffee, sat in a reclining chair,

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and she sat there,

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kind of amiably talking to each of her children

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as one after the other they came downstairs,

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checked the list, made themselves breakfast,

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checked the list again, put the dishes in the dishwasher,

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rechecked the list, fed the pets or whatever chores they had,

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checked the list once more, gathered their belongings,

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and made their way to the bus.

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It was one of the most astonishing family dynamics I have ever seen.

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And when I strenuously objected this would never work in our house,

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our kids needed way too much monitoring,

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Eleanor looked at me.

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"That's what I thought," she said.

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"I told David, 'keep your work out of my kitchen.'

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But I was wrong."

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So I turned to David: "So why does it work?"

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He said, "You can't underestimate the power of doing this."

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And he made a checkmark.

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He said, "In the workplace, adults love it.

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With kids, it's heaven."

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The week we introduced a morning checklist into our house,

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it cut parental screaming in half. (Laughter)

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But the real change didn't come until we had these family meetings.

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So following the agile model, we ask three questions:

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What worked well in our family this week,

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what didn't work well, and what will we agree to work on in the week ahead?

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Everyone throws out suggestions

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and then we pick two to focus on.

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And suddenly the most amazing things started coming out of our daughters' mouths.

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What worked well this week?

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Getting over our fear of riding bikes. Making our beds.

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What didn't work well? Our math sheets,

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or greeting visitors at the door.

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Like a lot of parents, our kids are something like Bermuda Triangles.

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Like, thoughts and ideas go in, but none ever comes out,

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I mean at least not that are revealing.

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This gave us access suddenly to their innermost thoughts.

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But the most surprising part was when we turned to,

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what are we going to work on in the week ahead?

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You know, the key idea of agile is that

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teams essentially manage themselves,

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and it works in software and it turns out that it works with kids.

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Our kids love this process.

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So they would come up with all these ideas.

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You know, greet five visitors at the door this week,

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get an extra 10 minutes of reading before bed.

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Kick someone, lose desserts for a month.

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It turns out, by the way, our girls are little Stalins.

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We constantly have to kind of dial them back.

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Now look, naturally there's a gap between

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their kind of conduct in these meetings and their behavior the rest of the week,

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but the truth is it didn't really bother us.

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It felt like we were kind of laying these underground cables

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that wouldn't light up their world for many years to come.

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Three years later -- our girls are almost eight now --

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We're still holding these meetings.

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My wife counts them among her most treasured moments as a mom.

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So what did we learn?

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The word "agile" entered the lexicon in 2001

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when Jeff Sutherland and a group of designers

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met in Utah and wrote a 12-point Agile Manifesto.

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I think the time is right for an Agile Family Manifesto.

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I've taken some ideas from the Starrs and from many other families I met.

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I'm proposing three planks.

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Plank number one: Adapt all the time.

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When I became a parent, I figured, you know what?

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We'll set a few rules and we'll stick to them.

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That assumes, as parents, we can anticipate every problem that's going to arise.

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We can't. What's great about the agile system

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is you build in a system of change

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so that you can react to what's happening to you in real time.

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It's like they say in the Internet world:

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if you're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago,

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you're doing the wrong thing.

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Parents can learn a lot from that.

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But to me, "adapt all the time" means something deeper, too.

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We have to break parents out of this straitjacket

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that the only ideas we can try at home

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are ones that come from shrinks or self-help gurus

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or other family experts.

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The truth is, their ideas are stale,

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whereas in all these other worlds there are these new ideas

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to make groups and teams work effectively.

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Let's just take a few examples.

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Let's take the biggest issue of all: family dinner.

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Everybody knows that having family dinner

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with your children is good for the kids.

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But for so many of us, it doesn't work in our lives.

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I met a celebrity chef in New Orleans who said,

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"No problem, I'll just time-shift family dinner.

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I'm not home, can't make family dinner?

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We'll have family breakfast. We'll meet for a bedtime snack.

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We'll make Sunday meals more important."

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And the truth is, recent research backs him up.

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It turns out there's only 10 minutes of productive time

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in any family meal.

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The rest of it's taken up with "take your elbows off the table" and "pass the ketchup."

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You can take that 10 minutes and move it

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to any part of the day and have the same benefit.

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So time-shift family dinner. That's adaptability.

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An environmental psychologist told me,

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"If you're sitting in a hard chair on a rigid surface,

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you'll be more rigid.

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If you're sitting on a cushioned chair, you'll be more open."

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She told me, "When you're discipling your children,

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sit in an upright chair with a cushioned surface.

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The conversation will go better."

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My wife and I actually moved where we sit for difficult conversations

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because I was sitting above in the power position.

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So move where you sit. That's adaptability.

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The point is there are all these new ideas out there.

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We've got to hook them up with parents.

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So plank number one: Adapt all the time.

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Be flexible, be open-minded, let the best ideas win.

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Plank number two: Empower your children.

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Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around.

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It's easier, and frankly, we're usually right.

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There's a reason that few systems have been more

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waterfall over time than the family.

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But the single biggest lesson we learned

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is to reverse the waterfall as much as possible.

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Enlist the children in their own upbringing.

