Ep7: Long Time with Roman Krznaric
“We’re always working on multiple time horizons between the urgency of the present, and the need to take a longer view.”
Our guest today is Roman Krznaric, who writes about the power of ideas to change society. We speak with Roman about how rethinking our understanding of time and planning for the long term can achieve regenerative transformation and a better future for generations to come.
Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His latest book is The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World. His previous international bestsellers, including Empathy, The Wonderbox and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 20 languages.
Show notes
Sarah and Michael’s book, Flourish: Design Paradigms For Our Planetary Emergency is available at Triarchy Press.
Visit this website to learn more about Roman Krznaric and his work.
The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World by Roman Krznaric reveals how we can employ long-term thinking to become good ancestors for our future generations. The book is available for purchase here.
Future Knowledge was an exhibition exploring the role of visual culture in continuing to raise awareness of the effects of climate change that ran from 20 May to 27 June 2017. For more details, please visit this website.
The Urban Redevelopment Authority is the national urban planning authority of Singapore. Founded in 1974, it employs long-term and comprehensive urban planning approaches for Singapore’s urban infrastructure.
Terra nullius is a Latin expression that means “land belonging to no one”.
Black Lives Matter is a decentralised, political and social movement originating from the United States that seeks to highlight racism, discrimination, and inequality experienced by Black people.
Hurricane Sandy was a catastrophic event that was named the deadliest and the most destructive hurricane of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season affecting most of North and South America and the Caribbeans.
The Future Design Movement was inspired by seventh-generation decision practised by Native American communities and is being further researched by a team led by one of the founders of the movement Tatsuyoshi Saijo at the Kochi University of Technology Research Institute for Future Design in Japan.
View the latest IPCC report here.
The Ministry of the Future is a science fiction novel by Kim Stanley Robinson on how climate change will affect the world in decades to come, told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts.
The concept of the “ethnosphere” originates with anthropologist Wade Davis.
Musician Brian Eno is known for his pioneering work in ambient music and more recently, an activist of human rights and progressive change.
Artist Katie Paterson, is known for projects such as Future Library which consider humanity’s role and place on Earth in the context of geological time and change.
Artist Olafur Eliasson co-founded the social enterprise Little Sun, which provides access to clean, sustainable energy to off-grid communities.
The Paris Climate Agreement is a legally binding agreement adopted by 192 countries in Paris in 2015, that covers climate change mitigation, adaptation and finance.
Economist and statistician Milton Friedman was a free market advocate who advanced the idea of free trade, smaller government, and a slow, steady increase of the money supply in a growing economy.
The Human Layers exercise was developed by The Long Time Project to explore an emotional connection to the lives of our past and future ancestors.
A Worker Reads History is a poem by Bertolt Brecht from 1936.
The Hunterian Museum’s Curating Discomfort project is funded by Museum Galleries Scotland to challenge the museum to find new, inclusive ways of interpreting collections that may be contested and are sensitive to diverse viewpoints.
Find more about the Empathy Museum here, and their travelling project and exhibition, A Mile in My Shoes.
Extinction Rebellion is a global decentralised and political non-partisan movement to persuade governments to act justly on the climate and ecological emergency.
The Future Generations Commissioner in Wales was a position developed from the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act 2015 to help Welsh public bodies and policy-makers think about the long-term impact their decisions have.
Visit this website for more information about series sponsor Interface.
Transcript
Sarah Ichioka 00:03
Hello and welcome to the Flourish Podcast where we discuss design for systems change. I'm Sarah Ichioka; an urbanist, strategist and director of Desire Lines based in Singapore. I'm delighted to co-present Flourish with Michael Pawlyn, who is the founder of Exploration Architecture, and a leading architect in regenerative design based in London.
Michael Pawlyn 00:51
In today’s episode, we will be engaging with the way we think about time and how this shapes our behaviour.
Sarah Ichioka 00:56
In our book, Flourish, which is the sister project to this podcast, Michael and I have written about what mindset shifts we believe are necessary to achieve regenerative transformation. And amongst those, we believe that rethinking our understanding of time will be essential.
