Becoming Good Ancestors: The Urgency of Long-Term Thinking
As a Designer and Futurist in Residence at the d.school, part of my role is to bring in new perspectives to our home team to spark new connections, learning opportunities, generative relationships, and expansive thinking.
Roman Krznaric’s new book, The Good Ancestor, A Radical Prescription for Long-term Thinking, offers a perspective that has resonance for all of us.
It’s more than a book, really, it’s a philosophical perspective that communicates a revolutionary point of view. One of those books that conveys a powerful idea in such a compelling and vivid way, it changes your whole perspective on the world around you. And, once you see the world differently you can’t unsee it.
The showstopper is right under the title, with a provocative quote from the famous immunologist, Jonas Salk, inventor of the vaccine for polio. “The most important question we must ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?’”
Let’s pause on that for a second…..Are we being good ancestors? Today. At this moment. Are we making choices that will be good for our children and our children’s children, and our children’s children’s children?
Roman’s provocation is that we need to do better at long-term thinking and to urgently consider future, unborn generations in our decision-making today. Thinking about the long-term is increasingly more challenging to do in a world that prioritizes speed, efficiency, immediate feedback, and measurable ROI.
However, as the future seems to come “at” us faster and faster, the urgency of valuing and investing in the long term is more important than ever. As Roman says, “We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, and nuclear waste, and which we can plunder as we please.”
I’ve spent the nearly twenty years practicing, writing, and teaching practices of futures thinking, strategic foresight, and design, orienting my work around the question: What does the future need from us?
So, you had me at hello, Roman.
I had the pleasure to interview Roman as part of the New View EDU podcast for school leaders that I co-host with Tim Fish, the Chief Innovation Officer at the National Association of Independent Schools. Given that schools are literally teaching our future — and for our future — I couldn’t think of a more important audience than educators, school administrators, and community leaders to hear and learn from Roman’s work. I’m proud we bought Roman’s book for all of our colleagues at the d.school to use this framing in our classes and upcoming design work.
Roman is as brilliant at speaking about the urgency for long-term thinking as he is writing about it, so I encourage you to listen, whether you’re in education or not. Link to the podcast here or read the transcript here. Our conversation had such a strong impact on me, I wanted to share some additional reflections below.
Reevaluating How We Spend Time Today to Honor Tomorrow
According to Roman, we are all wired to have both the acorn brain and the marshmallow brain. The acorn brain makes the more contemplative, longer-term connections, and the marshmallow brain likes the quick reward. All of us have this circuitry, not just the select few who seem to be gifted with “big ideas.” That’s important to remember.
Given the cultural and technological pressures that we experience daily, we’re much more practiced at using our marshmallow brain — and the external world rewards those quick amygdala hits much more intensely (hello…emails, texts, likes, pings, snaps, etc.). As such, we’re lured into constant attention hijacking, and then rely on (get addicted to?) the emotional zingers that those beeps, tweets, notifications provide. No one gives you a reward, thumbs-up, or “like” for taking things off your schedule to think deeply, meditate, read, walk, daydream, or appreciate art, do they?
This idea made me revisit my calendar with a new lens: If I went back to color code my days based on the time I’m investing in “acorn thinking” — planting seeds and ideas for the long term –and “marshmallow thinking” — things that might feel good in the moment to do or complete — how would that change the way I valued time, and what I did with that time? And, by not doing that, how am I letting down future generations?
At the d.school, we call that “designing your design work.” Being intentional about the conditions, environment, and culture that bring out your best work. This includes physical and digital environments — the stimuli that are often invisible, but critical to our state of mind and capacity for creative and critical thinking.
One immediate step to becoming a good ancestor is to start paying attention to the environments that bring out slower, longer term, imaginative thinking about the choices we’re making for ourselves, and for our future generations.
Practicing Gratitude for Good Ancestors: Past, Present and Future
Roman has an extraordinary list of concrete examples of what he calls “legacy mindset” projects, and reminds us that we are capable of investing in projects that won’t deliver payoff for decades, if not hundreds of years to come. The 135-year-old Sagrada Familia church still being built in Barcelona, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, and the Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 year clock are just a few of the examples explored in the book.
And, yet, you probably don’t study the Sagrada Familia unless you’re an architect or a tourist, or look at the importance of the seed farm unless you’re studying biology. And, if you’re like me, you probably talk mostly about time through the lens of not having enough of it today.
This idea resonates strongly with my belief that we are all capable of thinking more deeply about the future — we just haven’t seen enough visible examples of it in action and haven’t been given the intentional practice time to do it. For example, we don’t walk around forests and say, “I wonder who planted that for us?” Or, when we ourselves plant a seed, think “I can’t wait for my children’s children to enjoy this.”
