Read the full transcript of Episode 9 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, in which host Lisa Kay Solomon—in the temporary absence of co-host Tim Fish— explores what school leaders can do right now, in the present, to ensure that long-term thinking is a pervasive, prominent practice in schools. The guest is Roman Krznaric, public philosopher, author of The Good Ancestor, and founder of the world's first Empathy Museum. He explains how the good ancestor framework can be a foundational guiding principle for school leaders. Starting from the place of asking what legacy our present-day decisions will leave for future generations, Roman traces good ancestor thinking from indigenous cultures to present-day innovations.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Welcome back to New View EDU! Before we begin today, I want to just note for our listeners that my friend and co-host, Tim Fish, wasn’t able to join us for this conversation with Roman Krznaric. But you’ll hear some of Tim’s thoughts and reflections about the incredible wisdom Roman shared with me at the end of the show.
On today's episode of New View EDU, we'll be speaking with Roman Krznaric. Roman is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His most recent book is The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking. Previous international bestsellers includeEmpathy, The Wonder Box, and Carpe Diem Regained. They've been published in more than 20 languages. He's also the founder of the world's first empathy museum. We're so excited to talk about the interdisciplinary themes and Roman's work and why we all need to think and act like good ancestors. Roman, thank you so much for joining us today.
Roman Krznaric:I'm really excited to see where this conversation is going to take us.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Well, I want to start with long-term thinking and diving into what this is, putting some language behind it, and exploring why it's so important for school leaders at this moment. You talk early in the book about the conceptual emergency of long-term thinking and that they are cognitive skills for becoming a good ancestor and as a set of fundamental attitudes, beliefs, and ideas.
So, can you share a little bit more about long-term thinking and what you've explored in this book?
Roman Krznaric:Sure. So the whole idea for the book really came out of a question, a question which I found so compelling, and it was one asked by the great immunologist Jonas Salk, most famous, of course, for developing the first polio vaccine.
And in the 1970s, he asked this question, are we being good ancestors? In other words, how are we going to be remembered by the generations to come? And when I saw that question, I suddenly thought, well, this is it. This is really the question to try and help us tackle the conceptual emergency that I think we intuitively know is out there.
And what I mean by conceptual emergency around long-term thinking is that I think most of us have picked up newspapers, looked at websites and things and seen people talking about the incredible short-termism of society, whether it's the fact that our politicians can't see beyond the next election or even the latest tweet, or businesses can't see beyond the quarterly report or a market spike and crash and speculative bubbles.
And we're constantly looking at our phones. And I think we know that we need more long-term thinking, and often you see this all over the web, all over the media, but not many people ask: what actually is long-term thinking, are there different kinds of long-term thinking? Is it always good for us? Is this something that we can teach and learn? Can we teach it to adults? Can we teach it to kids? You know, is it that kind of a cognitive skill that we can really get a better handle on like driving a bike, riding a bike or driving a car or something like that. And that's really what I, I've sought to explore in this book, The Good Ancestor.
Lisa Kay Solomon:Well, I just want to commend you on it. I'm not sure I have a book that is quite as underlined and dog-eared as my book is, precisely because you make it so concrete, that you really don't just say the words, which is, I think, as you mentioned, we sometimes say, oh yeah, we need to think long-term and we all nod, but we don't actually know what to do with that.
How do we, how do we do that? And I really want to zero in right now on, as you talk about the tug of war for time, particularly for school leaders. I mean, I think, I can't imagine a population that is in many ways more reactive to what's happening in their environment and, and particularly this last year and a half, not just the pandemic, but all the other pressures coming at school leaders. Can you say a little bit more about how leaders can actually make time for long-term thinking, particularly when they're under this external pressure to be short term focused?
Roman Krznaric:Well, of course, those short-term pressures are all too real. I mean, I look at the school where my kids go. My kids are 12 years old. I've got twins and the whole leadership team at their school, which is just up the street from where I live in Oxford, UK, I mean, they are having to respond to changing government guidelines around COVID practically week by week, even sometimes day by day. They're trying to deal with kids not having access to online learning, all sorts of things. And what am I asking? Why should they, how can they be thinking about the long-term? In a way a Groucho Marx quote comes to mind where he apparently once said, "Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?" And I think if you are in a leadership position, often you're just firefighting, right? But I think there's something about education, which is inherently long term. This is about trying to educate kids, socialize kids, give them all sorts of social-emotional skills. Not just for today, but for all their, their lifetimes in a way, on some level, you can think of it as an investment, which doesn't fully yield its fruit until those young people go and become active citizens or family members, or they enter the workforce. And so on.
