exercise · all tools
Seventh Generation
Also known as: Double Circle
A ritual dialogue across two hundred years: in a double circle, the inner ring speaks as people of the seventh generation hence, asking the outer ring — people of today — what it is like to live at this time of the Great Unraveling, what they are doing, where they find strength. Roles rotate. The future stops being an abstraction and becomes someone listening.
Prerequisites
- Framing that speaking as the future is an act of imagination offered seriously, not performance
- Answering a future being's questions about our time surfaces real grief and shame; hold pace, and close with agency (what we are doing), not only feeling
Practical
- Time
- 60 min + 15 landing
- Group
- 8–60 · pairs, large-group
- Settings
- in-person, online
- Materials
- Two concentric circles of chairs; question prompts for the future voices
- Mechanisms
- perspective-taking, ritual-container, dialogic-encounter
- Change scope
- state · repeatable
Instructions
- Where
- workthatreconnects.org/resources/seventh-generation — The Work That Reconnects (Joanna Macy & Molly Brown), open
- Availability
- Open online — published at the link, free to read
- Licence
- Open source — "a gift freely given" (Work That Reconnects); acknowledge the source: WTR, Joanna Macy as root teacher, and named adapters
Source link checked 29 Aug 2026 — unchanged since we recorded it on 28 Aug 2026
This directory describes and points home; the instructions stay with the people who made them.
Origin
Joanna Macy — The Work That Reconnects (Deep Time); the seventh-generation principle honors Haudenosaunee teaching
The seventh-generation concept comes from Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) governance tradition — name that inheritance when facilitating.
In this directory via The Work That Reconnects (Joanna Macy & Molly Brown) · Toolbox & Facilitator Guide: Addressing Inner Dimensions for Sustainability in Higher Education
Related: Letter from the Future (pairs-with)
status: checked · added 2026-08-25