Imagine if we took time to notice the investments that past generations made for us in our everyday life, and acknowledge them through the lens of imagination, courage, and empathetic care.
Do we thank people who build our roads and bridges by honoring them as ancestors, or do we noisily honk and feel annoyed at any delay? How do we honor and recognize teachers for choosing good ancestor jobs? Do we say “Thank you for investing in our future” or place even more demands on them to achieve short-term outcomes and “performance”?
Following the devastating fall-out of the pandemic, there’s more public awareness and conversation about the need for mental health support and social and emotional learning, but have we really changed our priorities? Has any school flipped their equation to go from 80% knowledge/content to 80% relational and communal wellbeing? If we thought like good ancestors, focusing on what matters most for our children’s time during their foundational years, what would we want to have prioritized?
Feeling Shared Accountability for the Future
Roman asserts that by not considering the future impact of our choices, we are, in essence, colonizing the future. It got me thinking more seriously about the lack of accountability for the future and the void of shared responsibility we have on fostering better decisions. Our tools for measuring future accountability and responsibility fall woefully short to support the type of aligned action we desperately need for global and cross sector cooperation.
All too often we default to applying numerical formulas for accountability. Economists have an established way of thinking about the future called “discounting.” This involves applying some kind of discounted rate of future possibility to the current value today. But, as Roman warns us, using this blunt instrument to assess the value — or harm — of today’s decisions creates a false sense of accountability. The numbers suggest certainty, even though they are most likely speculation, and are often completely devoid of empathy or human understanding.
Our lack of shared accountability and underdeveloped ways of measuring future harm are particularly glaring when there’s no single organization that has to account for the decision — like in the case of climate change. So many people, governments and organizations share responsibility for decisions that will have both individual and collective impacts, yet none are truly held to account. When Greta Thumberg started her movement, Fridays for Future, she was demanding accountability from politicians and corporate leaders.
Roman also shares promising stories of potential accountability within governmental agencies, like Wales’ Future Generation Commissioner, whose job it is “to ensure that political decisions taken today don’t compromise the interests of Welsh citizens tomorrow.” Or the World Futures Society’s call for a UN Ombudsperson for Future Generations to bring “intergenerational justice into the heart of policy-making.”
Hearing about these initiatives gives me great hope. But, then seeing what’s happening at the ground level in our local communities reminds me that there is so much more work to do.
If we are truly thinking like “good ancestors” how do we:
Prevent California’s oldest forests (not to mention entire communities) from burning after years of rising temperatures, drought, and underfunded forest cleanup and emergency response?
Rebuild trust in science (and the scientific process) and use it to guide governmental policies
Strengthen and protect our democratic processes, institutions, and symbols and respond swiftly and decisively to actions aimed at their damage or destruction?
Stop technology companies from knowingly eroding the mental health and capacity of our children and teens who are our youngest living ancestors to future generations?
Act on the painful lessons of the pandemic and racial justice reckonings to address the deep inequities in education, economic opportunity, and access to quality health care?
Roman believes that the key to unlocking our long-term thinking and shared care for future generations may be empathy — one of our most unique and human traits. “How do we make a personal, empathic connection with future generations whom we can never meet and whose lives we can barely imagine?” It’s worth noting that Roman wrote an earlier book, Empathy: Why it Matters and How to Get It, which is also fantastic.
In our New View EDU conversation, Roman shared a powerful exercise that combines his areas of research: empathic time travel. He invited students from his son’s school to step into the shoes of potential future students who might attend their school in the year 2050. They then teamed up to design an exhibit or project from the perspective of those future students. This experience provoked a new discussion at the school, engaging students to think beyond the here and now. The current students created and shared stories of their preferred futures, using the imagined personal stories and perspectives of those who will come after them.
This is the sort of experiential learning that any community, company or team might engage in to sharpen their empathetic foresight skills and build their ability to think long term.
Such conversations offer transformational moments that break us out of the constraints of legacy thinking and 3–5 year planning horizons. They give us the chance to surface our fears and hopes for the future and discuss the pro-future, mindset legacies we want to leave for our family, community and the world. The good news? We can all enact this perspective — it doesn’t require any special technology, access to certain resources, or expertise. Just a willingness to do things differently.
It’s time to start thinking more urgently about the kind of good ancestors that our future generations deserve.
Grateful to Roman Krznaric, Tim Fish, Nancy Murphy, Denise Brosseau, Bonnie Kay, Laurie Moore, Carissa Carter and Laura McBain for their contributions to this article and their constant inspiration for me to become a Good Ancestor (or at least a much Better one).
Originally published on Medium by Lisa Kay Solomon on Oct 18, 2021