Michael Pawlyn 01:13
So today we’ll be speaking with public philosopher Roman Krznaric, who writes about the power of ideas to change society. And his latest book is The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World. His previous international bestsellers include Empathy, The Wonder Box, and Carpe Diem Regained and they’ve been published in more than 20 languages.
Sarah Ichioka 01:34
Goals, Michael, goals. We’re starting with one, we gotta get up to 20. Roman’s work is one of the key sources for our chapter about time, and in that chapter, we look at the case for expanding our thinking beyond short-term time scales, and also adopting a more qualitative and place-based understanding of time.
Michael Pawlyn 02:03
I first met Roman in connection with a long term project of his about empathy when we were involved in an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford that was called Future Knowledge. We both gave talks, and his was about long-term thinking and it was absolutely fantastic. What struck me was that it was just a really useful lens through which to look at familiar challenges of climate change and other environmental issues. So we're really happy to include him in our book, and really delighted to have him as our guest today. So when you've been working with clients recently, have you noticed any sort of difference in their attitude towards time? Do you think people are starting to think in the longer term?
Sarah Ichioka 02:40
I wish the answer was yes. I mean, taking a step back here in Singapore where I'm based, you can certainly see examples of particular parts of government or government-affiliated organisations who do plan impressively in the long term. So for example, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, who Michael, I think you've been a consultant for before, plan things on 10-, even 20-year cycles so well beyond a normal political cycle. And similarly the sovereign wealth funds who manage Singaporeans’ long term pensions also think, as they should right, in the long term. So there is a presence here of admirable long term thinking, but I would say that I still feel that many of our partners and clients and ourselves even, are still really under the stresses of the distractions of the attention economy, the cycles of quarterly reporting, you know, a lot of the pulls that work against long term thinking that Roman has outlined in his book. How about you, Michael?
Michael Pawlyn 03:47
Well, I do feel that there was a low point. And for me, that was in the late ’80s, early ’90s, when commercial clients were almost proud about the fact that they didn't give a damn about the future. And you know, anything that didn't actually make commercial sense, on completion day, they just weren't interested. And now there are plenty of clients that are willing to take a 2 to 5 or sometimes even a 10-year perspective on things. You know, if you've got a client who is willing to contemplate a 5 or 10-year payback period, then you can often introduce things to the scheme that are way better for people and the planet. And actually, once you've gone beyond that payback period, that actually might be much cheaper as well.
Sarah Ichioka 04:25
One of the promising signs I remember in the development sector in London — you know, the city where you and I both met and where your practice is still based — was a revisiting amongst the property sector of the model of the great estates, which are large portions of the UK which have been owned for a long time by certain families. Obviously, there is a whole other conversation to be had about land rights, and how that relates to justice and income inequality and the calcified class system of the UK, but in terms of their ability to long-term steward these pieces of the city rather than thinking about flipping them for quick speculative gains, I think has led to fairly positive outcomes for the character of those places.
Michael Pawlyn 05:21
What we will be talking about today is mainly Roman’s book, and I'll tell you, one of the things I found scariest: it was that diagram showing the three pathways for civilisation. The three pathways are labelled: “breakdown”, “reform” and “transformation”. And the breakdown one is fairly obvious, that's where society collapses. And the transformation one is fairly clear as well, you know, if we get onto a kind of transformation pathway, then all could be well. But the reform one is kind of dangerous, slippery one, because that's the situation in which politicians and business leaders do just enough to persuade enough of the population that they're taking meaningful action, when in reality, it's nowhere near sufficient. And that is, so clearly the pathway that nearly all governments and the vast majority of business is on. And so we've got a hell of a task ahead of us to get onto that transformation pathway. And, you know, that's, that's partly why Roman’s work is so important.
So Roman, there's a really lively and ongoing debate now about decolonisation, and you have a really interesting take on this in terms of time. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about that.