So educators and leaders in education must be thinking 10, 20, 30 years ahead at least, if they're really concerned about the young people's lives, which of course they are. But of course there's a bit of a tension there too, because what young people need to learn, in some ways, is constantly changing, because who knows what technologies are going to be dominant and around in 20 or 30 years' time. Are we actually teaching kids the right skills, the skills that matter? And it seems to me that, trying to think about that issue, there's lots of skills I think that are going to matter no matter how technological society becomes.
One of them, I think, is, and these are related actually, one is kind of relational skills. And the other one is the skill of long-term thinking. I mean, these are things that young people, whether they're five years old or 17 years old, or whatever, going to need to in a way master. And master partly for their own interests. You know, they are the ones who are going to be inhabiting the future. They need to be thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions and their society's actions. But I think then that raises the question, okay, great. Long-term thinking, what a nice idea. How do you actually bring it into, say, a school curriculum, and, you know, every book I write, I think that its topic should become a new school subject.
I write a book on empathy. That should be a school subject. I write a book about purposeful work or, well, they should be turning that into a school subject too. And of course, in some sense, I think about long-term thinking, being a good ancestor. Wouldn't that be nice if you could just suddenly create another hour a week or an hour a day? You know. To teach this stuff, and that's not realistic, right? One has to think, pragmatically, I think, really, about how you bring these ideas into existing curricula or into whole school activities and things like that. So I've got a few thoughts about that which I can share with you if you're interested.
Lisa Kay Solomon:Well, we're definitely interested. And I want to say that part of what we're trying to do with this podcast is actually raise the question why, why not think about long-term thinking as something that's worthy of an hour or more within every subject, or as a standalone. And I think that's really exciting. I mean, there's a big theme throughout your book about hope, about this being a moment for leaders to step up and question the status quo of how things have gone, to say no, what does the future need from us?
Roman Krznaric:Yeah. Well actually, I do think there is scope for bringing something like long-term thinking more directly into curriculum, and certain places are starting to do it. You know, certainly since the end of the second world war, we've expanded our circle of care to include not just people in our community or city or country, but to people in, say, low-income countries and the developing countries, as they used to be called. But one constituency of people we don't think that much about are those future generations, the billions upon billions of people who are going to inhabit the future.
But I think, in the realm, for example, of social and emotional learning, which of course has developed in school curricula, you know, the last 15, 20 years, probably since Daniel Goldman wrote his book, Emotional Intelligence, back in the mid 1990s—is the idea, for example, of the importance of empathy, being able to step into the shoes of others.
Well, let's not just step into the shoes of people who are maybe voiceless or marginalized in today's world. Let's try and step into the shoes of future generations. And one can learn about this. There are concepts and skills one can learn. Think about, for example, that almost every religion or ethical system has some sense of a golden rule, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Well, let's extend that to future generations. Let's try and treat future generations how we would have wanted past generations to have treated us. And of course, there's a lot to say about that. You know, in many ways we know we are the inheritors of very positive legacies from the past, you know, legacies of cities we still live in, or medical discoveries we still benefit from, but we also know we're the inheritors of very negative or destructive legacies, legacies of colonialism and slavery and racism that create deep inequities that must now be repaired, or legacies of economies that are structurally addicted to endless growth and fossil fuels that must now be transformed. And that raises a question. You know, about what are we going to pass on to the next generation, given what we've inherited, which bits do we want to keep and which bits do we want to move on from? And so I think there's a whole realm of social-emotional learning, where that sort of thing can be brought in, in very practical ways.
I mean, for example, in Canada, there is a great educational organizational movement called Roots of Empathy, where they bring babies into the classroom to teach empathy skills. Over a million kids around the world have done this, normally ages between five and 12 year olds, and the baby visits every few weeks, over a 27 week period with, uh, an instructor from the program and a parent too, or a carer, and the kids sit around the babies. A real, live baby, this is, on a green mat, and they start talking about the baby. You know, why is the baby crying? Why is she suddenly looking up at the father or mother? You know, why is she laughing? They're trying to step into the baby's shoes. It's the skill of cognitive empathy, perspective taking empathy, psychologists call it.
