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Recently a good friend of mine Mark Hattas recommended a book called “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss. It is about generational cycles. Now generally I really do not believe in predictions very much, it bugs me how consistently wrong they are. From people saying that the recession was ‘in our heads’, to predictions about a fast recovery. We also regularly hear predictions about the moral decay and decline of society. The book has helped me understand that predictions are so often wrong because we have been brought up to believe in the concept of “linear time”. This means that we extrapolate from where things are today or have been recently and project them into the future. We in the scientific and technology communities certainly operate in this fashion, and in some cases we believe in exponential time like Moore’s Law!

However, Linear time does not take into account that everything in nature is based on cycles: 24 hours in a day, 30 day lunar cycles, 4 seasons every year, high and low tides, and so on.

Based on the book, cultures also experience regular cycles called a “saeculum”. The saeculum has four phases (generations) and each cycle lasts about 80 years. I had goosebumps as the authors showed the regularity of the saeculum going back to the beginning of recorded time. This is the opposite of linear time and explains why our social and economic predictions are always so wrong. They extrapolate from the current path instead of seeing the change about to happen.

The 1st generation of a cycle are the ‘heroes’, they create new groups, organizational structures, technologies, laws, etc. They are responding to coming of age during a massive crisis and seek to protect future generations from living through what they had to endure. The 2nd generation are the ‘artists’, they optimize and refine what is in place; they are responding to an over-protected childhood during a crisis, and coming of age post crisis when things have settled down. The 3rd generation are the ‘prophets’. They question and rebel against the highly structured nature of the society they experience as they come of age and they are responding to being the children of ‘heroes’. This generation shifts societal focus from community to the individual and self-realization. This group makes its life mission to simultaneously dismantle the organizations and ‘obstacles’ to freedom created by their parent’s generation and focus instead on creating a ‘great awakening’. In our world, this is the baby-boom generation. The 4th generation (mine) are the ‘nomads’, we are often confounded, because everything around us is being attacked all of the time. We live in an era where everything is highly politicized and we have never experienced a context where community was the focus instead of the individual. This is our Gen X.

As the current crisis unfolds, we find ourselves starting the cycle over. People born after about 1984 are the ‘heroes’ of the next cycle: the Millennials or Gen Y as we call them, are coming of age in a world of crisis after crisis.

The new saeculum is just starting and we need to pay attention to the mindset of the Millennials to understand where our markets and social institutions are headed and ignore the impulse (and media predisposition) to extrapolate from where we are today.

The significant increase in enrollment in Social Entrepreneurship tracks within the MBA programs today is a telling sign of Millennial intentions.

What do you believe will be the changes in the new cycle? What types of institutions will the Millennials help create? And what are the consequences for employees, customers, communities and shareholders?

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