Roman Krznaric 06:37
Yeah, I'm Australian and when I grew up the story of colonisation was one of a benign, civilised Britain coming to Australia, and part of the mythology that developed was the idea that the continent was a terra nullius: an uninhabited land that was there for the taking by the British. And of course, this legal mythology left out the fact that there were already Indigenous people there and I thought, “This is a little bit like the way we treat the future, that we see it like a distant colonial outpost where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, as if there was nobody there.” So it's not a terra nullius, but tempus nullius. We treat the future as nobody's time and that led me to this idea that we've colonised the future. And the tragedy, of course, is that future generations aren't here to do anything about this pillaging of their inheritance. And I think it's quite interesting to think about how that concept of decolonisation or colonisation relates to the one that has emerged through Black Lives Matter. But what I found is that people engaged in racial justice, campaigning and struggles have connected with it, because they recognise that racial injustice itself is passed down from generation to generation, like wealth inequality is passed down from generation to generation, built into public institutions and public culture. When you think about the way we've colonised the future, the impacts of our dumping of ecological degradation on future citizens is going to hit the marginalised sectors of society hardest. You know, the classic example might be something like Hurricane Sandy, when it hit New York City in 2012. Well, Goldman Sachs was fine; they had their own generators and sandbags. But over half a million New Yorkers, many of them people of colour disproportionately, had no access to healthcare and water and transport and that kind of thing because of this climate disaster. And so I think that the way we colonise the future have a series of differentiated effects, which goes to create a kind of climate apartheid, which is just going to get more and more severe.
Michael Pawlyn 08:51
In a way, your idea of tempus nullius is another way of thinking about the voiceless and voteless, and thinking about our responsibility to them.
Sarah Ichioka 09:00
Yeah, very powerful. Thank you, Roman. You've identified in The Good Ancestor, this paradox that – in our time of these interwoven planetary emergencies of climate crisis, biodiversity loss, social inequality – that, paradoxically, the need for long term thinking is incredibly urgent. So how do we balance or integrate a sense of urgency and crisis with the need to act and think on a much longer scale?
Roman Krznaric 09:30
In a fundamental way, I don't see any tension between the need to act urgently and the need to think long term. I mean, of course, in everyday life, we're often making decisions in the immediate present, which have incredibly long term consequences, like you might decide to have children or get married or something like that. You could make a carpe diem moment of decision and we know that’s going to have ramifications for your whole life. And that's sort of where we are now and if we make the right kinds of decisions here and now, the long term consequences for future generations for people and the planet will be much better, potentially. Of course, for the world's 220 million migrants and refugees, there are immediate needs to be met, and particularly exacerbated by the COVID crisis, needs for shelter for food, that kind of thing. But actually, I remember talking to my father about this not long ago. My dad is 89. He was a refugee from Poland to Australia after the Second World War. And one of the things we were talking about was the way that refugees, for example, often have a very long term view of the world in their own lives and families. So a parent might be clutching their child in a boat crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe. Now, they might be fleeing some very immediate threat, like a civil war: why are they taking this huge risk? Because they're thinking about their children's future, you know, they're thinking decades ahead and they're willing actually, to take enormous risks with their own life and their children's lives in order to secure a long term future for them.
So I think that we're always working on multiple time horizons between the urgency of the present, and the need to take a longer view. And luckily, I think, human beings do have a capacity to think beyond the here and now. We are experts at the temporal pirouette. One moment we can be thinking about upgrading our iPhone but at the next moment, we'll be thinking about what songs we want played at our own funerals. That's what enables us to plan in our own lives, but also as a society, how can we build the flood defences that our city might need for 2100.
Michael Pawlyn 11:46
That actually picks up on one of the many things I found interesting in The Good Ancestor, which was the way that there have been periods in which attitudes towards time were deepening and shortening simultaneously. So as you describe, in the Victorian era, the advances in geology were revealing just how old the earth really was, while the increasing commodification of time through clocks and industrialisation were leading to shorter horizons. And I wonder what you feel about the present moment? I'm just really interested to hear what your thoughts are on that.
Roman Krznaric 12:17
Clearly, we are in an age of incredible short term cycles, you know, we're checking our phones 120 times a day on average. Of course, that, in a way, is an extension of what was happening in the 18th and 19th century, with the way the factory clock started speeding up time, speeding up work. But I think it's been really striking to me to realise that in the last 20 years, the public conversation about longer time cycles is becoming very prominent. I mean, in a way, one can date back at least to the 1990s, when climate scientists started making predictions about what sea level rise might be like in 2100. And if you look at the latest IPCC report, there are projections going forward to 2300. And that's making us think on a different sort of cyclical function and then maybe that is starting to permeate into fields like architecture and design and the development of cities where maybe the low points have been passed and kind of longer vision is becoming more prominent. But of course, these are struggles, social struggles in a way over who controls the kind of time narratives that are dominant in society, but I definitely think that the idea of thinking on a longer “now” is starting to permeate all sorts of different fields.