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Just yesterday, we were having our family meeting,

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and we had voted to work on overreacting.

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So we said, "Okay, give us a reward and give us a punishment. Okay?"

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So one of my daughters threw out, you get five minutes of overreacting time all week.

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So we kind of liked that.

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But then her sister started working the system.

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She said, "Do I get one five-minute overreaction

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or can I get 10 30-second overreactions?"

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I loved that. Spend the time however you want.

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Now give us a punishment. Okay.

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If we get 15 minutes of overreaction time, that's the limit.

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Every minute above that, we have to do one pushup.

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So you see, this is working. Now look, this system isn't lax.

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There's plenty of parental authority going on.

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But we're giving them practice becoming independent,

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which of course is our ultimate goal.

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Just as I was leaving to come here tonight,

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one of my daughters started screaming.

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The other one said, "Overreaction! Overreaction!"

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and started counting, and within 10 seconds it had ended.

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To me that is a certified agile miracle.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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And by the way, research backs this up too.

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Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules,

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evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex

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and take more control over their lives.

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The point is, we have to let our children succeed on their own terms,

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and yes, on occasion, fail on their own terms.

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I was talking to Warren Buffett's banker,

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and he was chiding me for not letting my children

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make mistakes with their allowance.

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And I said, "But what if they drive into a ditch?"

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He said, "It's much better to drive into a ditch

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with a $6 allowance than a $60,000-a-year salary

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or a $6 million inheritance."

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So the bottom line is, empower your children.

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Plank number three: Tell your story.

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Adaptability is fine, but we also need bedrock.

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Jim Collins, the author of "Good To Great,"

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told me that successful human organizations of any kind

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have two things in common:

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they preserve the core, they stimulate progress.

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So agile is great for stimulating progress,

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but I kept hearing time and again, you need to preserve the core.

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So how do you do that?

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Collins coached us on doing something

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that businesses do, which is define your mission

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and identify your core values.

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So he led us through the process of creating a family mission statement.

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We did the family equivalent of a corporate retreat.

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We had a pajama party.

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I made popcorn. Actually, I burned one, so I made two.

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My wife bought a flip chart.

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And we had this great conversation, like, what's important to us?

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What values do we most uphold?

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And we ended up with 10 statements.

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We are travelers, not tourists.

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We don't like dilemmas. We like solutions.

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Again, research shows that parents should spend less time

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worrying about what they do wrong

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and more time focusing on what they do right,

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worry less about the bad times and build up the good times.

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This family mission statement is a great way to identify

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what it is that you do right.

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A few weeks later, we got a call from the school.

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One of our daughters had gotten into a spat.

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And suddenly we were worried, like, do we have a mean girl on our hands?

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And we didn't really know what to do,

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so we called her into my office.

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The family mission statement was on the wall,

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and my wife said, "So, anything up there seem to apply?"

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And she kind of looked down the list, and she said,

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"Bring people together?"

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Suddenly we had a way into the conversation.

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Another great way to tell your story

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is to tell your children where they came from.

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Researchers at Emory gave children a simple

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"what do you know" test.

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Do you know where your grandparents were born?

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Do you know where your parents went to high school?

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Do you know anybody in your family

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who had a difficult situation, an illness, and they overcame it?

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The children who scored highest on this "do you know" scale

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had the highest self-esteem and a greater sense they could control their lives.

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The "do you know" test was the single biggest predictor

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of emotional health and happiness.

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As the author of the study told me,

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children who have a sense of -- they're part of a larger narrative

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have greater self-confidence.

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So my final plank is, tell your story.

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Spend time retelling the story of your family's positive moments

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and how you overcame the negative ones.

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If you give children this happy narrative,

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you give them the tools to make themselves happier.

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I was a teenager when I first read "Anna Karenina"

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and its famous opening sentence,

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"All happy families are alike.

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Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

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When I first read that, I thought, "That sentence is inane.

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Of course all happy families aren't alike."

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But as I began working on this project,

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I began changing my mind.

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Recent scholarship has allowed us, for the first time,

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to identify the building blocks

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that successful families have.

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I've mentioned just three here today:

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Adapt all the time, empower the children, tell your story.

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Is it possible, all these years later, to say Tolstoy was right?

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The answer, I believe, is yes.

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When Leo Tolstoy was five years old,

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his brother Nikolay came to him

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and said he had engraved the secret to universal happiness

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on a little green stick, which he had hidden

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in a ravine on the family's estate in Russia.

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If the stick were ever found, all humankind would be happy.

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Tolstoy became consumed with that stick, but he never found it.

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In fact, he asked to be buried in that ravine where he thought it was hidden.

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He still lies there today, covered in a layer of green grass.

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That story perfectly captures for me

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the final lesson that I learned:

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Happiness is not something we find,

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it's something we make.

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Almost anybody who's looked at well-run organizations

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has come to pretty much the same conclusion.

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Greatness is not a matter of circumstance.

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It's a matter of choice.

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You don't need some grand plan. You don't need a waterfall.

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You just need to take small steps,

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accumulate small wins,

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keep reaching for that green stick.

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In the end, this may be the greatest lesson of all.

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What's the secret to a happy family? Try.

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(Applause)