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Hold the Urgency

So, having solved this one set of things, but without making fundamental shifts in how we ran the world, we were setting ourselves up for much deeper trouble.

Bill McKibben

Rushing to action is the Fast Lane way to lead at a time of crisis. That’s how Spain’s leaders acted following the financial crisis of 2007–2008. In this logic a good leader is strong and decisive, one who shepherds their people through adversity and complexity. Quick fixes look compelling to Fast Lane leaders, even if they sideline the nuance that consultation and participation would bring. In business such leaders follow a similar pattern as they rush to market dominance. That’s how Facebook, in its pursuit of growth, simply rushed past issues like the proliferation of fake news or hate speech on its platform.

Since rushing to action is likely to cause harm, successful Slow Lane movements opt for the opposite strategy. They hold the urgency because they take a longer view. It is not that they don’t want change fast, or that they aren’t in need of urgent progress. But as a principle, Slow Lane movements strive not to sacrifice inclusion, participation, and sustainability for speed. Iceland picked this strategy during the financial crisis. Instead of restoring the old, broken order, leaders convened citizens to come up with the new order for the future. “Holding the urgency” is to know that the Slow Lane is the fastest way to get to the right place.

Three stories in this chapter explore how we can hold the urgency. The first story, “The Slow Race against Time,” follows the story of the German environmental movement. Urgency was their main organizing principle: activists rushed into action to prevent the construction of Germany’s nuclear power infrastructure. What was unusual was the movement’s diverse make-up: conservative landscape conservationists and farmers fought alongside rebellious left-wingers and local families. Holding the urgency became essential to the success of the movement and the Green Party that emerged from it. And the Green Party went on to transform Germany’s political system.

In “Division: Withstanding the Evil Temptation,” the second story, we follow how Ireland ended up undoing 157 years of draconian laws that criminalized abortion. Peacefully. Why did public leaders not turn it into the kind of divisive issue that delivered quick wins for Republican leaders in the United States? What (and who) motivated them to hold the urgency, and lead the country to resolve this issue through patient deliberation? The third story, “Taming the Crisis in Our Homes,” takes us to a dinner among my family and friends that turns sour when adults lose their cool over Fridays for Future. If Ireland can withstand the temptation of rushing to action, why is it so hard to hold our urgency at home? A conversation with my close friend Georg reveals the pressures we are under, when the fear for the future of our children clashes with our desire to provide answers, where none can be found. Put on the spot, the stakes seem unbearably high. Under pressure, we crack when it matters most.

Our fear of change in the face of crisis triggers reactions that stop many families, businesses, governments, and others from slowing down to care for and listen to one another. Put on the spot, our brains are wired to rush into action and to restore order, even when we know it is wrong. The way out? At times of great uncertainty, holding the urgency lets us accomplish important tasks together. Like finding alternatives and figuring out what those who matter most really need.

The Slow Race against Time

My first real memories start in the mid-1970s. At the time the evening news programs in West Germany were giving me the first glimpse of one of the nation’s defining Slow Lane experiences. The daily heute evening news showed thousands of people desperately protesting against the construction of nuclear power stations. Men, women, local leaders, families, farmers, students. What were they doing? Up to one hundred thousand people, out in the rain, in muddy fields. Marching, blocking roads, chaining themselves to trees and railway tracks.

In those days most experts—scientists, engineers, and politicians—were proponents of nuclear power. Not only would it be the only way to guarantee economic growth, but nuclear power would be completely clean and safe. And yet, so many people were afraid. Afraid that accidents might happen, that radiation might leak into their fields or that families would get poisoned. Afraid of what to do with the toxic waste. What I didn’t realize until much later is that one of the epicenters for these protests, the village of Brokdorf with fewer than a thousand inhabitants, was just outside my own home city of Hamburg. To me, on TV, what happened seemed worlds away.¹

My personal relationship to this movement is no story of heroic activism. Quite the opposite. I grew up in a conservative-leaning home that had no time for these activists, who, I was told, were trying to undermine our national progress and energy independence. I came of age alongside the green movement in Germany. When I was four years old, in 1977, the green movement won its first parliamentary seat in a local election. The antinuclear movement founded the Green Party when it realized that it could not achieve real change through protest alone. By the time I was a young teenager, at school I noticed that some of my teachers were environmental activists. But instead of feeling inspired by their activism, I struggled to see past their political leanings and unfashionable looks. All this was too abstract for me.

What blinded me was that I had, unknowingly, already taken sides. I had lost sight of the problem they were trying to solve. In large part I think this was because my family had taken sides. At home we were not discussing environmental activism as a matter of ecology, climate change, nuclear power or its risks. It was talked about in terms of who was protesting, what lifestyle the protesters represented, their politics. At home we reduced the broad coalition, which included even conservative farmers, to the polarized politics of the industrial age two-party political system. You either were with business-friendly conservatives on the right or the Social Democrats backed by workers on the left.