In the Roots of Empathy program, that baby visit is used as a jumping off point for then talking about, like, what's it like to be a kid bullied in the playground, or to be a family sleeping on the streets of Calcutta. But they also use the baby visits to start thinking about the baby in the future. You know, what responsibilities do we have to this baby in 20 years' time or 30 years' time, how should we be acting differently now? And there are discussions, you know, about what we are doing today that's going to affect that baby's world. You know, whether it's our emission of fossil fuels, or new technologies we might be developing that are posing dangers like AI, or bioweapons and things like that. So I think that's one really creative area.
Something else that just comes to mind thinking of Canada, actually, is the David Suzuki Foundation in Canada has created some really interesting curriculum materials, mostly for high school students, around the idea of seventh generation decision-making. So an ideal that's in many Native American communities, the Haudenosaunee and Lakota peoples, where they make decisions based on impact seven generations ahead. And they get the young people to have a look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the great UN document from the second world war. And they point out, you know, in the curriculum materials, that there's nothing about future generations in that document, the universal declaration of human rights, and they get the kids to write new articles, new parts of this declaration, about future generations and about the living world.
So it's a really great already existing piece of, you know, curriculum material that's already out there. But then I think there's another realm, where there's really exciting work going on in a sense. So for example, in the international baccalaureate programs, you know, it's well-known for, in its primary year programs, for having materials about emotional learning built into it. So if you're an 11 year old in Amsterdam doing that IB primary years program, your whole first term, I seem to remember, is focused on the themes of empathy, tolerance, and respect. Everything is learned through those lenses. That's a great way to bring in things like discussing future generations and intergenerational justice, but actually for the older kids, like if you're doing international baccalaureate economics, the latest IB economics textbook is really quite up to date in its thinking about long term economic systems. So if you open the main textbook published by Oxford University Press, yes, you learn about Adam Smith and the 18th century, you know, in the birth of capitalism and free markets. And you learn about Karl Marx and you learn about neo- liberalism, but then you study doughnut economics developed by the British economist Kate Raworth, which is all about how do we create an economy, which isn't just about growth, growth, growth, but it's about staying in balance with the living world, not going over planetary boundaries, things like CO2 emissions or biodiversity loss, and bringing people above a basic social foundation of health care and education and income. And so it's about thriving and balance rather than growth, growth, growth. And that is all about long-term thinking too. So there's really good, again, materials out there to start integrating into teaching for kids ranging from K to 12, the whole kind of range.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I really appreciate all of those examples because I think they get into the mindset shift that you're talking about. Like, how do we pay attention to future generations, not just the past? The systems that we're a part of, and questioning status quo, and the practical applications of it. And I think this comes back to something you said earlier around, these are things that we can practice, that we can develop mastery around. And you actually dedicate a whole chapter around talking about how we are actually all wired for long term thinking and you, and you classify the distinction as, as the difference between our marshmallow brain and our acorn brain. And I think, you know, roots of empathy and others that you mentioned are good examples of the acorn brain that we can open up.
So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about that, about this distinction between marshmallow and acorn and how we can maybe pay more attention to that acorn brain.
Roman Krznaric: Yeah. I mean, I think most of us, if we think about the struggles that are sometimes going on in our mind, we're often in a struggle between the short and the long-term, you know, do I party tonight or save for my pension for tomorrow? Do I upgrade to the latest iPhone or plant a seed in the ground for posterity? This kind of instinct to go one way or the other, or the struggle we face is one I think of as a struggle between the marshmallow brain and the acorn brain, and the marshmallow brain is the part of our neural wiring which focuses on short-term rewards and instant gratification. And of course it's named after the famous marshmallow test developed by psychologists in the 1960s, where the marshmallow was placed in front of kids, and if they could resist eating it for 15 minutes, they were rewarded with a second marshmallow, and it turned out majority of kids couldn't resist and they snatched up the snack.
