If you wanted to find another historical moment com- parable to the one we’re living in, futurist David Houle says, you’d have to go back to the American Revolu- tion, or to the 1440s, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Thosemoments were inflection points
—pivotal events that dramatically altered the course of human history, said Houle, a former media and technology executive who gives 100 speeches a year about future trends to U.S. and international audiences, andwhonext month will present aMas- ters Series program at PCMA 2011 Convening Leaders. The social and technological change we’renowexperiencing
is another inflection point, Houle said, marking the period in which the Information Age is giving way to a new reality that Houle has called “The Shift Age.” In the years ahead, he said, “historians will look back on this as the time in which we cre- ated a new reality and a new consciousness.”
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David Houle will present a Masters Series program at PCMA 2011 Convening Leaders on Tuesday, Jan. 11. For more information about David Houle, visitwww.davidhoule.com and www.youtube.com/evolutionshift. Read Houle’s blog,which includes a list of his forecasts and predictions, at www.evolutionshift.com.
Your Convening Leaders presentation is called “Leading and Succeeding in the Transformation Decade.” What exactly do you mean by that? The dictionary definition of “transformation” is a change in nature, shape, character, and form. From 2010 to 2020, most of humanity and most of its institutions will go through some kind of transformation. The way we communicate, the shape of our relationships, how we work, live, and travel—these are all changing. This will be the decade when we are going to face the future of humanity in the 21st century. There will be more change in the next 10 years than the following three decades combined.
You’ve said that the current economic crisis represents not just another cycle but a reality shift. What do you mean by that? This current recession can only be fully understood when seen as the reorganizational recession between two ages: the Infor-
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mation Age and the Shift Age. If you remember the 1970s, it was a really disruptive decade, with things happening we could not explain because they weren’t in our worldview.High unem- ployment and high inflation at the sametime, for example.New York City was going to go bankrupt in 1976. Inflation was 18 percent, interest rates were 18 percent, the welfare statewas tak- ing over, and we were losing our supremacy to Japan—it was just going to be awful. Well, in hindsight, it’s pretty clear what the decade was all
about. In the 1960s, the United States was an Industrial Age country. In the 1980s, it was all about Microsoft, PCs, Apple, cable TV, communication satellites—we were in the Informa- tion Age. The decade of 1970s was the transition between the Industrial Age and Information Age. We are now going through a five-year period—2006 to
2011—which is a transition period between Information Age America and Shift AgeAmerica.We’re in a time of upheaval that is reorganizational; institutions like city newspapers and Gen- eral Motors are going into bankruptcy. The things we have grown up with are falling away, and the new things that will replace them have yet to appear. I think that we are going through a very difficult time of reorganization, which is prepar- ing us for a new golden age. I really do.
What are the primary characteristics of the Shift Age? The Shift Age is the global stage of human evolution.We’ve gone through the family, tribe, city, state, and national orientations. The only remaining boundary is planetary, and we will be reor- ganized around a global construct. The three forces are the flow to global, the flow to individ-
ual, and accelerated electronic connectedness. One of the ways you know we’ve left the Information Age is that we are over- whelmed with information. In the early stages of the Informa- tion Age, the advantage was to be the first to have access to information. Now we all have too much information. In the Shift Age, it’s about attention.We create value by what we put our attention on. Heavily trafficked websites are of more value than less-trafficked websites, even though they have the same information. What we put our attention on creates value.
What qualities doyou need tohave tonavigate the next decade? If you are running a company and your company is not in a state of transformation, you are going to fall behind the rest of the continued on page 140