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 t