Now there have been lots of critiques of the marshmallow test, for example, the fact that it is influenced by socioeconomic context. So if you're from a deprived background, you're more likely to snatch the marshmallow, for instance, that partly has to do with trust and authority and factors like that. But there's another problem with the marshmallow test, is that it kind of misses out on something that we've learned increasingly from the neuroscience literature over the last few decades, which is that we also have a part of our brain which focuses on long-term thinking and planning and strategizing, what I call the acorn brain. You know, like an acorn you plant in the ground and you don't, you, you may never see it, you know, mature, even in your own lifetime, and human beings are constantly doing acorn-like things. You know, we are saving for our kids' educations. We are writing song lists for our own funerals. That's the acorn brain in action.
It's the acorn brain, which enabled us to build the great wall of China, you know, to voyage into space, and to develop, you know, public education in the 19th century. These were long-term projects. And humans are actually really good at this, even though you might think we're constantly looking at our phones. I mean, if you think like a chimpanzee, for example, will plan ahead a little bit. They might get a stick and strip off the leaves and turn it into a tool to poke into a termite hole, but they'll never make a dozen of those tools and set them aside for next week. And that's exactly what human beings have a capacity to do. We are experts at the temporal pirouette. And when you think about it like that you can think, okay, here I am running a school, for example, what can I do to switch on the acorn brains of all the kids? We're not just short-term creatures. We are also long-term creatures. We can get really good at this thing. And in fact, we have to, because never before in history, have our actions had such potentially devastating impacts on the generations to come, you know, because of climate change and technology and many other things.
Lisa Kay Solomon: What strikes me is that school leaders have a chance to model this and to really pay attention to how they are communicating their own narrative to their constituents about why they are making longer term investments that may not necessarily have that short-term payoff for the current parents or the current students, get me through this year, get me through this quarter.
So I wonder if you could talk very practically for school leaders about how they might think about creating more support, perhaps more social contagion, I think you talk about, around investments for longer term versus the pull for short term.
Roman Krznaric:Yeah. I mean, I think if you're a school leader and you walk into your governing body or trustee body meeting and say, Hey, we need to have a 100 year sustainability program for the school right now, people are going to say, wait, wait, wait, wait a second. Look, we've got all sorts of other problems to deal with. So I think what's really important is, you need to take people on a bit of a journey to really get them to engage with this. And let me just give you one example of how this could work and ways it does work.
So in Japan, there is a brilliant local government decision-making movement called future design. And future design is actually directly inspired by the Native American idea of seventh generation decision-making. But here we are in Japan. And what future design does, is it works with local cities and councils, and town, town halls and so on, to invite local people to discuss and draw up plans for the towns and cities where they live.
And they typically divide them into two groups, half are told they're residents from the present day, and the other half are given these beautiful ceremonial robes to wear, kind of like kimonos, and told to imagine themselves as residents from the year 2060. And it turns out that the residents from 2060 systematically advocate far more transformative plans for their town or city, whether it's long-term investment in health care, or action on climate change, or dealing with an aging population or automation, all sorts of things.
And what's really interesting about future design, I think, is the way that it's spread very, very quickly since 2015, from small towns to big cities, like Kyoto. It's even being used in Japan's ministry of finance and in big companies like Fujitsu. So why am I telling you this? Well, if I were a school leader, one of the things I would do, and it might sound playful is, you know, you get your leadership team together, whether it is your trustees or staff or whatever, and you do this future design process, you know, when you're thinking about what this school should be doing in 50 years' time. Get people to dress up, you know, make your own gowns, you know, because actually these kinds of almost sort of theatrical creative approaches enable people to embody the change. You know, it's much better than just feeding them facts. Of course, this is not the only thing that one can do. One can do all sorts of other creative approaches to this. But future design is, I don't actually know if it's been used in schools and it would be really amazing to see it used in schools. It probably has, and I just, I don't know all the examples. But I think it's one of those ways of taking people on a journey, modeling the change and making the space for the conversation. And, you know, it's, it's almost as simple as that. And these conversations change people. Like just to give an example, using this future design methodology, there was this one town in Japan where people are asked whether they wanted to pay higher taxes for investment in their water infrastructure, which is crumbling. And everyone said no. Of course not. Who wants to pay higher taxes, right? But once they did future design and they suddenly thought about, well, what kind of water infrastructure do they want for their children and grandchildren who will be living in the city in 60 years' time to inherit? Well, then they were willing to, in fact, accept a 6% increase in their taxes.