I mean, in the last year, I've had so many conversations, with politicians or businesses or community organisations who are thinking about making 100-year plans or talking about the ways we discount the future, or the need for more cathedral thinking. Of course, on some level, it's still on the rhetorical level, and it needs to be put into practice, but at least the conversation is happening. And, all of us here on this discussion, you know, we believe in the importance of ideas for creating new paradigms, and we need to have the concepts and the conversations about the longer term in order for the public policy to change. If we don't have the language, we don't have the public conversations, then, the change doesn't come or it can be very short term.
Sarah Ichioka 14:30
One of the things that I really appreciate about your book is the way you do share those green shoots that you've seen of those who are working to be good ancestors. And as you know, in Flourish, we're encouraging our readers to think about what might be possible and to expand their own personal and collective agency to make change happen. What steps would you encourage our listeners, especially those who are involved in the built environment, to take to start to think and act like good ancestors?
Roman Krznaric 16:03
I imagine walking through a city in 2030, or 2050, and what I would like to see, and what I'd like to see or feel or experience isn't just the buildings, but the whole cultural infrastructure of daily life. So I imagine walking down the high street of the future somewhere and seeing a great public square, where there are people wearing beautiful kimono-like gowns, and they are involved in a public discussion about the future of their city. And what they are doing is they are drawing on a methodology of local government decision making, which currently exists called “future design'', which is something in Japan that I've written about in The Good Ancestor, where local people are invited to discuss and draw up plans of the towns and cities where they live. And some of them are given these beautiful gowns to wear and those wearing the gowns are taught to imagine themselves as residents in the year 2060. And those wearing the gowns tend to have much longer term visions, whether it comes to action on climate change, or dealing with the problems of automation and things like that. Or I imagine walking down the city and seeing a building which contains a ministry for the future where there's a future generations commissioner of the city. So I imagine cities having all of these features which are about long term thinking. So if I'm thinking about those people working in the built environment, what to encourage them to do, I'd say try and imagine those cities that you want to walk through and try and imagine those cities are full of mechanisms, institutions, cultural artefacts, which can extend our vision beyond the here and now because we need to remember cities, of course, are the great long term technology of human society. You know, cities rarely die. You know, a city like Istanbul has been around for 2000 years, while nations and empires have risen and fallen around that and we need to build, build long term thinking into the cultural and social infrastructure of the cities we live in.
Sarah Ichioka 17:02
You mentioned The Ministry of the Future. And I wondered if you could share with us a bit why you think it's important to have authors and creatives like Kim Stanley Robinson, who can help to imagine a world beyond the dystopic destruction we so often see, in a lot of our popular culture.
Roman Krznaric 17:23
Sure. If we think about what enables humankind to survive and thrive and flourish, we need something called the biosphere. That's the air, in a way, that we breathe. But then we also need what I think of as the ethnosphere, the cultural air in which we breathe. And by that I mean the summation of the ideas, assumptions, beliefs, prejudices, worldviews, that's what's in the ethnosphere. And that's a contested space. So for instance, in the 20th century, ideals of individualism started to become more dominant than the ideas of collective values because of the rise of neoliberalism. That's what dominated the ethnosphere, and then, therefore, shaped our politics and our economies and so on. And I think the role of culture is to reconstitute the ethnosphere. It helps to create it and to reinvent it and redesign it. And so when I think of science fiction writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, or musicians like Brian Eno, or artists like Katie Paterson, or Olafur Eliason, I think of them all as bringing a longer term vision and imagination into that ethnosphere. So that,our economics, our politics, our societies, our education systems have the ideas they need to work with.
