I have to confess that I’m feeling a little bit like the kid in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes – and I just can’t contain myself anymore.

Friends, we have gone clear off the rails on this one and we don’t even know it. We have regressed from a studied and considered socio-demographic appreciation of generations over to a model defined by the protocols of Excel spreadsheets. Folks, we have thrown countless future generations of babies out with the social media bathwater. X, Y, Z – and now Generation Alpha and Generation AA? Really?

Recently, I was asked to make a presentation about the Gen6 Factor – the implications, opportunities, and challenges presented by having six contemporaneous generations in our society. As it happens, this little appreciated phenomenon is the only truly unprecedented thing to happen to humans in millennia.

Things were going well until someone asked me when I was going to talk about Gen Y and Gen Z; to whom I had been referring as Millennials and Homelands respectively, throughout my presentation. “But what about Gen Y and Z” …. they continued to insist. That was the moment I realized how deeply we had entered into the Twilight Zone of demographic generational inquiry.

Where did we go wrong?

No less an entity than Forbes Magazine fell prey to the madness in an August 11, 2019 article entitled “How Gen Z (and Gen AA) Are Reshaping the Economy.” Way back in December of 2015, Business Insider credited “Futurist, demographer, and TedX speaker Mark McCrindle” with leading the campaign to call anyone born after 2010 a part of Generation Alpha [my emphasis]. And the alphabet soup generation train is getting longer by the minute.

Why should this matter? Because words matter. Names Matter. Names have meaning. Defining moments matter. We are in the middle of recognizing that what comes after the covid pandemic will be different from what was before the pandemic because this is a socio-politico-economic defining moment. So was the turning of the Millennium. So was WWII. So was the violation of the American homeland.

Human history is a long road with many defining milestones. Each of those milestones has affected, indeed defined, the generation formed in its wake – and that’s how the generational nomenclature was arrived at.

Since 1992 we had a model that works.

Up until the Xers came along, we were simultaneously content and enlightened by a generational nomenclature devised by Messrs. Strauss and Howe (the 1992 authors of Generations: The History of America’s Future 1584 to 2069). In that simple yet meaningful model, each generation was shaped by a defining moment that occurred in their evolution as a generational cohort of values and attitudes. The authors’ model was supported by history, data, and information dating back some 500 years and some 20 generations of the American saga.

One of the beautiful elegances of the generational naming model devised by Strauss and Howe is that the name of each generation tells you much about that generation in the briefest possible form. How did we get into this alphabetical morass? With a simple misunderstanding… or rather an absolute lack of understanding.

Strauss & Howe were able to define generations through formative events going back to the 15^th and 16^th Century in Europe. Those cohorts included the Arthurian Generation, the Humanist Generation, the Reformation Generation, the Reprisal Generation, The Elizabethan Generation, the Parliamentary Generation, and the Puritan Generation. If you know a bit of history, the very names can tell you the generational story. (For a full list – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory#Late_Medieval_Saeculum)

“X” is not a letter of the alphabet.

Descriptive nomenclatures were flowing along nicely with this schema right on up through the Baby Boomer era, and then something happened that led us straight to today’s quandry. The subsequent generation couldn’t get readily named. No one seemed to agree on a rational, intuitively appropriate, name. Until, that is, the perfect name for a generation that would not be named presented itself.

“Author William Strauss noted that around the time [Douglas] Coupland’s 1991 novel [Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture] was published the symbol “X” was prominent in popular culture, as the film Malcolm X was released in 1992, and that the name “Generation X” ended up sticking. The “X” refers to an unknown variable or to a desire not to be defined… Strauss’s coauthor Neil Howe noted the delay in naming this demographic cohort saying, “Over 30 years after their birthday, they didn’t have a name. I think that’s germane.” Previously, the cohort had been referred to as Post-Boomers, Baby Busters (referencing the drop in the birth rates following the baby boom),[19] New Lost Generation, latchkey kids, MTV Generation, and the 13th Generation (the 13th generation since American independence).” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X)

Clearly, the “x” in Generation X is not an alphabetical sequence in any sense of the word. It is in fact the unknown in an equation, the unknown factor in any consideration, the unknown or the un-nameable in anything. Knowing this, how could any informed, educated, adult base their understanding of future generations on y, z, and whatever comes alphabetically next? This particular “X” is a singularity. Nothing can precede it. Nothing can follow it.

Are we courting disaster?

If that knowledge is not enough to invalidate X-Y-Z, how about logic and metaphysics? If we’re going with the alphabetical thing… how do you rationalize starting at the end? By the same token, in magical lore, naming something manifests it. Are we possibly courting the manifestation of The Final Generation? I say – why tempt the universe.