With the protests looking a lot like left-wing student and social protests of the 1960s, and the fact that some of the movement’s leaders had their roots in left-wing activism, our family, like many others, created a shorthand: environmentalism was just another complaint from the left. At our family meals the real measure of success was very much the Fast Lane world of business and dominance. Through that lens environmentalism was the realm of complainers who weren’t succeeding in the economy, who had delusional ideas that would cripple business. These were people who would eat into the privileges of families like ours, who had worked hard and done well, who deserved the freedom to travel and consume as they liked.

Missing the First Signs

The year 1986 could have changed all that. In April, just months before my thirteenth birthday, we were glued to our TV screens as the nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl unfolded just 1,600 kilometers away from our home. The dangers of nuclear power became real, as we experienced days of lockdown. Wind and rain had carried radioactive matter onto our streets and schoolyards (in fact, even today our family doctor in Berlin advised us not to eat local mushrooms, still contaminated from the fallout). That same year, in November, another environmental disaster unfolded on our TV screens. Efforts to extinguish a fire at the Sandoz chemical plant had washed toxic waste into the Rhine River, turning one of Europe’s most scenic rivers an apocalyptic red and killing whole populations of wildlife.²

Many more Germans began to come around to the Green Party. In the national elections of 1987, it doubled its share of the vote. The movement had grown exponentially, it seemed, with protests now attended by hundreds of thousands of people. But even the meltdown at Chernobyl and the gruesome images of Sandoz didn’t change my mind. I still couldn’t see that these protesters, who had been going strong for more than a decade, were really onto something. Yes, these events did reveal the immense risk of nuclear and chemical technology, but it wasn’t enough to shake off my prejudice against the movement. Fed by our family lore, and living in a city with no noticeable environmental risks, I continued to see the protesters as underachievers, do-gooders, and the butt of schoolyard jokes. My own social conscience was evolving in a different direction. I tried to come to terms with the social inequities around me, as well as the legacy of Germany’s Nazi crimes.

And yet the environmental movement steadily kept making inroads into my life. As I studied architecture in the 1990s, a small but growing movement of architects and engineers took on the challenge of sustainable buildings and planning. For a long time, they too were belittled by the establishment, as reducing buildings to energy concepts. Here too, I went along and shared that view, seeing these architects and engineers as overly focused on finding engineering fixes for energy, instead of addressing the immense social, economic, and cultural inequities that I was passionate about. Living and working abroad, though, helped me overcome my prejudices against the people involved. Disconnected from my home politics and social dynamics, I began to lower my defenses to see environmentalism less as a type of people and more as a cause. The German Green Party, meanwhile, continued on a steady trajectory. By the time I was twenty-five, in 1998, they had become a major political force, joining the Social Democrats to form a new coalition government for Germany.

It Is All Connected, Stupid!

In 1995, I had my first chance to witness how intertwined inequality, suppression, economics, and environmental crimes often are. We were in South Africa less than a year after Nelson Mandela had become president, putting an end to the apartheid regime of racist white rule. For us, the visit was a field trip to work in the township of Riverlea in Soweto, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Soweto had been created under the racist policies of South Africa in the 1930s and became the largest Black city in the country. But a South African township was nothing like a city.

For decades, millions of Black Africans had been forcefully resettled into townships like Soweto, where the population could only ever be temporary residents, serving as a workforce for Johannesburg. Racist ideology produced Soweto’s urban plan, a layout more akin to a prison camp than a city. “Passion killer” floodlights illuminated Soweto like an airfield all night. Homes were built to the “Non-European 1951” (or NE 51/9) standard, with deliberately cynical, low-quality detailing.³ In Riverlea, radioactive and poisonous waste from abandoned mines was piled into high mountains right around these poorly built homes, causing terrible respiratory diseases for generations.⁴ When, in 1996, I went to work in the shanty towns of Caracas, I found the same dehumanizing confluence of severe social injustice and pollution.

In Germany, meanwhile, it took another major nuclear disaster—this time in Fukushima, Japan—for the government to finally mandate an end to nuclear power. It was almost impossible to argue for safety if a country like Japan, of no lesser engineering prowess than Germany, had so evidently lost control. Forty years of protests by a movement that had become the largest in German history, had thoroughly changed the social and political environment. Within days the cabinet announced a phasing-out of nuclear energy by the end of 2022.⁵ At this point in 2011, the Green Party had become a third mainstream political force in Germany, polling at 25 percent in some states.

I had also changed, had come around to what these protesters had known all along: that the idea, that we could engineer ourselves out of our fossil fuel dependency through nuclear power, was just too risky (and too costly) in the face of unpredictable risks of global warming. And, more important, that this wasn’t so much about the specific risks of a technology but the symptom of something broken in our society: our endless hunger for more growth and dominance. In 2021, as I returned to live in Germany after thirty years abroad, things went full circle as I cast my vote for the Green Party.

