When I first decided to blog on my website, I set a goal to blog once a month. Even for a busy person such as myself, I figured it would be a simple task. In fact, my hope was to blog up to two times a month, when I could.
Looking back, after missing a number of blog posts, I recognize my failure to remember that plans don’t always unfold as we intend. Basically, life gets bumpy and plans get tangled, twisted, or unfulfilled. I can think of two adages that speak to this certainty. “We hope for the best, and plan for the worst.” Or, “If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then 9 times out of ten it will.”
Humor aside, as I see it, shared parenting relationships aren’t exempt from the clutches of uncertainty. Indeed, shared parenting plans undoubtedly experience a fair share of twists and turns along the way. Despite our tendency to create plans as if life never changes, and the skies are always clear, life happens!
So how do parents faced with shared parenting plan challenges minimize or prevent unexpected or negative effects of failed plans? Great question! For which there are any number of answers. To offer one possible answer, I want to talk about a tool called Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA).
In my work as a process improvement professional, I work with FMEA early in a project. In short, this type of analysis offers a systematic, proactive method for evaluating a process to identify where and how it might fail. Odd I know! We don’t often talk about how something might fail. But in short, FMEA offers a chance to plan ahead for things to go wrong.
By considering all the possible ways something can go wrong, which is often accomplished using brainstorming techniques, we can plan ahead for unexpected events. As an example, when my daughter was 8 or 9 she occasionally took the school bus to after school care instead of walking home. I worked rotating shifts as a nurse and her father would pick her up at after school care at the end of his work day. This was the post divorce arrangement we had made and it worked pretty well.
One day, I received a call at work that my daughter had not gotten off the school bus. As you can imagine, my heart raced, I felt hot all over, and I had trouble thinking clearly. Luckily, I had the insight to call our next door neighbor. She was there! In her excitement over a party at school, she had forgotten to get on the school bus. All was well, but I never wanted to experience that panic again!
Now let’s talk FMEA. If I had applied FMEA in the planning process, I could have recognized the difficulty for a young child to remember a rotating schedule. Once recognized, brain storming could have created a number of solutions to prevent the mishap. One solution could be to use two different backpacks. Green backpack for go home after school and blue backpack for take the bus. A simple, yet creative solution. The key is to keep looking for new ways to manage difficult situations. Once we decide there is only one way, or no way, we stop looking.
In what ways might you find FMEA useful? I’ll talk more about brainstorming in the months to come.
For every failure, there is an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour. ~ Mary Kay Ash.
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