Indy Johar (IJ): ...Covid is just a symptom of a structural failure of our relationship with the world. Systems like this don't fail nicely, they fail catastrophically...

Roman Krznaric (RK): ...We are dumping on the future, we are dumping ecological degradation, we are dumping technological risks...

IJ: ...I think we have to start to talk about this arc of a new human dimensional relationship, a new human potential, and what that is...

RK: ... is possible unless we can live within the boundaries of the one planet we know that sustains life...

RJ: ...If we don't make these decisions the likelihood of us as a civilization self-terminating is superbly high...

Peter Drobac (PD): Have we got your attention yet? Well buckle up because Reimagine is back.

[Music]

PD (narration): We're in a strange moment right now. We're no longer at the beginning of this pandemic but we're nowhere near the end. In some parts of the world we took our foot off the gas pedal and the virus has come roaring back. Yet we're battling pandemic fatigue, making the idea of shared sacrifice harder to sell. The solidarity that defined our early response to Covid-19 seems to be fraying but there's something deeper happening. The tectonic plates of our world are shifting beneath us. Will those shifts bring us closer together or will we drift further apart? Just like America, undergoing a much needed democratic transition, we're in a liminal space on the cusp of transformation and here's the thing: what comes next is up to us. 

Hi, I'm Peter Drobac and welcome back to a new series of Reimagine, a podcast about people who are inventing the future. We're unlocking the discovery process for social entrepreneurs, innovators who are creating value for people and planet. Wach week we take on some of the world's most pressing problems, reframing those problems to reimagine solutions.

As always, I'm coming to you from the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University's Sa‹d Business School.

It's no secret that the Covid-19 pandemic has thrown our world into disarray. Far more than a public health crisis, the pandemic has sparked an economic crisis, a social crisis, a political crisis, it's triggered a long overdue reckoning with systemic racial injustice, and meanwhile wildfires and other extreme weather events signal the increasing urgency of our unfolding climate crisis. All of these challenges predated Covid-19, but the pandemic has exposed and exacerbated flaws in our systems. We all long for a return to normality after months of loss and sacrifice, but is back to normal what we really want?

There's been a lot of talk about building back better, but that won't be enough. We need to
seize this moment to reimagine our systems. We need a reset. That's easy to say but much harder to do. Any one of these so-called wicked problems feels overwhelming. While it may be seductive to seek a magic bullet, there are no simple solutions to reform our systems. We'll need to think and act differently and that's exactly what we'll do in this new series of
Reimagine, a series we're calling 'Systems Reset'.

Covid-19 is a dress rehearsal for 21st century problems. How we respond in the months and years to come will reverberate for generations. It's time to summon our moral imaginations and create systems that are fit for purpose and fit for everyone. It's time for a declaration of interdependence. In this episode, we're going to explore what it means to think in systems. We're going to go deep, exploring the invisible architecture of our systems, and then we'll go long, discovering how radical long-term thinking can unlock innovation in the here and now.

You're going to meet two great thinkers who say we need to rethink the story of who we are, how we see the world, and how we connect to it. We'll hear from Roman Krznaric, a public philosopher whose stirring book 'The Good Ancestor' offers us tools to flip the script and cultivate long-term thinking in a world beset by short-termism. If you want to learn why there are redwood trees on a hilltop in Rwanda, listen on, but first up is Indy Johar.

PJ: Okay all right, I'll do all the intro stuff offline, talking about all of your accolades... 

IJ: Oh really, really don't, let's keep that down to a minimum...

PD (narration): Indy is an architect by training who's working to radically redesign our future. Indy's founded multiple social ventures, from impact hubs in Birmingham and Manchester, to Dark Matter Labs, an analytics and design team that's developing new working methods for system change.

IJ: It feels like I'm halfway through that cross-country, going 'It's a lot longer than I thought...'

PD (narration): They take on projects like the future of cities, and new governance systems for a distributed entangled world. Dark Matter refers to the invisible architecture of our systems. The thing about systems is that we tend not to notice them until something goes wrong. Think about the first time you encountered empty supermarket shelves as you were panic-buying toilet paper. Perhaps you thought for the first time about how food and other essential goods produced around the world magically appear at your doorstep. When systems fail, it's usually not subtle. They fail fast and hard. They fail catastrophically. That's basically 2020 in a nutshell. Indy says that our systems have errors in the deep code and that it's time for some reprogramming

PD: Indy, are you happy?

IJ: All good.

PD: Excellent.

IJ: Let's have some fun.

PD (narration): I wanted Indy to help us zoom out from the current moment, so I asked him to talk about what Covid-19 has revealed about the flaws in our systems.

