24. What Will Your Family Look Like Seven Generations From Now?

What Will Your Family Look Like Seven Generations From Now?

I was really on the hot seat. I felt like I was being interrogated! Almost a hundred people were staring at me as I stood under the bright lights. One after another they bombarded me with deeply personal questions like: "What is your deepest fear in regard to this?" and "What is behind that fear?" and "Isn't this really all about you wanting control?"

I had to answer too. Was I sweating it out!

The scene of my mental torture was a conference in Miami for families and family business owners. The facilitator of the conference had asked me that morning to volunteer at her session if no one else did. I had easily agreed. I am not uncomfortable on stage. I figured I’d be up there for a couple of minutes and that would be it. Simple. Yet the hour-long grilling was so intense, I wished I had never agreed to be a guinea pig!

The facilitator has a proprietary system for how to solve problems by asking effective questions. The questions were effective all right--effectively making me wrack my brain to come up with answers to things I never thought I would be asked in public.

At the beginning of the session, the facilitator had asked everyone in the room to write down their current most pressing issue or concern in their family or family business. I had known instantly what mine was. My son and daughter-in-love had recently announced they are having a baby girl, and the thought had hit me as a stunning reality on the flight to the conference. It was happening; with the second grandchild coming soon, we were really a three-generation family; a new era was already dawning. This was real.

When asked, I read this pressing concern out loud at the conference:

“What do I do now to help ensure that our family legacy, especially our values and purpose, flourish in the third to seventh generations?”

The audience had promptly asked: “Why seven generations?”

I explained that it was based on the seventh generation principle of the Iroquois. It comes from their constitution, a model for our own very successful Constitution. Iroquois leaders of tribes and families are to consider how their choices will affect seven generations. Talk about forward thinking!

The history of the Indian nations shows that it is only those families that rigorously maintain this seventh generation thinking that actually reaches the 7th generation and beyond to actually become a tribe. And I’d like to think that maybe something our family is doing in this generation could eventually result in a tribe that will have a specific impact for good on this planet 200 years from now.

The World Will Get Better When We Do Family Well.

I found the Iroquois perspective very compatible with my own ideas of leaving a lasting legacy to future generations. I believe the future of our world will be dictated by the progressive health of families and businesses in society. There is an undeniable rule of progress that any time you can build on the failures, successes, and learnings of something that happened before, you are more likely to have a better outcome in the next iteration. Unfortunately, the prevailing paradigm is that somehow families are the one exception to that rule. We have come to believe that each generation is supposed to stand alone, that there is no need to build on the successes, failures, and learnings of prior generations. But the way the world will get better is when we do family in a way where each generation builds on the shoulders of the prior generation to become increasingly more successful…however that family intentionally defines success.

After all the pointed questions from the audience, I was required to write down all the solutions offered and commit to doing three of them. One of them was to have an open conversation about this with my family, which I did. The results are in the Systems for Success podcast, episode 24. You might want to have a listen.

The eight members of my family going back and forth about this was easy in comparison to the probing questions of that audience! Still, my adult children are autonomous, critical thinkers and they did some ferreting out of their own. I am grateful that they agreed that leaving a lasting legacy to future generations was a worthy and valid goal.

First, we went back and forth about what success in that would look like. Next, we came up with ways to make it happen.

Success in families and/or in business doesn’t just happen. It has to be intentional. The right systems and processes have to be conceived and put into place. Many people think success is a matter of something that just happens if you are lucky or work hard enough. On the contrary, we believe that behind every success is a system in action. The magic is in the system.

How many people are systematic about how they approach their family’s legacy? They may be very systematic about bequeathing money and property. But what about the non-material legacy? What’s the plan for passing that on? What will success in that look like and what should be implemented in the present to make it happen in the future?  

Affinity - A Common Thread

My family and I agreed that a minimum baseline of success would be a clear bond of affinity throughout our extended family seven generations from now. We looked at one definition of affinity that seemed to resonate with all of us: “Close connection marked by community of interests or similarity in nature or character”

Seven generations from now, we wanted our relations to feel an affinity with their extended family, including us. Beyond this, in our maximum vision, their individual and family compasses would contain some reflection of our current generation’s values, mission and vision. Was it realistic, we asked ourselves, that our seventh generation descendants would share "a community of interests" with us? No; we doubted our descendants were all going to play instruments or like backpacking and skiing like we do. What we hoped was that there would be a "similarity in nature or character…or value set" or, as we put it, a common thread.