Wait, Not Everyone Can Be an Early Adopter

I had done next to nothing to help bring about this new ecological era. Instead, Brokdorf taught me a lesson in humility. For decades, I had missed the opportunity to look and think for myself, to be convinced by science and proven ideas. I beat myself up about it, afraid of what this revealed about me. But at other times I cut myself some slack. Had I not passionately pursued a different Slow Lane agenda that was just as meaningful?

We cannot possibly be early adopters and activists in every movement. And with time, just as I discovered how inseparable the social injustices I cared about were from environmental problems, the green movement became more embracing of social issues, especially once the fight against nuclear power in Germany was won. If, according to the environmentalist Barry Commoner, the first law of ecology is that “everything is connected to everything else,” there is a good chance that different Slow Lane movements will converge over time, just as I had experienced.⁶

This is the truly important lesson to be learned: in some ways the green movement had been patiently waiting for me all along. Although they were always fighting against immediate and irreversible destruction, the movement held the urgency. Its focus on science and evidence meant that the movement expanded its following, building bridges into my life and work, instead of attacking me. Intentionally or not, the movement gave itself time to evolve and gave me the time it took to unlearn my prejudices, ideologies, and ideas of success in life.

A Very Unlikely Alliance

One thing that made the green movement in Germany special was that it was such an odd alliance. From the outset the movement broke with political left-right norms. On the left it was fueled by activists who had failed to realize their revolutionary dreams in the 1960s. They brought with them protest experience and tactics as well as participatory models that helped the antinuclear movement organize itself. But to the conservative political establishment, this history also linked them with leftist circles, at a time when Germany was experiencing a wave of radical leftist terrorism from the Red Army Faction (RAF) that culminated in the so-called German Autumn in 1977.⁷ This fed a convenient narrative to cast the entire movement off as leftist radicals, when in reality the green movement had a much more diverse and mainstream membership: it included thousands of ordinary, politically moderate families and even very conservative groups such as farmers and landscape conservationists.

We cannot understand the impact, and unique trajectory, of the green movement in Germany without appreciating this unusual coalition of radicals, conservatives, concerned scientists, feminists, and families at a time of polarized politics. Geography was the force that united these groups. Germany is seven times more densely populated than the United States, meaning that any planned nuclear power station was going to be dangerously close to a population center. With so many people feeling at risk, the alliance became a very practical arrangement around specific locations. Protests were organized at these planned nuclear sites, places like Brokdorf, which in turn provided a physical space and opportunity for these groups to have shared experiences in mass protest and activism. For many people these experiences included aggressive policing by a state that was desperate to uphold its dominance.

A Pressure Cooker of Inclusiveness

Outside their shared mission, there was plenty of distrust among these different groups. Who should lead? What happened behind closed doors? This was a grassroots movement caught up, on live television, in a pressure cooker of history: the Cold War induced fear of socialism and nuclear threats, internal conflicts raged among the radical urban left and conservative members, and real-time events like Chernobyl and Sandoz drew attention to the cause. These circumstances forced the movement to constantly reinvent its tactics and develop new ways to make decisions. Weary of self-proclaimed leaders, the movement established rules to reassure and empower every activist. Unlike the more homogenous movements of the 1960s, this inclusive approach tempered the more radical activist instincts to cast the world into irreconcilable “us” and “them” logics. It is a defining characteristic that would be carried over for decades and eventually kept the doors open to latecomers like myself.

I am making a simple point here. This early pragmatism around a common cause led to a culture of listening, debate, inclusiveness, and resistance to traditional forms of hierarchy that had defined the political establishment of the 1970s. In my view, much of the long-term resilience and later political success of the Green Party goes back to this strange initial coalition that was so full of distrust. The Green Party is known for its extensive debates between realists (Realos) and fundamentalists (Fundis), which averaged out to a tense form of moderation. It revolutionized political practices in Germany, by institutionalizing procedures that require direct participation in major decisions by all party members, by creating rules to resist the aggregation of power by professional politicians, and by instituting a 50 percent quota for women in party leadership roles and elections.

A Slow Race against Time

Germany’s green movement never was complacent or intentionally slow. Quite the opposite. Urgency has been central to the movement from its inception: to stop nuclear construction projects, harmful policies, or emissions before it was too late. But its diverse founding history forced the movement to mediate between urgency and inclusiveness. Even today, the Green Party regularly struggles through difficult debates over principles, urgency, and pragmatism. But despite the imperfection of politics, it has institutionalized inclusive practices that resonate with the Slow Lane. What started out as a resistance movement of outliers has evolved into an established political force. The Green Party’s unique way of involving grassroots members in decisions means that many more ordinary people are involved in weighing the pursuit of politically riskier quick wins against the long-term success of its socioecological agenda.

