Letting go of our legacies

Entering the Shift Age - David Houle

Reviewed by Richard West

I find this book has been a great help in understanding the almost indescribable transformation we are experiencing.  I will share here some images and impressions.

David Houle calls himself a futurist.  I like that about him, also his clarity that the rate of change is happening so fast that letting go of the past to embrace the future is going to be more difficult, the earlier the year in which we were born.  He suggests that the "Digital Natives", those born into a "screen environment" from 1997 onwards will have a great edge and will increasingly take power.

It seems to me that each of us who aren’t resisting reality is a “sort-of” futurist.  Doesn't that come with being profoundly human?  Doesn't every decision I make have some element of anticipation that what I am thinking and doing enhances or detracts from my future possibility.

A futurist provides images that can help turn uncertainty into possibility. Houle’s writing suggests to me that we are best served by looking at what is happening, and then try making sense of it in order to reach clearer, future-based projections.

David Houle does a heroic and helpful job of recapping the past, pointing to the danger of “legacy thinking" which “imprisons our thoughts regarding the unfolding future”. He defines legacy thinking as viewing the present and future through thoughts from the past.

Some of the images he offers are:

• The metaphor of an earthquake, which in its impact may cause “Innovation Fatigue”.
• Consciousness will define the Shift Age - shifting from information to context.
• Three major forces are simultaneously creating and shaping the Shift Age:
- The Flow to Global: The Nation-State becoming an anachronism
- The Flow to the Individual: The transfer of power from large groups to each person
- Accelerating Electronic Consciousness: Eliminates time and distance from human communication
• Gatekeepers are disappearing; disintermediation and the Internet are reorganizing the economic landscape
• We see the world through the apps we select for our smart phones and tablets. Each of us is in control…
• We now have two realities we live in: real or physical reality and new screen reality
• He raises a helpful question. “Are corporations a twentieth-century business model that no longer works in the twenty-first century?”
• Design is ascendant: of objects, systems, ecosystems, mega-cities and lives.
• Right now we can and do exercise our individual power on a global scale.  This reality simply did not exist until the Shift Age.
• We have increasingly become able to shape our identities around our own individuality, rather than subsuming it into larger organizations such as unions, country clubs, companies, etc.  This releases an empowering sense of self-determination, self-definition and self-identification.

His implications are stimulating and challenging.  I find myself relatively comfortable with the Flow to the Global and even more in tune with the Flow to the Individual, but putting up some resistance to getting into the Electronic Flow.  My way of acting this out is using my iPhone only as a tool for me to call and text others, leaving out a host of possible apps as well as excluding myself from Facebook, Twitter, even backing away from Linked In.  I have lived through several generations. However, I might still be around for another generation or two, so I will go back to the highlights on my Kindle several times to take it in and allow my colleagues to point out where I'm still indulging in "legacy thinking" including some Great Depression thinking, WW-II thinking, etc.  I don't think anyone believes me when I say I remember when there was no such thing as plastic, let alone TV. I enjoy reflecting over the eras I have lived through and happily turn my attention again to the present and to glimpses of the possible future.

The earthquake is ongoing.  The Shift is.  Maybe I could create some Shift images of my own…

By Richard West, ICA Taiwan