[Music]

IJ: I think we're going through a fundamental reconfiguration of our relationship with the world. Covid is just a symptom of a structural failure of our relationship with the world. Climate change is a symptom of a much more structural failure between our relationship with the world. Inequality or even waste economy is a fundamental failure with our relationship to the world. That relationship structure was imagined in the kind of thesis of the Newtonian physics landscape when Newtonian physics was being imagined, we started to construct the world view based on a relatively infinite world which we organised through making things objects. That was perfect for a period where we were imagining the Earth to be Terranova. What's now happened is that actually there's been fundamental shifts. One, the externalities that that world is generating are starting to materially feed back into us, so climate change is a good example, waste is a good example. You know, you drink a glass of water it's got micro plastic beads and all that sort of plastics inside it, all sorts of stuff. 

So one we're getting feedback, but the other end we've got a foundational transition of our perception of the world. So whether you look at a quantum physics level which would talk about entanglement and wholeness at a structural level of how we see the world, everything is entangled at a quantum level. Or you can talk about at the biological level, where you would talk about mycelium networks and actually these tree networks which sit deep into our root system, which actually trees are not single systems but they're webs. 

We also know that actually our physical body is highly dependent, contingent, with through epigenetics and other things, actually with our environment. So microbiomes have a massive effect on our biological systems and our capabilities. We know our brain is a social function, and then if you layer on top of that our informational structures which are now building an interconnected net of institutional landscapes, we have moved from this object-orientated world to an entangled world of wholeness. And what we have is a thesis of organising which is changing. So in an object world, we had management theory, we had command and control theory. In an entangled world, that thesis doesn't work. That requires a different thesis of organizing and change. When we talk about this, I think lots of people get frustrated by having to spend time on the philosophy, but my thesis is that unless you can spend time here, actually the nature of solutions and the nature of what we generate becomes fundamentally problematic. So if you're talking about an entangled wholeness theory, then what you're trying to build is not either point solutions, you're trying to build the capacity of a system to be agent and free and aware, conscious of its interdependence. So conscious interdependence is a key characteristic.

So you start to have a completely different theory of organizing and change and I just put that on the table because I think it's relatively easy to define the paradigm shift. In a kind of way, okay we're in a new moment. I think there's something deeper going on. Competition doesn't work as a theory in entanglement. Competition is a net zero sum game and a net reduction game in an entangled world. Competition does work in an infinite world with objects, and so what we're also creating is a structural paradigm shift between how we see evolutionary human development, from competition orientated to complex collaboration-additive orientation. We don't know how to do that. And the other thing is we're currently operating in this entanglement, in a thesis of the old world which means what we're doing is we are now a global entangled civilization, trying to think we're individuals and objects, which means that actually that's where the risks are accruing because we're acting like individuals when it's very, very clear the entanglement needs a new response. 

PD: This is where so much of the chaos that I think we all feel comes from right, that there's the world in which we wish we were in, one that's linear, controllable, predictable. But in fact we live in one that's complex and interdependent and tangled as you say, and that sort of disconnect is where so much of, I think so much of, this kind of feeling of chaos comes from and strikes me as you say this how sort of ill-equipped many of us are to think and act in in this way, and so I want to dig into notions of innovation and how change happens a little bit. You know one of the things that's really frustrated me through the pandemic and so much as I've been engaging on the public health side is that even as the virus continues to rip through our communities and wreak havoc, so many people just seem kind of resigned to sit back and let it happen, waiting for the vaccine cavalry to come and kind of save the day, as if one day a scientist is going to announce the big breakthrough of a new vaccine and voila suddenly we're back to normal and the pandemic is over, right, it's on or it's off. And I think it's really emblematic of the narrow way that we approach innovation and how change happens. That we're always kind of seeking a single point of intervention and a magic bullet. Do you agree with that? And you know, to come back to what you were talking about, how do we need to think differently about innovation and theories of change?

IJ: I mean I totally agree with that. I think the paradigm problem is even greater for democracies. So I think why democracies are also struggling is because the paradigm of innovation is driven through a thesis of management theory, which is a command and control problem. So as the world becomes more complex, the only perceivable path in the current system is to drive greater command and control, to somehow greater perceive the problem and greater at speed respond to the problem. So we're kind of locked into this, and democracies are struggling because the greater you concentrate that power the less democratic they become. And so at a structural level, exactly right, I think we've got to change our thesis of innovation from management theory to societal. I would argue that our innovation window and our capacity has been entirely constructed by context, and the context is that if you make people precarious, so if we design an economic model which is systematically designed to make people precarious, sustainably precarious, mind you, but precarious, what you do is you reduce their capacity to think to short termism. It happens all the time in recessions. When there's an economic recession, people don't stop buying, they just buy chocolate, they buy clothes, they buy psychological fixes. With their short-term psychological fixes, they reduce the capacity to think long-term. In fact we know when you put households under financial stress the intellectual capacity of that household, regardless of anything, drops. Intellectual capacity drops by 13 points, 13 IQ points drops just by putting financial stress. So not only do you reduce the long-term capacity, you actually make people addicted to short-term psychological fixes.

