It’s been 16 months since my last blog.

I’ve written previously a wee bit about our leap of faith, me, my husband, my daughter, her husband, my granddaughter and grandson moving from a victorian villa in Edinburgh to a rural 11 acre spot just outside Kinross. My daughter Keira (@ellarove on twitter) has challenged me to write a weekly blog about our experiences and relate them to a character from or episode of Star Trek (it’ll be The Next Generation unless otherwise specified).

The first year here we settled in and Keira literally got a sense of the lie of the land. And my husband and I did some work to refurbish our tired farmhouse. The kids, now both teenagers continued their learning (outwith mainstream conveyor belt schooling), in real life and online.

Last year my husband, Wayne became semi retired and Keira left her civil service career to go freelance and start to regenerate our overgrazed fields. My son in law continued to work in IT in the NHS, I pottered in a tiny part of the garden, spent a couple of days most weeks with my other granddaughter, my daughter and her husband in far away Musselburgh and, with Wayne did some more work on the house.

We also started the process of putting in a planning application to turn our dilapidated outbuilding into an inspirational social space.

The initial response from the council to our pre-planning application overview document was largely positive with a couple of caveats. Keira and I had a couple of discussions about how to involve all six of us in the process and look at what we could all contribute during 2024 to achieving this and making progress on our wider vision: for the farmhouse, the outbuildings, the land, our lifestyles.

Between us a sense of angst emerged, what if… what if… what if…

A memory of a project I led years ago came back to me. I was determined to take on the project despite objections from colleagues and external stakeholders. What if our reputation got damaged, what if we couldn’t get the right team together, what if we couldn’t get the data we needed…

It was the one and only time I ran a project with the Risk Register being the main focus. We came up with mitigations and actions for dealing with each one and that dictated the plan. It was a success and I was really chuffed.

So Keira and I came up with an idea to have a family discussion about What could go wrong. We knew it was risky (did you see what I did there). Having a conversation with such a negative angle could spiral into a dark place.

We were also very much aware that a recent tragic bereavement was weighing heavily on our hearts and minds.

We came up with a game of two halves, What could go wrong and What are we going to do about it. Keira is an experienced facilitator of difficult conversations and I’m trained in Lego (R) Serious Play (R). We had a workshop last Saturday afternoon, where we each built a model of What I think could go wrong, then built a shared model based on these stories.

We did a Check out after the workshop and as expected we spoke of feeling low, tired, sad, freaked, sick. We also recognised that we’d done some really powerful thinking and sharing and that it was healthy and important that we surface and face things that could go wrong.

The workshop the next day started with a Dialogue walk, in pairs, outside. In a Dialogue walk you have a few questions to explore, each person talks for a few minutes, the other carefully listens with no interruptions, then you swap over, then have a conversation.

We then came back in and, no workshop is complete without postits, we took each What could go wrong and came up with a few What are we going to do about it actions for each one.

What a list! Themes included what if our infrastructure is damaged (food supply, water, power); what if we struggle to regenerate and maintain our land and infrastructure; what if our neighbours get upset; what if we have to deal with injury, physical and mental ill health, disability, death; what if one or more of us decides this way of life/location is not for me/us; through to what if there’s another pandemic; nuclear war; the zombie apocalypse.

We came up with loads of practical solutions : training and skills transfer; no weakest links; make sure tools and information are readily accessible; mapping our power, water, food infrastructure; maybe getting donkeys.

And we also agree we should continue to have these sorts of discussions, work at making social contact outwith the farm and online; keep extending invitations to hear and be part of what we’re up to, to neighbours and the wider community; be supportive of each other, talk more about how we are feeling and what concerns us.

Deanna Troi — Wikipedia would be proud.