Being a good ancestor
Can you feel the world changing around you? How can you respond?
So many people I come into daily contact with are quietly disturbed. Slightly uncomfortable. Some can identify their discomfort, and others can’t. But most of us can feel something like tectonic plates shifting underneath our daily way of life.
My local community is coming together to develop a Disaster Recovery plan – something that I can’t remember previous generations doing. But it feels necessary today.
I wonder what you are noticing in your life?
Cost-of-living crisis, housing crisis, extreme weather, flooding, and insurance uncertainty.
And at work?
Escalating costs of goods sold, changing and vulnerable supply chains, changing customer demographics and purchasing patterns, and employee tiredness due to never-ending change?
All of these are complex or adaptive challenges. They require us to re-learn and change at the level of beliefs or values to make progress.
Facing the multiple crises
In late September, I facilitated the final two-day session with the 2025 cohort of the Governors Leadership Foundation. We sought to understand some of the complexity of the poly-crisis that we are all now experiencing.
I have recorded the facilitative process in a LinkedIn post if you would like to review it. It included Joanna Macy’s four phases of the Work That Reconnects:
Being grateful for what we have now
Acknowledging our current reality and honouring the pain of that reality
Hearing about and experiencing new ways of being and doing
Deciding to do things differently and going forth.
We closed the 2 days with quiet reflection on the question, “How do I really want to experience my life and work?” The types of changes we need now are at this deeper level. Remembering the important things in life and employing a longer time frame. Considering individual change may seem small, but it is the beginning of systemic, inside-out change. I was trying to encourage participants to consider how they might be Good Ancestors for their children and future generations.
If you, too, are feeling the world change around you and wondering how on Earth you can make a difference, be encouraged: your individual choices about how you live and connect with community – what you choose to stand for at work – all make a difference. You are a part of the systems that need to change. These choices are the seeds of something new emerging in our enterprises and communities. We don’t know what it will end up looking like, but we can re-seed the future with the elements of life that we hold dear (values) for long-term prosperity.
Good Ancestor Exercise
I can’t offer you the process I shared with the GLF in a newsletter. Still, I can provide you with this short exercise based on the book The Good Ancestor by Roman Krznaric (btw, husband of Kate Raworth, who developed ‘doughnut economics’ – what a household!). This exercise was designed by my good friend, Eve Turner, and published in Ecological and Climate Conscious Coaching (2023, pp. 206-207), which we co-edited.
Click here for an audio you can use to undertake the exercise on your own or even with your team at work. Get some paper and pens!