For the past 10 years, Carla has taken a summer vacation with her husband, Ted, and their two children, Scott, 19, and Karen, 17, at the same dude ranch in Colorado. They go white-water rafting, fly-fishing, and horseback riding and see the same friends there every time. But not this year. Thanks to the good old economic downturn, the management–consulting business Carla and Ted run together has taken a pretty severe hit and they can’t afford the luxury of a dude ranch — or any other real vacation.

“OK,” I said when I first met with Carla’s family. “We’re going to think like entrepreneurs.” The kids groaned — understandably. “Seriously,” I said, “this doesn’t have to be the end of the world. We can’t have what we want. But I bet we could design something just as good.” We got out a flip chart (you could also use a large piece of paper) and created five columns. Here’s how we labeled and filled them.

Column 1: What’s the situation?

Under this heading we wrote, “Can’t take a vacation.”
“Can we do anything about this?” I asked.
“Nope,” came back the chorus.
“OK, then we move on.”

Column 2: What are we losing?

There was a lot to write under that column. But it was important for everyone to get all the things they would be missing about the dude ranch off their chests. Besides all the activities they loved, they wrote down things such as being together as a family, having an adventure, learning something new, taking a risk, and laughing a lot. Karen told a story about learning to fly-fish a few years earlier and hooking her own hat when she cast her line. Learning and laughing were in abundance on that trip.

Column 3: What’s a new possibility?

After writing down a few different options (and quite a bit of chatter), we settled on “Invent a new kind of vacation at home.” This took a while to agree upon, because once you’ve been to a dude ranch, vacationing at home is tough to imagine.

But all four members of the family were good sports, so we soldiered on to the fourth column.