Ethan Fletcher
My Background
Hi, I’m Ethan Fletcher, founder and principal at Discontinuity Strategies. I’m the father of a 7- and a 5-year-old, living in the Hudson Valley with my wife and family. I grew up with my parents, sisters, and brother in the wooded hills of Western Massachusetts, where my heart still lives.
My Dad was and still is a leader in the developmental disabilities field. He was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War in 1970, and for his alternative service he was assigned to be an orderly at Belchertown State School. That difficult, thankless, low-paid job turned out to be the foundation of the rest of his life. When his service ended he was promoted, which started him on his career path. He worked for the state and later led a nonprofit that placed developmentally disabled people into the community and provided each person the services they needed to live on their own. Throughout, my Dad was part of the movement to help people leave institutions so they could lead independent lives.
My parents met when my Mom, then a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts College of Education, taught a class to employees of Belchertown State School. My Mom was a compassionate, warm, and gifted teacher. She stayed home with us - and ran our small sheep farm - until my youngest sibling, my brother Will, started school. She then taught kindergarten for 15 years, until the last years of her career when she was a head teacher for a cohort of children with autism. With generosity and sincerity, she had a rare ability to build and facilitate positive relationships. When my Mom died in 2017, her former superintendent said “She would turn a school into a community.”
Of the many things I’ve learned from my parents, the most core to who I am is the importance of seeing every person, whatever their abilities, appearance, polish or other superficial qualities, as unique and worthy.
I was an earnest, introverted, and friendly kid. A capable student with a provincial worldview, and a spirited athlete with limited talent. After graduating from Amherst Regional High School, I went on to earn bachelors degrees in Civil Engineering and Economics from Tufts University. I worked for several years in management consulting and Democratic politics, and then went to Yale Law School, graduating in 2006 with a J.D. and a focus on the law of democracy.
How I Got Here
I’ve been fortunate to have opportunities to do worthwhile, impactful work in my career, but in some ways I’ve always been searching for the right thing for me. The search led me through interesting, rewarding experiences in tech/media startups, politics, applied behavioral science, and nonprofit leadership. In the process, I accomplished challenging goals, formed lasting friendships, and developed valuable skills, but I hadn’t yet found my calling.
For a number of years I’ve been thinking about how I want to spend the next phase of my career. Over that same period I’ve had a nagging sense that something fundamental had shifted in the world, at least in the United States. Climate change was a piece of it, Trump was a piece of it, but it felt deeper and more fundamental.
In 2021, a few things happened that started me on the path to offering adaptation guidance to individuals, families, communities, and organizations.
First, after spending 2020 helping the Biden campaign and hoping he could restore normalcy to the White House and the country, I watched as Trump and his allies convinced a supermajority of Republicans that a nakedly self-serving fabrication - “the election was stolen” - is true. Mass belief in consequential lies isn’t compatible with democracy, nor is the ability of leaders to manufacture alternative realities to serve their interests. In the long-term, something has to give.
Second, I saw increasingly extreme weather causing devastation across the U.S. and around the world. Though for many it still hasn’t sunk in, it’s clear climate impacts are inflicting extensive damage now, and it will get worse in the years ahead. I also observed how the impacts of weather disasters didn’t end when the events were over, second and third order effects rippled out, often in dangerous ways.
Finally, I noticed that these mounting risks and the likelihood of future upheaval were affecting how I was thinking about the most important aspects of my life. It was influencing what my wife and I looked for in a new house. It was affecting my calculus in making long-term financial and investing decisions. It was even shaping how we talk to our kids about the world, how we help them make sense of what’s happening in a way that builds agency rather than anxiety.
After weeks of careful deliberation, stress-testing whether these shifts in my approach were prudent, I concluded that not only was the answer “yes,” but anyone not factoring these dynamics into their planning for the future was leaving themselves exposed to new, poorly understood risks. Because of what’s at stake, people need support navigating this unexplored terrain. They need help making sense of the transformation we’re living through, teasing out the implications, and determining the best ways to build resilience.
What I Believe
In my practice, I help families, communities, and organizations understand and navigate the uncharted territory of this new era. My coaching and consulting is built on a foundation of my analysis (which will evolve as the world does), philosophical beliefs, and moral commitments.
Here are the touchstones that guide my approach:
I believe the world, and especially the U.S., is in the early stages of a significant and disruptive transformation driven by several destabilizing forces. These include declining social trust, rapid technological advances, a fragmented internet media ecosystem, demographic change, severe political polarization, intensifying weather events, and mass migration.
I believe this transformation will likely - eventually - upend much of what we take for granted in the world. We need to reassess how we approach a wide range of domains we’ve long assumed are stable.
I believe it’s critical to remember we can’t perfectly predict the future. Things that are unsustainable or unstable can and often do last far longer than we expect. Therefore, the choices we make and ruggedization strategies we pursue need to work for us in a wide range of future scenarios.
I believe today’s kids need a different mix of soft skills and a different attitude toward uncertainty and change than we had. To help our kids understand the changing world, we will need to let go of our existing mental models and see the world with fresh eyes. If we pass on our outdated mental models of the world to our children, we will be putting them at a practical and emotional disadvantage.
I believe each person, family, community, and organization is unique. Every resilience-building strategy needs to be customized to the values, priorities, preferences, and constraints of the client.
I believe people who start thinking about this transformation and its implications early will capture significant benefits that won’t be available to those who don’t.
If you’re seeing in the world anything like what I’m seeing, and are worried or wondering what the implications are for your future, I’d love to speak with you. You can get in touch on my Contact page, or via email at ethan[at]ethanfletcher.org.
If you run an organization and would benefit from an informed outside perspective to help you tease out the implications of this transformation for your strategy, operations, and stakeholders, I encourage you to reach out.
Whether you already have a clear sense of what you want to do and just want to refine your thinking, or if you’re at the beginning and need to start with organizing your thoughts, don’t hesitate to reach out.