I think, you know, and just in terms of trying to communicate this to key stakeholders, the reality is that, you know, anyone involved in a school probably has kids in their lives somewhere, either they're a teacher or they're a trustee who've got kids, or their kids have been through the school or something.
And you can take people on imaginative journeys. I often do this in workshops. I get people to sort of close their eyes and imagine a young person in their life, sort of pitching them. And then to imagine that young person, 30 years in the future. And then to imagine them 90 years in the future, to imagine what's going on in their life, what's happening in the world, outside the window, struggles they're facing, the joys in their life.
And it's to recognize that, you know, like for me, my 12 year old daughter could easily be alive in the year 2100, you know, that future isn't science fiction. It's an intimate family fact, you know, and, and caring about the lives of someone now in the future is kind of what schools are all about, right? Because it's about giving kids something great in their lives today, but also about doing something for their lives into the long future and giving them the tools that they need to survive and thrive in a very uncertain and turbulent world.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Roman, all those examples are so vivid, which I appreciate, you know, making the future feel like not an abstract thing that's so far removed or.... I think equally uninformative sometimes is the spreadsheet, right? We don't think about these, these human stories when we look at projections, you know, and, and it, it reminds me of the distinction between long-term planning, which is often done in business plans, and long-term thinking, which is really done in this vivid, visual way.
A couple of things strike me as, as school leaders think about how to incorporate long-term thinking is that they can look at kindergartners in their school and not just think of them when they get their diploma, which we often do. Oh, we have them for 12 years, 13 years. But really think about them as alumni. And then maybe as, as sort of uh, elders and what the foundation of what they learned in those early years allow them to do as not just again, graduates, but really as contributing citizens in a world that's very, very far into the future.
Roman Krznaric: Yeah, that's really interesting. Actually, it makes me think a little tangentially, I'll admit, about a great story written by the French writer Jean Giono in the 1950s, called The Man Who Planted Trees. And it's about a guy who basically puts an acorn in the ground or a few acorns in the ground every day for decades. And by the end has grown, you know, a huge oak forest by the end of his life, and which will exist long after he's gone. And in a way that's what school leaders are doing with the young people, that they are, you know, growing beyond graduation, they become the alumni, they become benefactors. They get more involved in the community of the school in some way. And I think that's one way of trying to think about, and actually, you know, when you're talking about long-term planning and long-term thinking, maybe this is also about long-term feeling, you know, it's about trying to maintain a kind of emotional connection with those people in their lives, you know, as they grow up. But it's, you know, it's hard to do, you know, as you know, Lisa, from all your work, thinking about futures that, you know, most people find it really hard to think, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 years ahead, you know, or beyond that the future goes dark, as they say. You know, with some work, I think we can shine a light on that future.
And of course, many cultures have a capacity to shine that light, like in Aotearoa, in New Zealand and Maori culture. There's this concept called Whakapapa, spelled with a wh. Whakapapa, which is their word for lineage, your genealogy. And it's this idea that you're all in the great chain of life stretching far into the past and long into the future. It just so happens the light is shining here and now, and what we need to do is broaden that light. So the kind of the living, the dead and the unborn are all here in the room with us. And I think one of the reasons in Maori culture that there's such a strong sense of intergenerational connection is because there's such a strong sense of community amongst Maori peoples.
And the connection there of course, is that schools are communities too. They persist through time. And you know, one of the reasons why in the Catholic tradition, you get people building cathedrals that might take hundreds of years to finish. The idea of cathedral thinking like, like the, the great Basilica in Barcelona developed by Gaudi, which is still being built today. The Sagrada Familia. Why do Catholics do that? Because they know their religion's been around for 2000 years and it probably be around for at least hundreds of years more. And I think that's the same with the school. You know, my kid's school has been around for a hundred years and it'll be around for a hundred years more probably. We're all part of that community.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I mean, I imagine a lot of school leaders at some point in their tenure, for example, are going to have to create a capital campaign to invest in the next. And it makes me think, your work, Roman, about how we even talk about what, the why behind that, that it's not just about a number, or even about a building necessarily or transactional, but it's really about the extension of community. It's really about the offer of values, holding true over generations and how we want to hold on to that. I can't imagine that many school leaders are thinking, gosh, we really need to think long-term about what our school is going to be. Let's make sure we're being imaginative right now. Let's make sure we're being playful. So I think your examples offer an opportunity to think differently about the planning cycle and the way we're going about it to begin with.