So what we've created is a macroeconomic thesis, I would argue, which is driven on short-termism and also driven on making everyone's kind of neuropsychological window short-termist, and also driven to actually fix short-termist needs as a result of the kind of deficit gap. So if you look at a structural level, I would say that's the kind of systematic design that is creating our future, and often we leverage the thoughts of individuals but what's more interesting is what is the collective capacity of society to think, and I think we've been downplaying the collective capacity of society fundamentally, and we've been creating institutional infrastructures which actually structurally destroy that. So i could come here and say yeah here's a system diagram here's 12 leverage points, that's the easy solution, and then in fact that's only what I'd call 'solutioneering', it's not systemically building the capacity of the system to make better decisions. So we need to more and more talk about the role of context engineering in order for systems to make better decisions.

PD: You've sometimes talked about the boring revolution, talk about that a little bit. 

IJ: Sure, the boring revolution was kind of just a sort of a slight frustration by me that there was a lot of cultural work going on about our interdependency, but actually when you looked at the term sheets, the employment contracts, the property rights, these institutional infrastructures, these kind of layers of how we see the world, they were fundamentally broken. So property is a kind of an interesting thesis and so we're doing a lot of work around future property rights, so property rights was built on a thesis that only by assigning property would you look after something, would you steward it. That was kind of the underpinning philosophical argument, but the reality is that actually property is the enslavement of a piece of land to your needs. And that was about our relationship with dominion over everything. So this coding of our reality has been intentionally designed and constructed over a period of time and it's manifesting in the faults that we see around us. We have already been doing hacks whether it's B Corps and all these things, are tweaks and adjustments to deal with the systemic failures that we've got on our table. And those to me are a whole class of deep code errors, that I think we have to reimagine for this new entangled wholeness thesis of the world. It is not that we control the world, we are in relationship to the world. And that means whether we are moving from property rights to being in treaty with nature, I think starts to create a fundamentally different type of relationship, and that 'boring revolution', that revolution of how we relate to the world, is coded in our institutions and our institutional infrastructures. And if we're going to make the transformation, we have to start to transform those things. So I think we have to start to talk about this arc of a new human dimensional relationship, a new human potential, and what that starts to imply.

PD: Let's talk more about how to actually make this stuff happen right, what you're talking about here is fundamentally rethinking our relationship with the world, our relationship with nature, our institutions, our systems of governance and so much more. You know that systems change or shifting systems is easy to talk about and hard to do. I think you've articulated that so could you give an example whether that's, you know, large or small in scale of a group of people who have effectively engendered some kind of systems transformation.

IJ: I don't think it's some people, I think it's an emergent phenomenon of society, but there are contributions that we can all make to that story, and I think the contributions are laying out some of these possibilities. So if I was to say, you know, if we could take a tree and reconfigure our relationship with a tree, really simple goal because currently a tree is an economic resource. And you can start to say, so most trees in cities are less than 10 years old, the reason why is that after 10 years old their maintenance costs go up and their insurance costs go up, yet the environmental services are not priced in, so which is why trees get chopped down and replaced with nice young trees. And everyone goes 'oh no we haven't cut down your tree'. The environmental benefit of your trees really arrives in 40 years, so it's when 40 year old trees are there you get the heat island effect, canopy cover, you get environmental services in terms of sustainable urban drainage. So for me, we want to change the relationship with trees by not only looking at how you fund these things, so what is the financing mechanism, but also how you govern. What's the governance architecture of trees and how do they govern themselves, how do you create self-sovereignty? But also looking at the relationship of value that they generate and how is that constructed. So what we have to do is create, go from being a siloed economy, to a co-benefits economy, to a care economy. The siloed economy is individual value; the co-benefits economy is the multiplicity of values of being able to contract and engage in that; the care economy is moving to an intentional model of intrinsic organizing which actually builds a new form of rich multiplicity at a level that we can't perceive yet, and we don't know how to organize. But I think if we see these as transitions then the middle transition is where we're at. The reality is you can build a cluster of trees relatively easily but it's building the micro trust and building all the other stuff in terms of actually human engagement, so these economies mustn't be financial economies only there must be human contribution economies and then at the higher level then there is a third dimension to the problem, which is really about recognizing, and this is something we're starting to scratch the itch of. 

Which is to say we're operating in a type of new planetary consciousness and I think the challenge that we have is we're still organized from the thesis of the individual, or whether it's individual or the individual state, which means that we're not able to recognize our planetary interdependence, and that way you can start to look at what is the constitution of a national state, when it starts to recognize future generations, the billions more people that are going to come in the future whose futures we're limiting, as well as our interdependence with ecological systems at a global level, so what does the constitution of a nation really look like when you start to recognize your interdependence. And it's the interdependence recognition both in space and time, but I think you have to create the political, social, neurological context for that capacity. So we have to engineer that capacity to do that and that's the big human development transition. It's not a machine problem, it's not an anything else problem, it's a human development problem. Until we can get the human development conditions right, some of the transition infrastructures that we're having to play through are just not possible, because if you've been locked into precariousness then competition is your only thesis, and in order to break through that, that's the paradigm leap I think we're facing as a globe, as a planet. As we're moving into that, that is the paradigm leap, and if we don't make these decisions the likelihood of us as a civilization self-terminating is superbly high. 

