He was afraid it would be for nothing.
Somewhere in Gujarat, early in the last century, a man who owned almost nothing worked out that staying still had become the more dangerous option. Drift meant predictable hunger, the same year repeating until it ran out. So he put his family on a dhow bound for East Africa with rumour for a map.
In the hold, my great-grandmother shielded her unborn child while the water hit the timber. What frightened them was neither drowning nor the men who worked those waters. It was futility. The thought that the whole crossing might end in salt rather than soil.
Above them the sky did the work the map could not. Night after night the stars arranged themselves into a grammar my great-grandfather could read, a slow sentence that said keep going. He had no proof of anything. He had a direction, a willingness to move, and the discipline to trust both.
Everything I do rests on that. Five generations later I make a living walking into boardrooms and telling people that the same decision is sitting in front of them, and that most of them are making it by not making it.
The ladder in the book did not come out of the research. I found it in my own family first and recognised it in the research afterwards.
Gujarat. Survival. The crossing bought a generation the right to begin again. Survival skills are what you build when the only real question is whether there is a next year: endurance, thrift, and the protection of the one thing that cannot be allowed to fail. My great-grandfather’s contribution was to decide that his children would not need them.
Dar es Salaam. Street skills. My grandfather was born on the new soil and turned an empty kiosk into a trading hub. He learned Swahili, which many of the traders around him never bothered to do. He was known as Cheka Cheka, Laugh Laugh, because he had worked out that the smile came before the conversation and the conversation came before the customer. One night soldiers banged on the shutters and demanded money the family did not have. He stood in the doorway, brewed chai and made jokes about the size of their boots. When the cups were empty the rifles came down. No qualification records any of that. It was the thing that kept the shop standing, and the family with it.
Britain. Specialist skills. He sent my father and my mother to Britain, separately, to learn a vocation. My father arrived in a safari suit with a suitcase too light for the winter and coins in his pocket for a phone box he did not know how to use. He became an accountant. My mother, second oldest of nine, became a midwife. Money and babies, the reasoning went, will always exist. That is choosing for durability over status. It is a more sophisticated piece of thinking than it usually gets credit for, and it was a kind of thinking his own generation had no way of buying.
The desk. Soft skills. My brother and I were born here and handed the education that was the whole point of the rung below. The qualification turned out to be the entry fee rather than the advantage. Being good at the work was not the work. It was teams, argument, persuading people who did not report to you, and knowing which problem was the real one. I first met a computer past midnight, cross-legged in front of a ZX-81, green light on the carpet, my parents talking about bills one floor up. Creation and anxiety sharing a wall. Nobody had needed to name any of these skills before, because in my father’s generation the vocation was enough.
The future. SuperSkills. My children were born in this century and will not be able to rely on any of the four rungs below them in the way each of those generations relied on the last. Not because the skills stop mattering, but because the machine now does a convincing impression of most of them. One evening I watched both my daughters on the sofa, phones glowing, one video ending and the next one starting. Neither of them chose it. Their thumbs never moved. One of them said, with no complaint in it at all, “It just continues.” What they will need is the layer above: knowing what to ask for, judging what comes back, and being able to answer for it. That is what I mean by SuperSkills. It is the argument of the book.
Four crossings, four different answers to one question: what will my children need to be able to do that I cannot teach them by example? Each generation looked at the ground shifting and built the next rung before anyone asked them to. None of them had a framework. They had a decision, taken early, about whether the future was something that happened to the family or something the family designed.
That is the whole of it. It is why I work on this rather than on the technology. The question I put to a board is the one I cannot stop asking about my own children. What if we are the generation that forgets to build the rung?
My great-grandfather crossed his sea so that I could write this. My daughters will cross theirs with whatever we choose today.
The ladder is set out at greater length in the prologue to SuperSkills. The argument it turned into is at judgement, and the evidence I have since gathered against it is at the evidence base.