So I love Kim Stanley Robinson. And I've read many, many of his books and spoken to him about his most recent book, The Ministry of the Future, which looks at how we're going to implement the Paris Climate Agreement over the next 30 or 40 years. It's sci-fi, almost of the present. And I think the power of his particular works, particularly that book, is that it doesn't try and paint a perfect utopia by any means. It reveals the struggles that need to happen if we're going to create a world that stays under 1.5 degrees, and we need to try and imagine those struggles in order to reach the places that we want to reach as well. But I think, yeah, Kim Stanley Robinson is brilliant in that way. And also because he mixes the utopian and the dystopian, together. And that's kind of how I feel about the world, too.
Michael Pawlyn 19:42
And what you were saying really serves to remind us just how powerful ideas are. And the way that the ideas do have the power to change the course of civilization. And it was ideas of people like Milton Friedman and the neoliberals that have, in many ways, created the situation we're in now. And I find it really inspiring to just be reminded that ideas that we can cultivate do have the potential to shape the future.
Roman Krznaric 20:10
Yeah, the problem though, is that those ideas often develop over too long a timespan right, given the urgency of our current situations. So if we're going to create a culture, say, of regenerative economies, of intergenerational justice, do we have half a century to do it? And I think the answer probably is no. So there's a question I think about how change happens at speed. And how ideas happen at speed. And occasionally, of course, ideas can become more dominant at speed, but they tend to need crises to happen in confluence with them. So the ideas for example, of the welfare state were developing in Europe before the Second World War, but the Second World War really kick-started, though that potential for the ideas to take political form, so that within a few years after the war, many countries like the UK, for example, established National Health Services, or we had the rise of the World Health Organisation and other institutions. So I think crises can be a help.
Michael Pawlyn 21:18
And as architects, you know, we often appeal to our clients to incorporate greener ideas into projects, but these are quite easily dismissed with commercial arguments. When you suggest doing things like asking people,”What is your long term purpose?: or “What do you want your legacy to be?” That's a really persuasive way of getting people into a more transformative way of thinking, which could bring about more rapid change. And I wonder if you could describe the Human Layers exercise?
Roman Krznaric 21:44
Yeah, so when I'm talking to say, politicians, or people in power, I'm always thinking to myself, how do I convince them to step away from the everyday demands that are on them, the budgets, the practicalities and the world in which they're working, whether it's business or in public policy? How do I take them to a different place so that we can have a more open conversation which challenges the short-term, profit-driven, growth-based mentalities that we have today, and I often will do with them an exercise called Human Layers, which is developed by the Long Time Project in London – a great project. And what this is a visualisation where I ask people to close their eyes and to imagine a young person in their lives, who they really care about, it could be a nephew or niece, or their own child or grandchild. And then I ask them to imagine that child 30 years in the future, to imagine what they look like, the sound of their voice, the struggles in their life, the joys in their life. And then I finally get them to imagine this young person at the age of 90, that it's their 90th birthday party, surrounded by family and friends and loved ones. And I ask what kind of world is out there. And then I describe how the 90 year old stands up about to make a birthday speech. But instead of making that speech, they see a photo of you, their departed ancestor over on the mantelpiece and decide to tell the gathered room about a positive legacy that you left for their future, actions that you took to be a good ancestor. And so when I do that with people, even if I'm doing an online talk with hard-nosed politicians from both left and right, what I have found is that people really respond to that, because they're human beings. If you think about a young person in the future, like if I think about my daughter at the age of 90, I realise she's not alone. You know, she's surrounded by a web of human relationships, in the web of the living world: the air she breathes, the water she drinks. If I care about her life, I need to care about all life. Does that sound too utopian?
Michael Pawlyn 23:49
Not at all, no. I think it's a really useful way of just raising the level of ambition. You know, there's sort of golden moment at the start of any project where it feels as though anything is possible. And that's the point at which I think it's really useful to bring in ideas of good ancestorship. Sarah, what do you think?
Sarah Ichioka 24:07
I think it's really helpful in a built environment context to do that layers exercise for the actual site. I've been really heartened by how increasing awareness and acknowledgement of indigenous populations, and how integrated their lives were and are with specific places, that it's incredibly helpful when thinking about new developments on sites to peel back the layers of what was there before. It helps, I think it helps to think about a new project in that lineage. And particularly in really fast growing cities in Asia, where there's this increasing norm of thinking about a constant cycle of demolition, any door that can be opened to thinking about the longer history of any given site is really, really helpful.
