The story behind the story

I am an Agile coach. My job is to help teams of smart, capable people who are drowning. Not because they are lazy or careless, but because their work has become invisible to them. Too many things started, nothing finished, no way to see the whole pile at once. The tools I use to fix this are almost embarrassingly simple. Sticky notes on a wall. One thing at a time. A short, blameless meeting every couple of weeks to ask what worked and what did not.

Somewhere along the way I noticed that when parents describe life with a teenager, sometimes one who has ADHD, they describe the same drowning. The backpack nobody can see into. The assignments that vanish between the classroom and the kitchen. The fights about effort, when effort was never the problem. The question I could not let go of was this: if these tools rescue professional teams every week, why does nobody hand them to families?

In this novel, I share the techniques with you to use with your family.