Roman Krznaric:You know, I did an event recently with the head of the United Nations Development Programme, Achim Steiner. And we were talking about how, you know, UN planning budget cycles are sort of three to five years. Something like that. Yet they're trying to tackle problems like long-term investment in education and healthcare, going at least several decades ahead, what they, what they're aiming to do. And there's a kind of a mismatch between their strategy documents and you know, and their planning cycles and what they're really trying to achieve. And I imagine that's often the case in a school context as well, but the other thing you just mentioned, this made me think about, again, whole-school creative approaches to this issue.
And just again, I'm thinking of my kid's local school. I, I gave a talk the other day, that day, that special day that the school was having and it was called Chaney 2050. Chaney is the name of my kid's school. And they're trying to imagine the school in the year 2050. So I went along and I did a, several workshops, with the students who were sort of age about 15 to 17. And we were trying to imagine the school in 2050, and one of the things we did was I told them, we started by talking about this empathy museum that you mentioned earlier, which I've been involved in, where one of the projects we have is this traveling shoe box, which goes around the world. It's called a mile in my shoes.
There's an actual shipping container, but it looks like a shoe box and you walk inside it. And you are fitted when you go inside there, you're fitted with a pair of shoes, belonging to a stranger. So it could be of a Syrian refugee, or a young person living in a favela in Rio, whatever. And you literally can walk in their actual shoes while listening to an audio narrative of them talking about their own life in their own words. It's very powerful, very personal, very playful. But the challenge I set the young people at this Chaney 2050 day was to say, okay, this project of mine, In my shoes, is about stepping into the shoes of people in today's world. And I said to them, right, go off and design an exhibit or project for stepping into the shoes of the pupils who'll be at this school in 2050. And they worked together and came up with all these amazing ideas about how to do that. But I think it was part of creating a culture, a discussion at the school, thinking beyond the here and now. And I think so much change requires changing the, the discussions that are going on, you know, not just trying to implement them from the top down or from the outside, you know?
And, and so I think you need these kinds of whole-school style activities, which cut across the curriculum to, I guess, induce or inspire a bit more creative, long term thinking.
Lisa Kay Solomon:One thing I would say about the future, we often think that it's so unknown. There's actually a lot that is known. We know, for example, the next year we're going to be a year older than we are. We know that kids will at some point move on, and why it's so important to think of, I think, students not just as the year that they are, but as representatives of the leaders of the future. And I just really want to point out, to your point about conversations as real opportunities for transformational moments, that in the book you have just this great moment where you talk about essentially good ancestor conversations, tied to your principles.
And particularly the one around thinking about, for example, transcending goals or holistic forecasting, that these could be great opportunities for school leaders to have with their administration teams, with their boards, to change the way that they're thinking about it, to break beyond what I would say, the constraints of maybe legacy thinking that planning should happen in three to five year chunks. Who decided that those were the chunks that we should plan around, you know, and the courage it takes to say, no, we're going to take a different approach?
Roman Krznaric:Yeah. I agree with that actually. And I think that's part of that, taking people on a, on a journey as it were. I used to run this organization, a kind of crazy sounding organization called the Oxford Muse, spelled M-U-S-E, and our remit, what we aimed to do, was to create conversations between strangers. And one of the methods we used was what we called conversation menus. So we'd invite people from different parts of a community together, rich and poor, black and white, Jews, Muslims, Christians, whatever. Mix them all together and put them in pairs and invite them for a meal. But instead of giving them a menu of food, we gave them a menu of conversation, which had questions on it. Like what have you learned about the different varieties of love in your life? Or in what ways would you like to be more courageous? So it was about trying to find commonalities, but we also used exactly the same menus in government departments, in big businesses and so on, to get people talking across hierarchies, to getting the warehouse workers talking to the, to the managers and so on.
And you know, in The Good Ancestor, I've included this menu of conversational questions, which I think, exactly as you say, can be used among school administrators to start a conversation talking about what are your own fears and hopes for the future? What legacy would you like to leave for your family, your community, for the living world? What do you think should be the goal of a, long-term goal of a school or of a species or of a planet? You know, all these things. It is about opening these spaces and then you're ready to really start thinking. Okay. How are we going to put this into practice? How are we going to change the budget cycles? How are we going to do more long-term investment and put solar panels everywhere? How are we going to bring in the best of the international baccalaureate curriculum and steal the good bits which are all about long-termism?