On the other hand, if we go back to the sequence of “Millennials” (who marked the turn of the Second Millennium, and all that represents) succeeded by “Homelands” (who personally witnessed the vulnerability of the American Homeland and all THAT represents) then it might logically lead us to see the incipient generation not as Z-The Final Generation of Humanity, but as the values and attitudes cohort spawned in and defined by the first truly global pandemic of the Information Age. We would then get a meaningful handle on the foundational generational shift that’s likely to serve as the prism of understanding the values, attitudes, motivations, and intentions for this generation.

Restoring the Generational Continuum.

Building on the totality of Strauss & Howe’s robust model of generational precedents, four cyclical turnings, and four generational archetypes (see article above), the post-Homeland generation is likely to be a Prophet generation. It will echo many of the themes propagated by the most recent Prophet generation, the Baby Boomers – idealism, consensus around a new societal order, and a coming of age as the self-absorbed (and self-anointed, crusaders of an Awakening). And, YES, those were the hallmarks of Baby Boomers. In spite of the fact that we are now seen as “the establishment,” we Boomers struck out in a new direction of idealism and community (we believed we invented the idea of harmonious “communes”; as apparently so do many other generations). Remember the Hippie/Yuppie culture? Here comes the echo!

Next time….. How GenNext (working title only) might learn, think, understand, decide, and value in the stream and context of what has come before.

I have spent more than 25 years helping clients achieve moments of genius, repeatedly and on demand, in team meetings. I have spent the last decade studying how people think together in groups. For the past four years I have been deeply involved in “distance learning,” and I have come to understand that virtual connections, done right, offer possibilities we only hope for in same-space encounters. Who runs the meeting, and how, makes all the difference. Running effective meetings in the virtual world is more demanding… and that’s a good thing if we learn from it.

Three things can make virtual meetings more conducive to extraordinary results.

1. The safety of digital solitude. It’s what makes it possible for the social media “you” to be less inhibited than the “in the flesh” you. Even as you are “out in the world” digitally, you are still physically in your home safe space.
2. Permission to think out loud. In the physical presence of others, we are less likely to express thoughts that are only partially formed. Exposing ourselves and others to ideas as they develop in a virtual environment can accelerate and precipitate their perfection and benefit from evolving collaborative input.
3. Access to collective native intelligence. With our traditional barriers lowered, we are open to including more of our total experience in the conversation. In same-space meetings we tend to offer more self-limited, uni-dimensional, participation, and constrain it by task, title, or job function.

Three things to avoid in digital conferences.

1. Don’t mistake virtual meetings for lesser versions of same-space meetings. The rules are different. The process is different. The dynamic is different. The potential is greater.
2. Scrupulously avoid the one-to-all model of communication. That’s what memos are for. Virtual meetings are multi-directional engagements of the group.
3. Avoid going over 30 minutes. Starting a meeting with a count-down clock is simultaneously challenging and energizing. It is better to have two or three productive short meetings than to have one dreadfully long one.  

Seven things you can do to achieve the full potential of the new-new normal in meetings.

1. Enforce Collegiality.  Virtual meetings have high potential for expanded and elevated input opportunities. A collegial atmosphere, where every attendee and every opinion is treated as equally valuable, opens the door to more, and more meaningful, contributions.
2. Orchestrate Omnilogues. Work at ensuring that as many opinions as participants are voiced and heard.
3. Practice and Encourage contributions in short bursts. Just like in basketball, the more hands touch the ball, the quicker it gets to the basket. The briefer and more intuitive the thinking, the greater the clarity.
4. Summarize. Recognizing that most people are better editors than authors, someone needs to take on the responsibility to describe “what just happened here” in succinct form.
5. Round-robin assent. Get a Yea/Nay from each attendee. Don’t assume everybody heard the same thing.
6. Articulate Closure. Restate the general understanding based on (5) above  
7. Commitments. Ask for specific “next steps” from each participant.

NOW you can close the meeting.

A note about who should run virtual meetings. Taking full advantage of the benefits of virtual meetings requires different inclinations, skill sets, and empathies than leadership or management. The person who runs your organization may not be the best person to run virtual meetings – at least not initially and not until some learning or training can take place.

So, to begin this process in your organization, seek out the individual with a “natural” talent for understanding and appreciating the intricacies, peculiarities, and subtleties of collegial thinking in the real world and set them loose in the virtual world. Your organization will be the better for it in the moment and in the long run.

