The Gut Check

The first time our designer, Rodger Bridges, ran a gut check on our book, I thought I understood what was happening. I didn't. He took a set of images we had already chosen, pieces we'd pulled because something about each one felt right, and he asked us to react. What did we like, what did we not, and, harder than it sounds, why. He asked us to answer through three lenses at once: what felt true to us personally, what felt true to the Sum Total brand, and what felt true to the workbook itself. Not a vote. Not a defense. A gut read, said out loud, three ways.

Then he gathered all of it and reported back, not a verdict, but a pattern. What repeated. What resonated. What was actually useful. And here is the part I did not expect: he was listening just as closely for where we diverged as for where we agreed. When one of us reached for "energy" and another for "ease," he did not smooth it over. He wrote both down, side by side. The deviation, he told me later, is the most useful thing in the room. Agreement tells you where you already are. Disagreement tells you what the thing actually has to hold.

We were deep in building our book when I realized he had handed our entire curriculum back to us, in miniature, without knowing it.

Because that is exactly how we built it. We do not design our exercises to get a family to agree. We design them to surface each person's honest instinct — the student's, the parent's, whoever is at the table — and then to treat the places they don't line up as the insight, not the problem. When a sixteen-year-old says "ready" and the parent says "not yet," most people experience that as conflict to be resolved. We built the work to experience it as information. That gap is where the real conversation lives. It is where the actual young person is forming.

Then our designer said the thing I have not stopped thinking about. The clearest priorities, he said, are almost never singular qualities. They are balances, the tensions a design has to both consider and convey. He walked me through the ones he was holding for our book: energy and ease. Youthful and credible. Clarity and complexity. Expression and purpose. Not one or the other in each pair — both, in a proportion true to what the thing is for. Nail one quality and betray its opposite, and you have made something loud and dead.

That is the whole truth about a family, and about the strange, moving target of late adolescence. A young person in these years is not one quality you are trying to lock in. They are a set of balances, and the balances keep shifting. Independence and belonging. Ambition and rest. The pull to leap and the need to be held while they gather themselves for it. You are not raising a fixed thing. You are helping someone hold proportions that will not sit still, and a family is the room where those proportions get negotiated, out loud, over years.

Most families walk into this process believing the goal is to agree, that a household on the same page is a household that has done it right. It isn't. A family that agrees on everything is usually a family where someone has gone quiet. The deviations are not failures of alignment. They are the design telling you what it actually has to hold. Your job is not to erase them. It is to understand them well enough to build something true.

So the next time your family does not line up, when your instinct and your child's point in different directions, I'd ask you to do what our designer does. Don't rush to resolve it. Write both down, side by side. Ask what balance that tension is pointing to. The disagreement is not noise getting in the way of the plan. It is the plan, showing you its real shape.

The book Rodger was gut-checking that day is the first of our family workbooks — the same work our counselors do with families, rebuilt so a family can sit down and do it at their own table, at their own pace. It arrives at the end of this year. The gut check will be in it, because the gut check is the method, not a step on the way to one.

That gut check is built into everything we make at Sum Total — exercises designed to surface what each person actually feels and to treat the gaps as insight, not trouble. If you'd like to see what that looks like for your family, schedule a Free Conversation with us: 20 minutes, no commitment, no pressure. And if this reaches a family in the middle of a disagreement they're trying to fix, that is exactly who it is for.

Robynne Lofton is Co-Founder of Sum Total Consulting.

The Sum Total family workbooks are designed by Rodger Bridges - rodgerbridges.com