PD: I want to build on that little existential exclamation point that you added there at the end, you know, you and I were speaking this summer and a provocation that really stuck with me was you said that 'our actions in the next 10 years will determine the future of civilization' and that sounds both terrifying and blindingly obvious. Talk about that, we've talked about sort of the size and the scale of the challenges, and the scale of transformation that's needed, but there's a real urgency as well. Can you talk a bit about that?

IJ: So I think the next 10 years are fundamental because actually, systems like this don't fail nicely they fail catastrophically. So what happens is moments like this, and you know we've seen the beginnings of some of these conversations already, we're going to start to see global conflict coming to the table very soon, and it's pretty predictable. And I think that's what we're starting to do, we're starting to build frameworks which actually leave people no choice, and I think we need to stop worrying about enterprise. So slightly controversially, I think we need to start to really deeply go for the rules of the game as a mechanism itself, and recognize that actually by transforming those we will create whole new forms of value in a way that was unperceivable 'til now. You know, when the mental health of a city is an asset, what does that do? When it's on the balance sheet of assets, what does it do? I think we're in a tipping point of a new human economy, when actually the role of machine intelligence is not to enslave us but to enable us. What does that do? What does it do when it enables our democracy in really radical formats? 

PD: Let's finish aspirationally, so if this is to be our decade of action, how would you frame, for all the young change makers out there around the world listening, how would you frame our mission in the next 10 years?

IJ: The two things I would say is, one, is in an entangled world everything is powerful so there is no magic moment that you need to reach to be able to do this. Like I said we're starting with the relationship with the tree. I think everything is up for grabs whether it's food systems, healthcare systems, either the idea of any of this stuff, power, currency, these are all going to be recast. See the world as liquid and fragile and vulnerable. I think the second thing is actually there's a lot of school mottos out there which is, you know, 'be on service of the world'. I would not say that anymore, I would say 'be the world'. I don't think it's about us being in service to somebody else, it's about recognizing that we are the world in itself, and I think that recognition invites us and requires us to operate differently. The other thing is I would just be deeply much bolder. Much, much bolder, you know, for all the likes of Google and Uber - Uber just created a global taxi company right, I need the social  change makers to be a little bit more ambitious than building taxi companies. I think for all the likes of Google, which I think is extraordinary, they really just created a search engine. I think there's a whole bigger demand, I think our scale of ambition must become deeply proportionate to the scale of challenge, and we really must stop product replacing the other economy, but fundamentally redesign it. Lots of advice but the major thing would be, we have to think at the scale of the problem. 

[Music] 
PD (narration): You can see why I love talking with Indy Johar, he really lives up to the name of this podcast. And I think his charge to us that we be much bolder is dead right, because a great transition is underway whether we like it or not. The question is whether we have the moral courage to shape that transition. Wouldn't it be powerful to collectively imagine a future that's awesome in both the literal and American senses of the word? Speaking of futures, let's see if we can really stretch our time horizons. Let's think about the world our grandchildren's grandchildren might inhabit what legacy will we leave to them?

Roman Krznaric (RK): Okay so that's rolling.

PD: So we're both rolling...

PD (narration): Our next guest believes that long-term thinking is a superpower. Roman Krznaric is a political scientist turned public philosopher, who writes about the power of ideas to change society. He not only wrote an influential book about empathy, he actually founded the world's first empathy museum. In his latest book, 'The Good Ancestor', Roman draws on notions of empathy to challenge us to walk in the shoes of future generations.

[clip from Greta Thunberg speech] I want you to act as if the house was on fire.

PD (narration): One of the tools Roman will share with us is 'cathedral thinking', grand projects that take generations to complete. 

[Greta Thunberg] It will take courage, it will take a fierce determination, to act now.

PD (narration): Imagine building something knowing that you will never see it finished in your lifetime. Fans of the climate activist Greta Thunberg, might be familiar with this idea.

[Greta Thunberg] In other words, it will take cathedral thinking. I ask you to please wake up and make changes required possible.

PD (narration): I had my own experience with cathedral thinking when working with colleagues in Rwanda to create the University of Global Health Equity. The big idea behind the university was not simply to train a new generation of healthcare leaders for Africa and the world, the big idea was to accelerate a movement that would fundamentally transform public health and human development over decades. And so as the community was building the university's campus on a hilltop in northern Rwanda, right next to a beautiful hospital built by and for that same community, we did something really cool together. Dr Paul Farmer, who we heard from in the very first episode of this podcast - if you haven't heard it yet please do go back and listen - Paul brought some redwood seedlings from California over to Rwanda. Redwoods, as you know, are these majestic trees that live for literally thousands of years. We planted those redwoods around the hospital and university as a visible reminder of the long-term ambitions for this special place. So you can see why 'The Good Ancestor' really resonated with me. As an adopted son of Africa, I've gained a deep respect for the legacy gifted to us by our ancestors, but until I read Roman's book I never thought of myself as an ancestor in the making. So I started by asking Roman what it means to be a good ancestor.

