Given this important role to be played by a professional coach when their client considers this new pathway, we focus in this essay on the nature and range of Generativity Three. We consider the motivations that drive the push toward guardianship. While we will identify many different motivating drives in exploring the varieties of Generativity Three engagements, we focus on five that are central and reoccuring: (1) nobles oblige, (2) living in a tangible culture, (3 safeguarding specific traditional values, (4) “paying it forward” and (5) outliving ourselves. A professional coach who is working with mid-centurions should be conversant with these five drives.
Nobles Oblige: In many traditional societies—especially those with a strong and sustained class structure—the primary obligation of those at the top of the societal hierarchy is to preserve existing values, aspirations, and assumptions within society. This is the noble obligation (nobles oblige). One of our Emerging Sage leaders addresses this obligation directly:
“It’s an old-fashioned notion, but I have a healthy dose of noblesse oblige. It was made abundantly clear to me from the beginning that I was very lucky, and with that came some burdens. My family, schools, and community reinforced that I have been blessed and need to pass those gifts on. When I was a little girl, every year at Christmas my school would adopt a family. We would raise money, pick out presents, and give them a Christmas they would not have been able to afford. Another source of motivation and inspiration is my religion. Social justice is a basic tenant of Unitarian Universalism. There’s a hymn that we sing, ‘We’ll build a world…’ It’s about making a difference, about making this world we live in the best that it can be.”
In traditional societies this function is often served by religious institutions, although preservation and reinforcement also may be in the hands of those who enforce the law (including the judicial system), by those who defend the society from external intrusion (the military), and even by outside influencers (those who monitor the media in highly repressive societies). In each of these societal roles we find Generativity Three, the preservation of that which currently exists.
The Tangible Culture: both of us have been involved for many years as leaders, consultants, and coaches to various for-profit, not-for-profit, and government organizations. In each we have discovered various subculture that often operate in opposition to one another (Bergquist, 1993, Bergquist, Guest and Rooney, 2002; Bergquist and Brock, 2008: Bergquist and Pawlak, 2008). In many instances, an old subculture has re-arisen or been resurrected in response to the emergence of a powerful new subculture. The past twenty years have repeatedly demonstrated the introduction of subcultures associated with new digital communication devices, the globalization of the world’s economy, and the many ways in which ancient religious and political ideologies have been challenged.
These new subcultures threaten existing norms, values and ways of operating in contemporary societies. And, they have led to the emergence of powerful counter cultures that often emphasize not just traditions but also tangibility. Just as the digital era has inaugurated a virtual subculture that has made the world flat, so a powerful reaction against this virtual subculture has led to the emergence of a tangible subculture that emphasizes place, history, tradition, and fundamental values.
The noted sociologist and social theorist, Talcott Parsons (1970), emphasized the importance of this subculture many years ago when he used a complex term, latent pattern maintenance, to describe the critical task to be performed in any viable social system that maintains often unacknowledged but highly influential patterns. These latent patterns are maintained through ceremony, preservation, honoring, and other Generativity Three acts that we describe later in this essay.