Germany’s green movement is no simple success story. In 2019 Germany’s overall CO emissions per person were the fifth-highest among European Union countries; Germany was ranked twenty-fifth among the world’s highest emitting people.⁸ German politicians were direct and indirect enablers of what became known as “Dieselgate,” the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, a systematic fraud perpetrated by the allpowerful auto industry that undermined the nation’s green credentials. This Slow Lane journey is still a work in progress, and who knows how long it will take. But it is indisputable that the green movement has already made a truly important contribution to democracy, releasing Germany from a two-party system that was defined not by the future but by ideologies anchored in its industrial past.

Division: Withstanding the Evil Temptation

For centuries, public leaders have resorted to a distasteful instrument to get their way, fast. Division. They follow a simple yet effective playbook: look for something only “their people” have in common, then single out the “others,” who are now declared inferior. Whip up an urgent sense of a sacred, existential mission that justifies any means. History is full of terrible events that used this playbook: wars, civil wars, sectarian violence, genocide, identity politics, the Holocaust. For examples, we don’t need to look far back into history. Think Brexit, think Rwanda, think Trump, think Scottish or Catalan independence, think the fight over abortion rights in America. Division does nothing to heal or enrich democracy. In all these cases public leaders chose division as an effective way to preserve their power or get their next big win. For communities it is a downward spiral that is hard to escape.

Why, then, did public leaders in Ireland pick a different path to tackle their country’s most divisive issue? A socially conservative catholic country, Ireland took the Slow Lane to remove a draconian ban on abortion from its constitution.

The Eternal Temptation

Before we get to Ireland and its peaceful settlement on abortion in 2018, I want to take you back to an experience I had in Barcelona in 2012. It is a reminder of the lure of identity politics. One morning, in my neighborhood square, a group of pro-independence political activists called me over to their information stall. They asked me if I was going to vote for Catalan independence from the Spanish state in the upcoming referendum. “Why,” I asked, “would I?” I was with my daughters, eight and five years old, at the time. Both had been born and raised in Barcelona, had spoken Catalan as their first language at kindergarten and school for years. At home we sang Catalan nursery rhymes.

Upon hearing my question, the activists lost interest. After all, I had replied in Spanish, not Catalan. It may not sound like much, but this was the first time, after a decade of living in Barcelona, that I had the courage to ask a pro-independence activist to pitch me. I never dared ask until then because whenever conversations turned to Catalan nationalism, immigrants like myself were told to shut up in no uncertain terms. We were told that we would never understand because we weren’t Catalan. But why weren’t we?

When What Divides Us Trumps Everything

When we first moved to Barcelona in 2002, the region’s nationalism had felt benign. It felt like a way of preserving a regional identity, celebrating the language and culture. As my children were born there, I began to wonder. Were we now Catalan, too? Or just the girls? Things really began to change when the financial crisis of 2007–2008 brought to light serious financial mismanagement and political corruption in the region.⁹ As the scandal unfolded, the otherwise moderate regional president Artur Mas tried to divert attention by conjuring up Catalan nationalist sentiment.¹⁰ According to Mas, it wasn’t a matter of finance or corruption but of “us” (the Catalans) against “them” (the Spanish, who had called out the financial mismanagement).

What for years had felt like a welcoming regional identity began to turn more overtly divisive by the day. In a speech Mas even referred to the “Catalan DNA” as being non-Spanish.¹¹ The 2012 “informal” independence referendum divided society further. At school some children refused to speak Spanish. Families were divided. Politicians took more and more polarizing positions, forcing voters to choose parties on the single issue of identity. Public leaders seemed to answer my question for me: immigrants like us were at best an afterthought in the independence project. In matters of identity, bloodlines trumped all else.

Years later, in 2018, I learned about the constitutional referendum in Ireland that legalized abortion. Now living in America, we had lived through a bruising and divisive presidential election that brought Donald Trump to the presidency. And in other countries there had been a series of referendums that were notable mostly for their false and divisive claims, like those for Scottish and Catalan independence as well as for Brexit. The results from Ireland caught my attention. They were soothing because they seemed so orderly. Instead of dividing society, the results seemed to offer a path for us to tackle even sensitive issues. The story of Ireland holds some valuable clues as to how people in power can withstand the temptation of rushing to divisive action.

A 157-Year Journey to Empowerment

First, a quick history of what happened in Ireland. In 1861 the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland passed the Offenses against the Person Act that penalized abortion with imprisonment with hard labor for life for the woman, and three years for anyone found aiding an attempted abortion. The legislation remained in place in predominantly Catholic Ireland and was reinforced by the Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution in 1983 after pro-life campaigners feared a judicial ruling against the draconian 1861 law. The Eighth was supported by the three main political parties of the time and approved by 66.9 percent of the population in a referendum. It was only in 2018 that the legislation was removed, replaced by a law permitting abortion, as the result of a national referendum in which 66.4 percent of Irish voters voted in favor of legalizing abortion. Ireland had settled a painfully divisive issue peacefully, strengthening democracy along the way.

