The Grasshopper, April 30, 2024

Thinking it forward

Photo by Savelii Barashkov on Unsplash

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Seven Generation Thinking: Present, Past, Future

A different way to shift innovation

I come from the tail end of the Boomers and the very beginning of tech as we know it. And I was a fervent believer until recently. I saw the incredible evolution of personal tech, the rise of the internet, and the effect of information and computing power delivered by the cloud.

It was quite an amazing time, one history will see as a turning point. But I am no longer interested in tech as a thing. Why? In the nineties and most of the 2000s I regularly upgraded my tech. I was never a first generation buyer, I liked it better when the bugs were out and the prices had dropped. But nevertheless I upgraded.

Until I didn’t need to. My current laptop, an Apple MacBook Pro, if you need to know, is at least five years old. I didn’t buy it for its power, I bought it because at the time it was the smallest, lightest Apple laptop I could get (ironically, I use an old iPad for my writing). I’m not a power user. Most of us aren’t. Even junk machines today do almost anything unless you are a gamer, a video producer, or do other things that require computational power and speed.

I’m a lowly writer, and was an even lowlier tech marketer, though that paid a hell of a lot more than scribbling.

But anyway, the tech I have performs perfectly well so I no longer have to think about it. That future is here, relatively bug free, and no longer of interest. It just works.

But it was the future once and someone imagined it. Many someones. The most obvious example in recent tech history is Steve Jobs, a strange man who legitimately can be called a visionary. But why was he a visionary and what can we learn from that?

Jobs had a unique ability. He would look at a functionality and say, we won’t want that, we will want this. He saw, for example, that the goal was to make tech invisible until it simply did what we wanted to do and did it elegantly.

This was perhaps the least geeky thing possible. To simplify complexity until it became invisible, working behind the scenes and requiring little learning curve, a perfect tool.

Seven generation thinking

Jobs was a seven generation thinker. This is not my brilliant brainstorm. I watched a PBS series on the future*, and the concept of seven generation thinking, thinking from the perspective of seven generations in the future, was spelled out in a most unexpected place: A teepee.

*A Brief History of the Future, now showing on PBS and via PBS Passport for streaming

It is an indigenous peoples concept, to consider the impact of our actions now on those who will live seven generations later. You might call it the most environmental thinking imaginable and the concept is ancient. It is motivated by something related called ‘cathedral thinking’ where you work on things you will never see completed. Cathedrals. Pyramids. Nuclear fusion (?)

It is largely a lost ability in modern society, where disposability is still our weakness. We build buildings only to tear them down twenty years later. We have built-in obsolescence. Or we advance so fast that once amazing boxes full of electronics become boat anchors in a few short years.

Another concept was covered in the program to explain this seven generation thinking idea, with a twist. There are, apparently, three kinds of design thinking. Present design thinking that solves immediate problems, past design thinking that utilizes the lessons of thousands of years, and future design thinking that projects into the future and imagines how they would have solved the problems we face now, with their knowledge and perspective.

That last one, thinking like a person in the future, knocked me out.

I think about my city a lot. I can think of many ways we could improve it. And I’ve watched many things change, mostly for the good. But if I project myself into the future and think of what it ideally would look like, I have a roadmap for bypassing so many mistakes and all that rebuilding.

The thing is that anyone could do this. You don’t have to be a physicist or a neuroscientist, you just have to have the imagination to say 'wouldn't it be cool if?’. And then work backwards.

I don’t know much about this stuff but it has clicked a switch. I need to know more, especially when you consider an existential challenge like climate change or feeding the world or even ending war (I’m skeptical about our ability to do that because I think, on some level, we like it. Don’t shoot me).

What if we factored in the seven generation viewpoint as one of our standard problem solving tools, an automatic filter we applied as a matter of course when changing things, innovating, or creating something entirely new, my definition of real entrepreneurship?

An entire new way of looking at time and the future, a way where we take responsibility for creating a future we may never see. 

Btw, writers and creatives do this all the time. You don’t write novels with an expiration date, though many have them. We want timeless appeal, immortality for our work. That dream may be why we create, but when we create that way we are seven generation thinking.

Let’s give that one a thought.

~ I write The Grasshopper, a letter for creatives, The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate, and The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. All are weekly and free, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your upgrade to a paid subscription helps make that happen. 

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