Roman Krznaric 25:00
And when you're just talking about constant cycles of demolition, I was remembering that I was a teenager in Hong Kong, which is where I grew up. And buildings went up, and they were down within 20 years. And I remember seeing not long ago, some photographs of early 20th century Hong Kong, and how much agriculture that there was absolutely everywhere, that was not the Hong Kong that I knew as a teenager, but in fact, it wasn't that long ago, you know, when the city was doing more to feed itself and that kind of thing. And we so often forget those histories and just reminds me of a lovely Brecht poem called “A Worker Reads History” that said, “Who built the Seven Gates of Thebes? Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?” which for him, of course, was asking us to remember the workers who created the present, but I think it reminds us to think of everything that created the present.
Michael Pawlyn 25:51
It's such an important point about historical memory. And one of the things we talked about in our book Flourish is the way that the fossil fuel age has been, in many ways a massive distraction from ingenuity and it's good to remember that humans are fantastically ingenious species. And if you look back to some of the solutions that existed before the fossil fuel age, that shows that the age we're entering now could be the most amazing age of the reawakening of ingenuity. So I'm thinking of, for instance, the way that the ancient Persians knew how to make ice in the desert. You know, when you look at some of the absurdities that Western architects are creating in the Middle East it can make you question the whole idea of progress. But if we look back at some of that indigenous knowledge, and think of that as an amazing resource that we can use to address future challenges, I find that a really inspiring thing to contemplate.
Sarah Ichioka 26:43
Is there anything else that we haven’t covered that you would particularly like to tell us about?
Roman Krznaric 26:48
I think one of the things that I have been thinking about recently is the role of race in relation to time in the city. So I recently came across this development in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow in Scotland where they have appointed a curator of discomfort. And the role of the curator of discomfort is in a way to remind the visiting public about Glasgow's slave trading past and to create public conversations about that, to create discomfort. In a way, this is returning to something we have spoken about which is the importance of grappling with the past. And I love those kinds of projects and I think maybe there are kind of analogies there for the built environment. How do we bring these multiple voices, voices which have been excluded into the way we design roads and cities, and the institutions within them and the social interactions which happen within them.
And I’d say one more final thought is that I’m involved in this project which I helped found called the Empathy Museum, and one of the exhibits we have, this is a project that travels around the world, it’s called A Mile in My Shoes. It’s a giant shoe box and you walk inside the shoe box and you are fitted with a shoe that belongs to a stranger. It could be the shoes of a Syrian refugee or a Brazilian judge or a Quaker pacifist and you can literally walk in that person's shoes while listening to a narrative of them talking about their own life in their own words. And with the challenges that cities will be facing over the coming decades with, you know, climate refugees, resource limitations, the need to create circular economies, all sorts of adjustments that we need to make sure that we hold the social fabric together of cities. Cities have been historically very good at that, they’re a great social technology for mixing people together but we need to be inventive in the way we go about doing that. A Mile in My Shoes is just one kind of thing. I’d like to see an empathy shoe shop on every street in every major city of the world.
Michael Pawlyn 28:47
That’s such a lovely challenge for the fashion world which is increasingly coming under criticism for consumption and short-term thinking.
Roman Krznaric 28:58
Yeah, absolutely. And I was watching some YouTube videos a couple of days ago of Extinction Rebellion activists jumping onto the catwalk at fashion shows and holding up banners and the models were just sort of walking around the protestors trying not to see them and in a way, it was kind of an allegory of our whole society not wanting to see the messages, the message coming from the Earth, that it is burning and that we need to act and we need to find innovative ways to flourish, which is of course what your book is all about.
Michael Pawlyn 29:26
And it had perfectly ominous background music as well which was quite amusing. A final question: what would you say to someone who finds your ideas completely convincing and asks, “Well, we are in a planetary emergency now, how do we accelerate these shifts?”