The Right Activist, in the Right Place, at the Right Time

Many people who have studied this history told me about Katherine Zappone, whom they considered a central figure in the story. As I connected via Zoom with Katherine in her home in New York City, I had two questions on my mind. I wanted to know why Ireland had not made abortion a matter of eternal political division. And I wanted to know what had led to this peaceful resolution. Like so many key players in the Slow Lane, Katherine’s life story matters.

Born in Seattle, Katherine became a theologian and moved to Ireland in 1982, just months before the introduction of the Eighth Amendment. She was a self-described feminist. Her partner (and later wife) was the theologian Ann Louise Gilligan, a former nun. Together, they founded An Cosán in 1986, one of Ireland’s largest providers of education and services to empower women and girls from disadvantaged areas. Teaching feminist theology in Ireland, Katherine found that the Eighth took a central role in her work. The issue eventually forced her out of Catholic institutions. She joined Ireland’s leading nonreligious university instead.

Katherine became a leading advocate for better abortion rights and marriage equality. Her first success came about in 1992, when a referendum stopped the introduction of even more hardline clauses to the constitution and led to amendments that allowed sharing information about abortion services abroad. It took twenty-one years until advocates could claim the next win, the 2013 Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act. In 2016, Katherine became an independent member of parliament and joined the cabinet of Prime Minister Enda Kenny as minister for Children and Youth Affairs. Katherine’s appointment was essential to the prime minister, who needed her vote to form a minority government. Katherine, who didn’t see eye to eye on most issues with this socially conservative politician, had a single condition to join his government: she demanded a citizen assembly on abortion reform.

The Path of Peaceful Deliberation

To learn about this citizen assembly, I called Jane Suiter, a professor of communications at Dublin City University and one of the leading scholars on citizen assemblies in Ireland. I wanted to know why, of all things, Katherine had demanded a citizen assembly. Jane told me that since the 1983 adoption of the Eighth, the harsh terms of the law had created a growing number of legal challenges. High-profile cases revealed the inhumane conditions the law created for victims of rape and for women and girls in other life-threatening situations. Even the United Nations Human Rights Committee called on Ireland to do something about a law that was exceptionally cruel to women.¹² But the dominant political parties, all socially conservative, had little appetite for an issue that the media portrayed only in its extremes.

Meanwhile, Jane and her colleagues in political science departments at different Irish universities had grown increasingly concerned about the decline in political debate. In 2009 they formed a working group to develop new ways forward. In 2011 they organized We the Citizens, the first experimental citizen assembly.¹³ The goal was to find a way to slow down decision-making on critical and divisive issues and to avoid political posturing by letting randomly selected citizens develop recommendations. We the Citizens inspired an act of parliament in 2012 that established a first national citizen assembly, the Irish Constitutional Convention.¹⁴ It was a new forum for deliberation, made up of one hundred people. One of the most notable outcomes was a recommendation that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in a national referendum on May 22, 2015. Katherine hoped that such a citizen assembly could find a peaceful resolution for abortion, too.

Here is how the citizen assembly that led to the abolition of the Eighth Amendment worked. In 2016 the Irish government created a citizen assembly, modeled on the experience of the Constitutional Convention. The assembly was chaired by Justice Mary Laffoy, a respected former supreme court judge. Ninety-nine members would be invited to develop recommendations for the parliament on eight themes. As demanded by Katherine, the Eighth Amendment was one of them. Thirty-three of the assembly members were appointed by political parties in parliament. Sixty-six members were ordinary citizens selected at random by a jury, to be representative of different social, economic, and geographic backgrounds. Before deliberations commenced, an open call invited the public to present their views. They presented thirteen thousand submissions.

Irish Citizen Assembly

Mary Laffoy, the chair, invited seventeen organizations to make presentations to the assembly, representing different sides of the abortion debate. Members met to hear presentations, consulted experts, and deliberated for eighteen months before the assembly voted on its recommendations for constitutional reform. The recommendations reflected the different views of the assembly. Options included abolishing or reforming the Eighth as well as views on the application of time limits for abortion relative to the age of the fetus, and consideration of other circumstances such as rape or health risks to women. The government led a debate of the recommendations in parliament, as mandated by law.

In May 2018 the government presented the abolition of the Eighth for a constitutional referendum. And 66.4 percent of voters came out in favor of abolishing the Eighth. A new law, the Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Act, was adopted at the same time to legalize abortion for up to twelve weeks of gestation.