Lisa Kay Solomon:What I love about that conversation menu as someone that has spent many years exploring how to design better conversations that are future focused, that do bring in diverse perspectives, that allow us to get to new places, is that it gives agency in the choice of the conversation, but not a prescription. Which is, I think where so many conversations go, that they're really used as a collaborative way to go through things that have already been decided, versus to really open up understanding and really exploration of what could be. And I think particularly as school leaders have a chance, coming after this extraordinary year that caused them to pause and stop and rethink, to not just go back to what they did, but to use this moment to open up and have these kinds of conversations, really could be transformational for the school and the community.
Roman Krznaric:Yeah, actually the guy who set up this project, this Oxford Muse project I worked with, was a famous British historian called Theodore Zeldin. And he used to always send a Christmas card that said "A satisfying conversation is one that makes you say things you've never said before." And I think that's what good conversation is about, and I think what's sort of inherent in what you're saying there, that it's about curiosity and being interested in other people and their views and being interested in the world. And, well, what is a school, but a place to try and generate curiosity? And let's be as curious about future generations as we are about our neighbors, you know, why not? You know, and let's think about how to do that and what that means, because I think curiosity is a creative way to create connection. You know. And, and, and the sense of responsibility you know, to try and imagine a future world and who might be the pupils at the school in 2050 or 2100. And once you start doing that, then you automatically start thinking about, okay, well, what should we be doing for them? Or can we do things that are good for us that are also good for them at the same time?
Lisa Kay Solomon:I always think that we can't expect people to be experts at things that they've never had a chance to master. And so Roman, I'm with you on the need to talk about long-term thinking and learning how to be good ancestors as a practice, and a practice that's not on the periphery, but a practice that's core. Perhaps to start within each discipline, that perhaps, you know, every teacher and again, inspired by the school leader could say, Hey, look, we spend a lot of time thinking about the past, whether it's in history or science or things that have come before us, we're now going to add a unit on the future, or now going to add something that allows us to expand this to, to build out our ability to invest in our acorn brain and to do it perhaps in a way that is first scaffolded, but over time becomes inherent in how we think about the decisions that we make. Because we know that the structure around school is not always going to be around the structure for adults when they graduate. How do we get them to develop the skills of looking forward? Versus just looking backward.
Roman Krznaric: I think that's a really interesting point about backwards and forwards, because I think, I mean, one of the great developments clearly, I think of the last decades has been, well, I'm not sure this is true, but this is just what, what comes to mind, is that there has been more focus on the past, in a healthy way. You know, like, like in Britain where I live, you know, the history curriculum has started to engage with issues of colonialism and slavery and so on. And there are certain, I think, disciplines where there is a complete failure to think about the past.
So in economics, you rarely learn about the history of economics. But if you learned about that, you would see that it was very contingent and had only followed particular paths. And it was very narrow in some ways, but the bigger gap in a way is thinking about the future of all different disciplines. And I think it's a great idea to try and sort of ask that question about, you know, what would a, a unit on the future look like? Or what would it mean if we asked a question about the future all the way through the existing curriculum, what would we think about and do differently and in a, in a sense there are, I think there are other ways of getting at this.
So for example, I mean there are whole disciplines in a sense, new disciplines emerging in recent decades, like systems thinking, which are all about the long term. It's about learning the conceptual tools of tipping points or reinforcing feedback loops and things like this. Now these are the things which determine the fate of civilizations, like, are we going to hit tipping points on global heating that are going to send sea level rises skyrocketing, well, we're going in that direction. But if you don't understand how those things work, you're not going to be able to think long-term, whether you're thinking about economics or history or physics or politics, or, you know, the social sciences or whatever it is.
So in a way there's core skills in fields like systems thinking which equally need to be brought in. I mean, I've had to learn this stuff myself. You know, I was never taught any of this. Or when I studied economics at university, I never learned about the fact that the economy is a subset of the living world, pretty basic, but no one ever told me that, which means it can't keep going forever. You know, this is the basis of ecological economics, which is part of a sort of systems approach to thinking about who we are and who we could be.