RK: The concept of being a good ancestor is one I stole from the great immunologist Jonah Salk, who back in the 50s with his team developed the first polio vaccine, but later in life when he described himself as a bio-philosopher he said that the great question facing our civilization and the next century is 'are we being good ancestors?' In other words, how are we going to be remembered by future generations. And I think what he recognized, this is something we all know, that you know in the next two centuries alone, billions upon billions of people will be born. Far, far more than those who are alive today, and the question is, well what is our obligation, our responsibility, to those future generations? And he believed that if we were going to tackle the challenges of our age, we needed to expand our time horizon, so instead of thinking on the scale of minutes, seconds and hours, we needed to think on the scale of decades, centuries and millennia. 

And I think today that makes complete sense, because we need to recognize that never before have human beings had actions which have such consequences for future generations. I mean we see it of course in areas like public health care, recognizing that those countries that had long-term pandemic plans in place have dealt with the virus much more effectively than those which haven't, but we've got these long-term issues to deal with. Of course there is the climate crisis, we've got carbon in the air for hundreds of years, we've got sea levels rising for hundreds of years, we already know that. And then we've got technological risks to deal with, so risks from AI-controlled lethal autonomous weapons, or perhaps genetically engineered pandemics, again long-term issues which we are imposing on future generations, long-term risks. And then there are these very deep inequalities, racial inequalities and wealth inequalities, which get passed on from generation to generation. And all of these raise a kind of paradoxical perspective really, which is that the need for long-term thinking is incredibly urgent. We need to be good ancestors right here right now, because we live in the age of the tyranny of the now. Our politicians who can't see beyond the next election or even the latest tweet. The businesses that can't see past the quarterly report, the markets that spike and crash in speculative bubbles. The nations that sit around international conference tables bickering away while the planet burns and species disappear, and then of course as individuals there we are with our phones looking at the next text and clicking the buy now button. We must challenge this tyranny of the now. 

PD: We live in a world that's moving, it feels like faster than ever, and if a corporation operates on a time horizon of greater than three months we celebrate them as being visionary, so it feels like we're sort of trapped in these loops of short-term thinking, but as you articulate in the book, there are many examples of long-term thinking across geographies and across cultures that you draw from. Talk about some of those examples.

RK: Yeah, I think we sometimes forget that human beings actually have this extraordinary capacity to think long term. Sometimes it's called cathedral thinking, that's the idea of embarking on projects and programs and policies with time horizons decades, even centuries, ahead. Embarking on things we know will never be completed within our own lifetimes. Of course, it's called cathedral thinking in honour of those medieval cathedral builders in Europe who would start building their religious edifices, knowing they'd never be completed within their own lives. You know for example there's the famous Lutheran church in southwest Germany, Ulm Minster, which was begun in 1377, when the good citizens of Ulm said that they wanted to finance their own church, build their own church. Well it wasn't finished for 500 years until 1890. Now it's probably the world's longest crowdfunding project, but of course it's not the only one. This kind of cathedral thinking we see in realms like, well the building of the Great Wall of China, or the sewers of Victorian London, built after the Great Stink of 1858 which as I'm sure you know, as a public health expert, that that was an era when raw sewage was being dumped in the Thames, tens of thousands of people were dying every year from cholera, diphtheria, and so on, and it was only after the long hot summer of 1858 when the stench of the sewage from the Thames was going into parliament itself, parliamentarians walking around with face masks on, they couldn't breathe, something they're doing now. And that's when they passed the legislation to build the sewers, which took 19 years. 22,000 workers, 318 million bricks, masterminded by the chief engineers of Joseph Bazalgette, and those sewers are still being used today, because Bazalgette made them twice as big as they needed to be. That was long-term cathedral thinking. And then we see it around today as well, like the Svalbard global seed vault, collecting millions of seeds in an indestructible rock bunker in the arctic circle that's designed to last a thousand years, that's the kind of thinking that would have really impressed Jonah Salk if he was still around today. 

I believe we have two parts of the brain, or two parts of the brain we don't often talk about: a marshmallow brain and an acorn brain. The marshmallow brain is the part of our neural anatomy, which focuses on short-term rewards and instant gratification, and that's named of course after the famous marshmallow test from the 1960s. The psychology test where a marshmallow was put in front of kids and if they could resist eating it for 15 minutes they were rewarded with a second marshmallow, and most couldn't resist. Now, we all know about that part of the brain in a sense because we constantly hear a narrative in media, society, business, that we're driven by short-termism, driven by the 'buy now' button. This is human nature, but in fact it is not human nature, it's only part of the story of who we are. We also have wired into us what I think of as the acorn brain. Acorn of course because it's about long-term thinking and planning and strategizing, planting seeds that we know may not mature for years or decades, and this is a new part of the brain. The marshmallow brain's about 80 million years old. The acorn brain is a couple of million years old only, and it lives at the front of the head in the frontal lobe. Particularly a part, if you're interested, called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and that is the part which we are wired to help, you know, enables us to think for the long term. Now other animals of course do plan ahead, so a chimpanzee will get a stick, strip off the leaves, and turn into a tool to poke into a termite hole, but they'll never make a dozen of these tools and put them aside for next week, but that is precisely what a human being will do. We are long-term planners extraordinaire, we plan and save for our children's educations, we write song lists for our own funerals, it's that acorn brain which has enabled us to voyage into space and embark on all those cathedral thinking projects. So metaphorically I think we need to recognize we are not just short-term marshmallow snatchers, we are long-term acorn thinkers, and we need to learn how to switch on the acorn part of our brains and create economic institutions, public institutions, culture which amplifies it in a way. I think of the, the ultimate symbol is the buy now button, now just imagine if instead of a buy now button when you went to your favourite online shopping emporium, there was a buy later button and when you pressed buy later, well there was the option to buy now, but there's also 'buy in a week', 'buy in a month', 'buy in a year' or 'borrow from a friend'. If you press 'buy in a year' maybe you'll get an email in a year's time asking whether you really want that third yoga mat. Maybe you won't, right, but that's currently not how technology works, because we are not making that effort to amplify the acorn that lives inside our own heads. 