The Phone Call That Put an End to Fast Leadership

According to Jane, the experience of poor decision-making during the financial crisis played a major role in making the citizen assemblies possible. In 2008, facing the collapse of the financial system, government leaders in Ireland had found themselves in a similar position to leaders in Spain. In an ad-hoc phone meeting at six in the morning, the cabinet decided to guarantee all banks. A decision that would cost Irish taxpayers billions and cause years of hardship was taken by phone, in a rush, with no meaningful evidence or consultation. In part, this rushed decision came about because leaders felt that the public expected decisive leadership. But later, after the fallout became clear, citizens were looking for a different way. Citizen assemblies offered one such new way forward, a way in which citizens could participate in big, complex, and nuanced decisions.

Building Back Better Belief Systems

Another important enabler of the citizen assembly was that following the financial crisis, Ireland found itself grappling with its values. Before the collapse, Ireland self-proclaimed its fast growth economic model as the Celtic Tiger. The nation’s leaders had hoped that by unleashing financial markets and globalization, Ireland would deliver sustainable wealth and progress. But the financial crisis only brought humiliation, austerity, and grief. When I attended Ashoka’s Change Nation summit in Dublin in 2012, I heard public leaders discuss their sense of shame over what had happened in the Celtic Tiger years. Shame in letting greed and speculation go so far, and a sense that their decision-making (including the 6 a.m. phone conference to bail out the banks) had served financial over human needs. It was an incredible moment of reckoning.

Here was a nation coming to terms with its Fast Lane ways that had led it astray from its tradition of humility and neighborly values. People wanted a better way forward.

The third enabler of Ireland’s transformative citizen assemblies was the rapid decline of influence from the Catholic Church. Starting in the late 1980s, historians, journalists, activists, commissions, and parliamentary inquiries revealed a seemingly endless history of abuse of women and children by the church.¹⁵ By challenging the purity of the rigid doctrines of the past, these revelations made room for rebalancing people’s religious beliefs and human rights. Ireland was a late mover compared with other European countries on both investigating abuse and carrying out reforms. Katherine and activists like her found themselves not just demanding change but also cushioning this transition from a country organized around the church, to a country organized around human rights. As a feminist, the first openly gay cabinet minister, and a theologian married to a former nun, Katherine’s life embodied this transition. As a theologian and trusted member of the prime minister’s cabinet, she was able to shepherd government leaders through their difficult questions of faith.

Real Division Was Always Just a Short Drive Away

What happened in Ireland was no accident. It had been in the making, crawling toward resolution for generations. More than a matter of abortion laws, it was a symptom of broken societal systems holding back progress on human rights. As to my question of why politicians had not used abortion to divide (and rule) the country, as they had done in America, both Katherine and Jane couldn’t provide any real answers.

Here is what I think. Northern Ireland must have played into it. Belfast is just a two-hour drive from Dublin. When I visited West Belfast shortly before the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland in 1998, I saw a glimpse of what can happen when you go all in on the game of division. High walls separated Catholic and Protestant communities after decades of sectarian violence. Police trucks with snipers patrolled Catholic neighborhoods in an attempt to control the Troubles, the uprising against British rule of Northern Ireland. Neighborhood police stations were fortified like bunkers in a war zone. Taxis were either serving Catholic or Protestant neighborhoods. Military cordons protected children on their way to school. It was a city divided. And a reminder for leaders in Dublin to not gamble everything but play it slow.

A Roller-Coaster, a Crash, an Elegant Landing

The deep soul-searching that Ireland underwent following the financial crises, coupled with the Catholic abuse crises, must have contributed to the peaceful and inclusive reform of abortion laws. It was a moment of reckoning but also of unlearning. Too many people had made mistakes, had misplaced trust, had believed in economic growth, had looked the other way. Like many other countries, Ireland got its wake-up call. Unlike others, Ireland chose to slow down by creating citizen assemblies to deliberate these complex questions. And these citizen assemblies got things done and proved productive. Over the course of a decade, Ireland passed a series of important constitutional and policy reforms.

Unlike Spain, it wasn’t radical new political parties that uprooted the Irish political establishment. Mind-sets and belief systems had shifted from within, helped along by widely respected institutions, universities, and movements. People like Justice Mary Laffoy, Katherine Zappone, and Jane Suiter stepped up to fill the void. They offered guidance when long-held power structures and belief systems fell apart. The citizen assembly was the kind of instrument that helped steer the final phase of this pivotal period to a resolution, holding the urgency until the end.

Taming the Crisis in Our Homes

The stories of how Iceland and Ireland took to their citizens, and how the German environmental movement held the balance between urgency and inclusion, give us insights as to how leaders can hold the urgency to tame moments of crisis. After all, these countries withstood the temptation of quick, authoritarian fixes in the face of collapsing financial markets, international pressure, and fear of nuclear disaster. And they remind us of what is lost when people in power give in to these temptations: millions of people suffer.

Even as we know all this, holding the urgency can prove elusive when we are among our loved ones. It is worth exploring how things can play out in the safety of our homes because it reveals how taking part in the Slow Lane also calls for important inner work.