We decided that our main common thread as a family was spirituality. We hoped our descendants would share that. This doesn’t mean being the same religion. It shouldn't be rigid, and it has to encourage the creativity and expansion of future generations, including people who would marry into the family from differing backgrounds. Even now, in our family, we have different approaches as to how we live out our family values and mission statement. Yet spirituality binds us together; it is our main common thread. If our descendants shared that, it would be a marker of success.

But how to pass down this and other parts of our family mission vision?

A Tangible Legacy

We thought it could help maintain the philosophical legacy if we could also leave some tangible legacy, like books that were important to us, documentation of past goals and accomplishments, documentation of individual family values and visions, videos of important family moments, memories and stories, maybe even some physical memorabilia that represent things that are important to the family. We talked about our ancestors’ journeys from Europe to America and how we wanted to pass down their stories through an oral tradition, but that we should also document our lives well.

I told them about the office of a family business in Minneapolis, a national company in its seventh generation of family ownership. In the center of their office, they had dedicated a small little museum area to the family--all the generations from the 1800s. There were artifacts of the family's projects, interests, and milestones--even old love letters!

They had the first generation’s copy of Poor Richard’s Almanac, open to things he had marked as important: values and principles related to money and good business practices. The family still tried to align their business with those values and principles.

From that, we realized that we had to document our lives with what we wanted future generations to know about us. We needed to leave tangible items that told our descendants who we were and what we stood for.

Individual Yet Part of the Whole

Then we tackled the question of how to create and preserve a family legacy but to allow for new interpretations and variations on the themes because of people’s individual personalities, interests, and approaches.

Here the married among my adult children made large contributions. They had already faced the fact that they wanted to be loyal to the family’s values and vision but that they also needed to create their own unique family identity. We decided that the best way to describe it would be that each new family would have its own “flavor” (and that prospective mates would probably be attracted to members of our family because they had a similar “seasoning” in their backgrounds).

We realized that without extension and creativity, without each generation adding to and expanding the vision through their unique interpretation and bringing their own strengths to it, the family legacy would be weakened over time. Also, we decided we would not want future generations to think they had dishonored the family name because they had their own passions and interests, and their own autonomy.

My wife Shelley summed it up: “If you guys did not expand beyond what dad and I originally taught and instilled in our family, I would feel like we would have failed. No parent wants to see their kids be stagnant but to be leaders of change and good in the world.”

Timeless Values

I had done some study on lasting family businesses and families. I had discovered that some families could flourish to the fourth generation by luck or by accident or because of common interests. Other times it was because they all lived in the same part of the country, or because of the sheer force of the strong personalities of the first generation. Yet none of that was enough to carry to the seventh generation. To last to the seventh generation, something had to withstand the test of time. There had to be timeless values.

Love and acceptance, we decided, would have the strength to permeate and unite seven generations. With love and acceptance, even during the messy process of growing and changing and being different, things would hold together. Relationships were more important than being “right.”

To last to the seventh generation, something must withstand the test of time.

Maybe, we speculated, it would boil down to a few broad words like leadership, health, love, service and family. Those simple words and concepts have been honored in every society, in every generation. It is hard to imagine a future society where courage is not admired, friendship abandoned, service and leadership de-valued, or family ties completely dead. Timeless values stand the test of time. They traverse generations.

Your Seventh Generation Descendant

Now I’m going to ask you to imagine your seventh generation descendant. He has your eyes, Uncle Larry’s voice, and your granddaughter’s lithe physique. He plays a mean piano, just like your Great Grandmother Lucie.

What else do you want him to have in the fiber of his character that can see him through the challenges of the 23rd century? What ancestral whisper do you want to come to him as he faces life? Courage? Family? Service? Leadership? Total acceptance and love?

What can you build into the spiritual DNA of your family now that will strengthen him, that seventh generation iteration, who is a lot like you and plenty different? What lasting legacy can you give to him so he can steer straight in a world that will undoubtedly be very different from our world today? What can you give him that will be a lasting legacy?

It’s worth thinking about. It’s worth being intentional about, and it’s worth fighting for now.

After all, he’s family.