Roman Krznaric 29:40
I think the beginning of thinking about that is to not think about the individual but the collective. You know, I believe in the importance of agency but of course we are past the time of changing light bulbs; this is the time for collective action. And it’s a time for, for instance, supporting movements. Like in the UK, there is a campaign for the UK to have a Future Generations Commissioner, a new political position, like they have in Wales. I am a great advocate of supporting those campaigns. I am a supporter of direct action because we have, you know, failed to use existing political mechanisms to challenge the climate emergency so I go on the streets with Extinction Rebellion and others. Everyone has to find their own way to do that but as individuals, we need to not be individuals if we are going to create change, we must become the collective agents. So not the individual idea of carpe diem, seize the day, but the idea of carpamus diem, the plural, let’s seize the day together.
Sarah Ichioka 30:40
How can our listeners find you online and follow what you are up to?
Roman Krznaric 30:46
I think you just type in the words, “Roman” and “Good Ancestor” and you will find my website, Twitter, books, films, anything that you might fancy.
Sarah Ichioka 30:55
Well, thank you again so much for spending your time with us and sharing your wisdom.
Roman Krznaric 31:01
Oh, it’s been a huge pleasure. And I just want to say I think your book, which I’ve seen in the original manuscript is absolutely fabulous and I’m really looking forward to seeing its ideas spread around the thinkers of the world.
Michael Pawlyn 31:16
That’s really kind of you, Roman. Thanks so much.
Michael Pawlyn 31:21
So I find Roman’s perspective extremely useful and I can see that long term thinking could help overcome certain binary arguments. And I'll give you an example of that. So, Sophie Howe, who is the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, she had a very similar situation to this. So soon after she was elected into her post, there was a discussion about whether to extend this massive piece of motorway, and it was discussed in a framework of impact on future generations. And they came to a very clear decision through a very inclusive process, that it wasn't in the best interests of future generations at all.
Sarah Ichioka 32:01
When I reflect on what I see as the power of Roman's perspective, I think it's about activating the power of imagination. Which actually strangely, I think, as designers, we use certain aspects of our imagination, but in a way, I think it's using our imagination to change the ways that we behave in a professional context. You know, if you think about talking to clients through the future layers exercise, right? It's kind of calling us to be more vulnerable and more exploratory than we're usually accustomed to be in our professional personas. Right? And to think about what possibilities for transformation that opens up.
Michael Pawlyn 32:43
I think it also draws out some some really important questions, because you know it's often been said that convictions are strongest when self-generated, you know, if you were to sort of tell a client that you think they're being dumb about something, you're likely to get a negative reaction. But if you can encourage a client or someone in a position of power, to think about, you know, what is your long term purpose? There can't be many people who would honestly say they want their long term purpose to be degenerative or or just about money. And Roman's work encourages people to think about, you know, how do they want to be remembered? What is the long term aim of the time that they have on Earth, the precious time that they have to do something important?
Sarah Ichioka 33:27
If you're interested to learn more about principles of regenerative design, or any of the many fascinating topics that we've been discussing together today, you're warmly invited to visit our website, which is simply flourish-book.com. And we'll also have a link to subscribe to our website there as well. That website will also include links to all of our socials. The podcast is sponsored by Interface, and based on the book Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn.
Michael Pawlyn 34:05
So, Ray Anderson, who was the CEO of Interface, he's, I think, a really good example of how you can think long term and create a really lasting legacy. So back in the mid ’90s, when he had his Damascene conversion, he created this long term plan for Interface, the ambition being that by 2020, they would have got to a point where they had no impact on the environment whatsoever. And although Ray Anderson passed away, his legacy continues because he empowered others to do this. And so now they're trying to go beyond that into the realms of having a positive impact and becoming a regenerative company.
Sarah Ichioka 34:45
The Flourish podcast is recorded at Cast Iron Studios in London and the Hive Lavender studios in Singapore. Our co producers are Kelly Hill in London and Shireen Marican in Singapore. Our research and production assistant is Yi Shien Sim. The podcast is edited and features brilliant original music by Tobias Withers.
Presenters Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn
Audio producer and composer Tobias Withers
Producers Kelly Hill (London) and Shireen Marican (Singapore)
Researcher and production assistant Yi Shien Sim
Podcast cover art by Studio Folder