A Fraught Family Dinner Conversation

Spain, 2019. It was a beautiful summer evening. We had set a table underneath the olive tree, overlooking the sea. It was a special treat for us to be among old friends, since we had left Europe to live in New York four years earlier. Our daughters, seated among us at the table, were all young teenagers now. Everyone was lending a hand, the conversation was fun and easygoing, as it can only really be when you are in the company of people you trust. I noticed how Olivia, my then eleven-year-old daughter, was looking around the table waiting for an opening to say something. She was shy in front of adults, but at last she spoke up. “At school, my friends and I have started to learn about Fridays for Future,” she said. “We have even joined some of the marches in New York. Our teachers and some parents who are scientists have helped us learn more about climate change. I think it is really urgent we do something.”

It was true, since the beginning of the year, the girls’ growing interest in climate change had had some real impact in our family. First, they went vegetarian, and I saw almost daily how they grappled with balancing their desire for things with their carbon footprint. “In just a few weeks,” Olivia continued, “we will have a really big climate march in New York. I think Greta Thunberg, who started Fridays for Future, will be there also!” Now the other Olivia, my good friend Georg’s twelve-year-old daughter, chimed in.¹⁶ “Same here! My friends and I also participate in Fridays for Future at home in Barcelona.” As the girls shared their excitement about Fridays for Future, the mood at the table changed. Visibly agitated, Georg jumped into the conversation. “I hate any form of personality cult, and this is exactly what this Greta has become. This hasn’t played well in the past. Also, Greta is autistic, so there must be someone who is telling her what to say! She’s just a puppet, and teens are just blindly falling for her.” Soon, several of the grownups joined in and laid into Fridays for Future and Greta Thunberg. They looked defensive, their faces red. They no longer talked to the two Olivias but debated among themselves.

Then, quite abruptly, the evening ended in an awkward silence. The girls left to hang out. As we cleared the table, Georg, like the other grownups, looked uncomfortable.

What Stopped Us from Listening, When It Mattered Most?

A year had passed when I called Georg to ask if he would be comfortable revisiting the evening with me, to understand why things had happened the way they did. To me, that night revealed something about our relationship to change. “You know, I feel very strongly that Greta Thunberg is a distraction, that she is divisive, polarizing, and not building bridges,” Georg said. “I have a real aversion to this kind of idolizing of leaders, to have people who symbolize a cause. I don’t know, maybe it is to do with being German, because of our history.” He explained that he prefers answers that are more nuanced, technocratic, and science-based. To Georg, it feels dangerous when young people are enthralled by a personality they only know from social media and who is promoting such uncompromising demands.

But as the conversation progressed, I noticed how Georg took longer pauses, becoming more pensive. “Maybe there was also something else that caused me to react the way I did,” he said. “I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think I felt a bit overwhelmed, put on the spot. Vulnerable. It was a terrible feeling. I may have felt that I don’t have any real answers to the threat climate change poses to our children. But at the same time, as a father, I am supposed to protect them, know all the answers.”

Georg and I had become close friends over the twelve years that I lived in Barcelona. He is incredibly thoughtful, and I admire his work as a successful photographer working for magazines, spending time with journalists and traveling all over the world. As a teenager, I had dreamed of becoming a photographer, like him. Both of us had grown up in quite similar circumstances, moderately conservative households, in what was West Germany at the time.

I asked Georg whether, if he had known beforehand that we would talk about Fridays for Future that evening, he would have handled the conversation differently. “Yes. No doubt,” he said. “I don’t think I would have got caught up on the credibility of Greta Thunberg. I mean, the evening was about the girls sharing their enthusiasm for a civic cause. It seems shortsighted, in hindsight, to try to discredit the movement or win an argument against the girls. It should have been a moment to celebrate that our daughters spoke up about a cause they cared about.”

Georg told me that with a moment’s time to reflect, he might have seen the bigger picture. “I should have helped them, first and foremost, by listening and engaging with their ideas. There would also have been no harm admitting that I myself was afraid also. That I don’t know the answers. It would have been nice to open the door to an ongoing conversation with them about how we can change things. You know, they actually know a lot.”

Georg’s words resonated not just with my experience as a parent but also with my professional experiences. Fear of change in the face of crises triggers reactions that stop so many families, businesses, governments, and others from slowing down to listen to one another. Put on the spot, we rush to restore order, even when we know it is wrong. To restore order, we assert ourselves by tapping into stereotypes, prejudice, and posturing that has been cultivated for generations.

According to my friend Eric Dawson, founder of the youth-empowerment group Peace First, 99 percent of media coverage consumed (and produced) by adults presents young people as either a problem or a victim. This feeds a preconception among adults that young people have nothing to contribute. It is not surprising, then, that in Australia, for example, only 3.3 percent of news articles featured young people and that two-thirds of young Australians feel that mainstream media has no idea what their lives are like.¹⁷

Sadly, shutting out others and rushing to action is the norm in how we deal with our fear of losing control. Behavioral scientists such as the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman have shown that people all too often behave in ways that are contrary to their best interest. It is in moments of crisis—whether in our economy, our business, or at a family dinner—that we rush to actions we subsequently come to regret because we stopped listening to those who matter most.