Lisa Kay Solomon:One of the things, again, Roman, I found so compelling about the book of the language that you use and the urgency that you use to communicate it. And, you know, you're exactly right that not only are we coming off a year where a pandemic and COVID disrupted everything, but we really have urgency for social justice, and for a real examination of historic systems of oppression that we need to change. And I just want to call out that when I read how you described the urgency to think long-term as it is about colonizing the future, about saying if we don't pay attention now, we are de facto making choices for future descendants that don't have a say. And that we have to honor, and to your point have empathy, for those future generations through this felt response in order to inform decisions today. So one learning of the pain we're feeling from reckoning from our past we have to consider, is the actions we're going to take to not do that in our future today. And I think that that's a very, very powerful stance.
Roman Krznaric:And I think young people are really alive to this. I mean, just think how many incredibly inspiring—what I think of as time rebel movements, dedicated to intergenerational justice and long-term thinking—are coming out from teenagers, for example. I mean, obviously there's Fridays for Future, which is the most obvious example, but you know, in the U.S. for example, there is this great public interest law firm called Our Children's Trust that has filed a landmark case on behalf of 21 young people, suing the federal government on behalf of these 21 young people who are campaigning for the legal right to a safe climate and healthy atmosphere for both current and future generations. So they're trying to get the U.S. Government, actually also federal and state level, to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.
But this is led by the young people, right? So it kind of doesn't make sense to have a, to run a school in a way that, which isn't alive to these issues that the young people themselves, really are very passionate about. And in fact, in Germany recently, the Fridays for Future movement brought a case against the German federal government, and the constitutional court ruled in their favor, saying that the government was failing. It was failing future generations in its lax carbon emissions targets.
So why shouldn't kids be taught about all of this stuff, to start thinking about intergenerational justice, for example, and things like climate justice and ecosite, and being introduced to a whole language of community concern and moral concern around the long-term rather than just the here and now.
Lisa Kay Solomon: What I love in that example, Roman, is this change of mindset from some of the younger generations in schools, protesting, sharing their concerns as things to be managed versus opportunities to spark new possibilities, right? A, a different mindset of saying, wait a minute, there's really something here that we can use to be on this journey together.
Well, Roman, I could talk to you for hours. I want to end this conversation with something you say early in the book around your work and the opportunity for school leaders to embrace long-term thinking as a prospect of radical hope. I mean, you basically say, look, our future is not written for us, but it does depend on the choices that we make. And you talk about hope as a, as an active stance, going back to the original question that you posed from, from Jonas Salk: Are we being good ancestors? So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit and share your, your ideas for school leaders to think of themselves as architects for radical hope, and some of the choices that they might make in the coming year to set the stage for activities to come. How might they incorporate the urgency of this hope into their work?
Roman Krznaric: You know, there's this famous Steve Jobs speech that he gave it at Stanford, I think, a commencement address, where he talked about how every morning he looked in the mirror and asked himself, you know, if this is the last day of my life, would I do what I'm planning to do today? A kind of carpe diem, existential mantra.
Well, I think a school leader can also ask themselves at the beginning of each day or at the end of each day, what can I do to be a good ancestor today? Or what have I done today to be a good ancestor? In a way it's making that kind of question a habit. And within that, of course, there are many things they could be doing. It could be decisions about long-term capital investment in the school. It could be about working with new curriculum ideas. It could be about setting up a museum of the future in the school, all sorts of different things. And you know, different issues are going to be relevant for different schools in different situations, and different leaders.
But I think just that question of recognizing who I am as a leader, you know, the definition of a leader, in a way, needs to be inspired by the idea of seventh generation decision-making. A good leader is one that's thinking seven generations ahead. Let's say, as a rule of thumb. And that is a leadership quality that has worked for indigenous peoples for thousands of years, you know, it's a form of ecological stewardship, but the stewardship that a school leader has is also a kind of a social stewardship, you know, about the community they're creating and they're generating and regenerating. So I would say, yeah, maybe something like that, that look themselves in the mirror every day, ask themselves if they're being good ancestors, or recognize that leadership is as much about tomorrow as it is about today. It's about the seventh generation, as well as the one that's, you know, you're looking at it as you walk around the playground each day.
Lisa Kay Solomon: That is beautiful. Roman, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure.
Roman Krznaric:Well, thanks so much. I really enjoyed the conversation and it's certainly made me say things that I've never said before, which is always the mark of a good conversation.