See the video below

If you would like to ‘hit the ground running’ with the new-new thing in virtual meetings in as little as one session, and within the next few days, please contact us for an immediate response.

How Thinking Whole can help teams and organizations (and high school classrooms) achieve Moments of Genius repeatedly and on demand.

It works for Senior Leadership Teams. It works for Ad Agency Creatives. It works for 14-year-old high school freshmen.

Twenty-five years ago, John Krubski began to achieve uncommonly highly creative results – in a single day – while working with corporate tasked and leadership teams. Over the following decades, his unique process developed, evolved, and perfected. It helped shape strategy, align organizations, and unleash innovation. It also helped take the output of advertising and marketing creative teams to a higher level by simultaneously unleashing collective native intelligences and grounding that creativity in practical applicability.

Ten years ago, Dr. Alexandra K. Krubski, began using exactly the same process (which we now call “Breaking Genius”) in her high school biology classrooms. Why? Because she found that fertile, but often distracted, young minds responded to the open-ended discipline of Breaking Genius with remarkable consistency. In extremely short order, they made sense of even scientifically complex information, organized it into a conceptual, consistent, whole – and achieved sometimes literally stunning clarity of understanding and insight.

It turns out that what works with adolescent brains also works with adult management minds; and vice versa. Moreover, it not only structures information, it simultaneously provides a platform for insight, creativity, and innovation – and actionability.

Those of you who are familiar with Daniel Kahneman’s THINKING FAST AND SLOW (or Malcolm Gladwell’s BLINK, or Michael Lewis’ MONEY BALL) might better appreciate Breaking Genius as the logical extension of that foundation of behavioral economics.

Breaking Genius is the actionable process that derives from what we call THINKING WHOLE. As we see it, Kahneman’s System One (Intuition) and System Two (Deliberation) only take things far enough to describe models of decision-making. Decisioning is essentially making the better of two or more choices.

What about creativity? What about Innovation? What about manifesting an entirely novel alternative. Most importantly, what about a prescription for doing rather than an explanation?

That’s why we took on the task of creating THINKING WHOLE (aka “System Three”) and BREAKING GENIUS. It’s what fuels, informs, and grounds everything on this website, along with everything in our more academic platform: www.ad-sci.org and what we describe in our book.

Check out the book

Abraham Lincoln once said: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” 

There are as many Descriptive Futurists as there are stars in the heavens. Prescriptive Futurists are a far rarer thing. Mainly because it’s a lot easier to describe what “might” happen and a considerably more challenging undertaking to help guide you to manifesting that future of choice.

Try googling “Futurist Speaker” and you’ll get something like TWO MILLION hits. Narrow that down to “BEST FUTURIST SPEAKER” and you winnow down to something like a half million hits. Add a specific year, say 2018, and you reduce the choices to a quarter million.

Google “PRESCRIPTIVE FUTURIST” and the number dwindles to somewhere around 75,000; except that the “prescriptive” refers to the analytics some futurists use to get to their predictions. It’s all about the thinking without little, if any, mention of the how to get it done.

In the immense universe of choices, there is only one prescriptive futurist – a futurist who can not only help you see a vision of what might be but the one who also provides a toolkit for manifesting the vision of your choice. By applying Thinking Whole and Breaking Genius to Creating the Future You Deserve, John Krubski can get your team to an actionable vision and an action plan for that future in a single day. That’s right, a single day. Best of all, if he fails to deliver, you don’t have to pay for the day. When was the last time you heard that kind of promise from a consultant?

The exact same process and learnings that apply to teams can also be usefully implemented by individuals.

Call or email to get started on the path to defining and manifesting The Future You Deserve.

A speaker’s job is not done until the audience is in a position to walk away with something they can do with the perspective they have just heard.

That requires three things:

1. They need to have learned something new that changes the way they think
2. They need to have been motivated to act on that new learning
3. They need to have been given the means by which to turn the new learning into actionable outcomes

My Keynotes check the boxes:

1. How and Why Generations Decide, How and Why Americans Decide, Creating the Future you deserve, and What Matters Most in Small Business Success are original, proprietary perspectives based on original and proprietary research methodologies and studies
2. Thinking Whole is a system that provides a ground-breaking framework, an algorithm for creative critical thinking, that leads to a higher level of actionable insighting (by precipitating Moments of Genius on demand); that take you to exceptional insights which can change pretty much everything about pretty much anything
3. Breaking Genius is a fast-track process for actionable inciting; rapidly perceiving and building out an action plan for manifesting the new thinking in a way that applies specifically to the audience members’ needs, goals, and aspirations