Slowness, Bad and Good

Isn’t it interesting how time reveals itself as almost secondary in these stories of leaders, movements, and people holding their urgency? They all respond to crises; they all want to change things fast. And yet, their urgency operates more like fuel than a hard delivery date. Even in the German green movement (where urgency was the actual purpose!), urgency turned out to provide the energy that was channeled into creating something much bigger. It motivated people to keep experimenting with different forms of organizing, testing, and adapting different forms of action, and ultimately helped them reshape the entire political system.

For powerful leaders in business and politics, there is a choice to be made: they can either hold their urgency, or take the Fast Lane of quick fixes. Leaders in Spain, Iceland, and Ireland had that kind of power. My friend Georg appeared to have this power too, at our dinner table, when he chose to rush into action and judgment. But hindsight revealed how his reaction was fueled by a deeper sense of helplessness, of losing control. His frustration, his sense of powerlessness, was shared by the environmental activists in Germany and the women’s rights campaigners in Ireland. They all wanted “change right now.” But it was simply beyond their control to determine the speed or direction of change. They found themselves holding the urgency not as a matter of choice but as the only way to develop the kind of critical mass that could lead to change. For these activists slowness is a double-edged sword. It causes pain and anger, but it also unlocks far bigger success later on.

Slow Down to Get Important Things Done

As painful as it may be, holding the urgency lets us accomplish important things. It helps us figure out what “good” should really look like. Spain’s bitter medicine wasn’t just cruel, it was also unimaginative. It immediately reduced the crisis and its moment of uncertainty to a single task: return the financial system to what it was before, at any cost. Leaders lost all sense of proportion when they failed to ask, “At what cost?” They showed no desire to imagine an alternative, to imagine a better outcome than taking away the dignity of millions as they descended into poverty. Spain’s indignados, camping on city squares, created movements that began to fill that lack of imagination with new answers. They tried to do in a couple of years what the German green movement did over the course of five decades: to dream up a different future. For them, slowing down created a new political platform to imagine better answers.

Holding the urgency also lets us build bridges. As movements strive to realize their visions, they need allies. Germany’s green movement and Ireland’s human rights activists became ever more inclusive. Building such bridges can be very uncomfortable, as many movements start out by creating an identity of being different, creating an us against them mentality. Successful movements avoid such division. Activists in Germany realized that they couldn’t insist that people submit to a predefined set of ideas. That turned out to be wise because such indoctrination rarely works. Instead, these activists invented a new, more participatory way of running a political party. Eventually its unique way of making decisions created a powerful logic, by which even newcomers and outsiders are seen as fully capable contributors.

But here is the challenge: holding the urgency feels counterintuitive at a time of crisis. From a young age we grow up learning how powerful it is to conjure up a crisis to get things done. After all, a crisis permits us to grab power and resort to special, often authoritarian measures.

What Made Them Slow Down?

What made these leaders slow down? Hidden in these stories are different reasons why some leaders grasped the value of holding the urgency. In Iceland, a small country, bailing out the banks would have drowned its small population in debt. Being a small island nation outside the European Union and its single currency may have given Iceland that bit of additional room for common sense and independent thinking. Unlike leaders in Spain, leaders in Iceland realized that it was above even their pay grade to make a decision of such magnitude for people and not with people. Calling a constitutional assembly also echoed the kind of soul-searching that people in Ireland experienced when it reckoned with its Celtic Tiger years of fast growth, greed, and speculation. And this soul-searching wasn’t all that different from Georg’s reflections on why he ended up that evening long ago saying the polar opposite of what he really wanted to do.

We can be more intentional. We now know, after all, that holding the urgency will get us to the right place faster. With that knowledge we can say “Hold on!” when we are told that there is no alternative and that a high price must be paid. Let’s just assume that there always is an alternative, but that to imagine it, we may have to let go of something we hold dear. Like our pride in having always been right, or admitting that going back is not an option. As we practice slowing down in this way, we should be compassionate with ourselves and those around us. Our brains, after all, are literally wired to rush to action, looking for old answers to new problems.

The Joy of Slowness

As we overcome the temptation of quick fixes, we can push our imaginations to new heights—whether at home in our families, in our communities, at work, in business, in government or society. This is fun, and it is energizing. One of the secrets to success in the Slow Lane is to create enough joy to see us through the inevitable setbacks until we reach the other side. That moment when our big dreams become the new norm.

To get there, however, we need to do more than slow down a bit, here and there. We need to say, “I am not going anywhere!” Staying for as long as it takes. Isn’t that what caring is all about?