PD: In some ways the ability to conceive of and plan for the future is fundamentally what defines what it means to be human, right, that's how we have these big foreheads to make space for our big frontal lobes. Let's talk about how we can develop our acorn brains, and you lay out some really fascinating tools in your book. In this podcast we talk a lot about how social innovation works and the idea of reframing problems to reimagine solutions, and one of the tools you talked about was this concept of 'intergenerational justice' and seventh generation thinking. It strikes me as a really powerful reframing tool, could you talk about that a bit?

RK: Sure, so the idea of seventh generation thinking is normally associated with Native American communities, particularly Iroquois people, Lakota people, who today use this principle of making decisions based on the impact seven generations ahead. It can also be found in Indonesia in the Moluccas Islands where village councils look seven generations back and forward making decisions, and there are also congruent concepts, for example in Aotearoa and New Zealand, in Maori culture they have an idea of a concept called Whakapapa, spelt with the wh but pronounced with an f, and that's their idea of genealogy, the idea that we're on a long chain of life stretching long into the past, far into the future. We need to consider the whole thing, not just shine the light on the present, but what I think is really fascinating about seventh generation decision making is on the one hand you might think 'well, that's what those indigenous people, do that's not something for the modern world of Miami or Dubai or Shanghai', but what I find really interesting is how many organizations today, people who I think of as time rebels, people committed to intergenerational justice and long-term thinking, are picking up on the idea of seventh generation thinking and putting it into practice. One example I love is a local government decision making movement in Japan called 'future design'. They are directly inspired by the Native American seventh generation idea, and what they do is they invite local people, local residents, to design and draw up plans for the towns and cities where they live, and they typically split them into two groups. Half of them are told they are residents from the present day, and the other half are given these almost sort of ceremonial yellow kimonos to wear, and told to imagine themselves as residents from the year 2060. Well it turns out that the residents from 2060 come up with much more transformative city plans than the current residents, whether it's in the area of healthcare investment, or climate change action, or AI, or Covid response, it enables them to start thinking about what's the impact going to be on my children, my grandchildren, the wider community? And this future design methodology is now spread from small towns like Yahaba to major cities like Kyoto. It's even being used in Japan's Ministry of Finance, and some businesses are starting to use it too. The idea of trying to give a voice to those future generations. There's the great founder of the UK renewable energy company, Juliet Davenport, the energy company Good Energy, she talks about future holders and about trying to give them a voice in the boardroom, and there aren't just shareholders and stakeholders. Let's think about those future holders too. So I'd love companies around the world to be dressing up in those yellow kimonos, like they do with future design in Japan, imagining themselves as the future holders, the customers, the stakeholders from 2060, and seeing how they would judge the actions of today. You know, why don't we do that? 

I think there's been a revolution in say, empathy, across space but not through time. So since the end of the second world war, we've seen the expansion of the moral circle to, you know, developing countries now, low-income countries as we might talk about them, where people were not giving humanitarian aid or not a lot of it before the second world war. That has changed, but we haven't yet made the same shift to thinking about our extending our moral circle through time, and I think that's the next step as it were, or a fundamental next step in expanding our moral universes.

PD: I'm a little disappointed Roman that you didn't turn up today in a yellow kimono. I may have to get one [Laughter] 

RK: I keep it only for special occasions.

PD: I've often tried to make sure that I was incorporating empathy and the ability to walk into the shoes of others in my own work, and one of the most humbling bits of reading your book was this notion of colonizing future generations, that we're all colonists. I've been working to decolonize a whole bunch of structures for my entire career and never quite thought about this idea that actually I was exploiting people who don't yet exist.

RK: Well I had the same realization myself a couple of years ago. I mean, I used to be about 20 years ago a professional political scientist, I was an academic, I was apparently an expert on democratic governance, and during those 10 years it never once occurred to me that we systematically disenfranchise future generations, in the way that other groups have been excluded throughout history: slaves, women, indigenous people, and others, yet I think that is the reality. You know, and the problem of course is those future generations, they're given no power in the political system, they have no rights, they're not here to protest about it. They cannot, say, just sit in like a civil rights activist, or leap in front of the king's horse like a suffragette, or go on a Salt March to defy their colonial oppressors like Mahatma Gandhi, and I do think of it in colonial terms, and maybe that's because I'm Australian actually and kind of sensitive to the long history of indigenous exploitation in the country I grew up in, and that I've benefited from. I'm a product of the white privilege that I was born into, but you know there's this legal doctrine, you know, in the 18th and 19th century, when Britain colonized Australia, they drew on this legal doctrine that's now known as Terra nullius, the continent was treated as 'nobody's land' as if there were no indigenous people there, it was theirs for the taking. Well I think today while those indigenous struggles for land rights still go on in Australia and Canada and elsewhere, but alongside terra nullius we also have tempus nullius. The future is generally seen as 'nobody's time', particularly in high-income countries where we are dumping on the future, we are dumping ecological degradation, we are dumping technological risk, but it is very hard to empathize with those future generations. 

I founded a museum called the Empathy Museum which travels around the world, and one of our exhibits is called 'a mile in my shoes'. It's a gigantic shoebox, you can walk inside it, and you can literally wear the shoes of a stranger, like someone who's been in prison for 14 years, or a Syrian refugee, or a Brazilian sex worker, and you're given a set of headphones so you listen to an audio narrative of them talking about their life in their own words. And we've collected hundreds of pairs of shoes and stories from a dozen countries, but the challenge is how do you do the same thing with future people when you cannot look them in the eye? You cannot put on their shoes, you cannot listen to their voices, and that's where we really need to use our imaginations and recognize the power of the human imagination. I can imagine my 11 year old daughter when she's 90 years old. If I close my eyes, I can picture her face, I can see her at her birthday party on her 90th birthday surrounded by family and friends and loved ones. I can look out the window and try to think about well what kind of world is it out there? And then I can reflect on that whole experience and recognize that my daughter at age 90 is not all alone, she is part of a web of relationships, human relationships, community, but also in the web of the living world, the air she breathes, the water she drinks, the foods she eats, so if I care about her life, I need to care about all life. That's that step from a kind of familial sense of legacy to a more transcendent sense of legacy, and because we can't meet those future people, we need to in a way use our children or young ones as a kind of a bridge to connecting with those universal strangers of the future. 

I think one of the challenges of long-term thinking is how do we really think a century ahead or a thousand years ahead, that seems like an impossibility, but there is a secret to doing this and I found it in the work of the biomimicry designer and thinker Janine Benyus, where she says we can learn from nature's 3.8 billion years of evolution. What she points out is she asked the question 'how have other species learned to survive for 10,000 generations or more?' and the answer she says is this: that they have learned to take care of the place that will take care of their offspring. In other words, they live within the ecosystem in which they are embedded, they do not foul the nest, which of course is what humans have been doing with devastating impacts and ever-increasing pace and scale over the last century. So the secret there to being a long-term thinker is not just about extending our time horizons, but about regenerating place. It's about falling in love with rivers and mountains and with ice sheets and savannas, and regenerating and restoring and repairing the living world, and getting back in touch with the ecological choreography of the planet. 

PD: If we come back to our current moment which is a moment of crises or really multiple linked systemic crises, right, we're in the middle of a pandemic, it's triggered an economic crisis, it's exacerbated a racial justice crisis, all in the backdrop of the climate crisis, right - there's a lot happening right now. And there's a lot of suffering, inequality has been worsened etc. A critic might say it's not prudent to think about stuff that hasn't happened yet that's way in the future when there's so much suffering happening right now. Is there a tension between looking out for future generations versus looking out for those who are suffering right now, or is that a false choice?

RK: I think there's a tension to consider, I don't believe the tension is nearly as tight or conflictual as many people do. I mean, Groucho Marx famously allegedly said, you know, why should I care about future generations, what have they ever done for me? And I think that's a very real sentiment a lot of people have. Look, 'I've got enough problems to deal with now, I've got I'm in Covid, i've got no job, I'm in debt, I'm a refugee', and so you might think, okay well that means we should really be thinking about now, why should we care about the future? Now I think one way to look at that issue is to, in a way, take the approach of Wales' Future Generations Commissioner, is to focus on those policies which benefit both the current generation and future generations. So obviously things like dealing with air pollution, renewables in our energy systems, you know, these are all things which help people today but also help people tomorrow. And of course investment in long-term public health care and education is all about being a good ancestor, because those children are our future citizens, and in fact the way government decision-making works in particular, is so biased towards the present compared to the future, we must tackle it. We have to bring those future generations into the room when we're making our decisions today. On a kind of ethical level it's just not right. 

PD: The last big systemic crisis that we lived through was probably the financial crash of 2008 and I think at the time there was a recognition that some poor policy decisions and other practices led us into that crisis and there was talk about reforming our financial system. Very little happened in terms of actual structural change, right, there were bank bailouts, a little bit of changes in regulations, for the most part everyone rushed to get back to normal and left those who really suffered to kind of pick up the pieces, but the system doesn't look so much different than it did in 2007. How is it going to be different this time, or let me phrase that differently, what can we do now to make sure that we can emerge from this crisis differently and actually use long-term thinking to start shifting systems?

RK: It's a very tricky issue. There's some really interesting research on people who've had near-death experiences, they've almost died in a plane crash, or just recovered from cancer at the last moment, and they tend to have different responses. Some of them decide to seize the day after that near-death experience, they radically change their lives, they give up their boring jobs and so on. Some of them have a traumatic response, they become anxious, they have all sorts of mental health issues afterwards. Some have no major response at all, and the split is about a third, a third, a third, across those three areas. I think it's a bit like that when it comes to crises in society, economy, ecology, more broadly and we're seeing many of those different responses today. We're seeing enormous progress coming from some countries and particularly cities actually. I think that's where a lot of the hope is. Just look at how Paris has responded to Covid-19, right, we're going to turn these roads into parks and cycle lanes. Look at Amsterdam, really deeply embracing the circular economy and donut economics, and I think what's really interesting is the amount of peer-to-peer inspiration that's going on. So Amsterdam adopts the donut model then suddenly Copenhagen does, and that I think is where there's a lot of realms of hope. 

But let's remember about the history of crises, that they do go in different directions, so we can look back to the second world war and the crisis of the war, and out of that came pioneering long-term institutions like the World Health Organization, the European Union, the National Health Service in Britain, now that's an easy example to look at. If you go back 10-15 years to the Great Depression, well out of the depression came some pioneering, progressive political changes. You had the rise of the welfare state and social democracy in Scandinavia, but you also had the rise of fascism in Germany and other places, so there's always a devil's fork at moments of crisis. So how do we really take advantage of this Covid moment, you know, I can only say that this is an existential choice. Do you go one direction or another? Do you stay within the degenerative economy of the 20th century and say we're going to get out of Covid if we get rid of all those environmental regulations which have been holding us back, and that's going to help us give jobs to people and get back on the growth cycle? Or are we actually going to take the long view around this and try and jump onto a regenerative, transformative pathway. Let's try and reinvent democracy for the long term, let's take some of those big steps. And the good news, I think Peter, is that there are enough examples around to draw on to find inspiration from, probably more than in 2008 after the financial crisis. I think there's more alternative economic models. The language, the very language of a regenerative economy is much more embedded today. The very language of intergenerational justice is more embedded today than it was then, so we need to draw on that, and something which ultimately, in a way, gives me hope is something I read in a kind of obscure book on economic history called Energy and the English Industrial Revolution by Tony Wrigley, who's one of the great demographers, economic historians in the UK, and there's this little paragraph in there where he talks about public responses to the industrial revolution in the 18th century. And what he pointed out was that people like Adam Smith didn't even know there was an industrial revolution going on at the time, he couldn't see it before his very eyes, and I think that's where we might be today, that there are extraordinary examples of economic rethinking for the long term - whether it's the B Corp movement or the stuff happening around circular economies -  and there are things going on in the political realm, from Fridays to Futures, to that future to design movement in Japan, and if you put them all together, even though it's difficult to see, and at the moment we mostly are still looking at the big tech companies, the big fossil fuel companies. If you look in the right way, put those movements together, I think you can see a genuine time rebellion going on, or at least we might look back in 100 years and perhaps see that we are on a shift, that was maybe as big as the shift from feudalism to industrialization. I might be wrong, I might be wrong. But, I might be right.

[Music] 

PD (narration): There's a difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is a sunny disposition whereas hope is, as Roman put it, an existential choice, and Roman gave us a hopeful note to end on. I want to thank Indy Johar and Roman Krznaric for joining us today. If you haven't read The Good Ancestor yet please pick up a copy from your local independent bookstore, we'll put this and other resources in the show notes. 

Next week, we'll talk with global health leader and social justice activist Dr Joia Mukherjee about reimagining our health systems in an age of pandemics. She's one of many extraordinary guests we have lined up for this series of Reimagine: Systems Reset edition. 

If you want to make sure that you don't miss a thing, subscribe right now to Reimagine wherever you get your podcasts, and if you're new to Reimagine now would be a great time to check out our first series. Roman mentioned Kate Raworth, whose donut economics theory is taking the world by storm. No less than David Attenborough recently called donut economics our compass for the future. We talked to Kate in our second episode and it's still essential listening.

Kate Raworth: "Who are we to give up now, and then in 30 years' time turn around and say 'oh look it turns out it was possible, where we just thought it was too late'"

If you like what you hear then help us spread the word about Reimagine. Tell three friends about the podcast, give us a shout on social media, leave us a review. You can find me on twitter at @peterdrobac, and to learn more about social entrepreneurship and the Skoll Centre visit reimaginepodcast.com. From Oxford, I'm Peter Drobac, and you've been listening to Reimagine, a podcast about people who are inventing the future.