What if we told you that the secret to successful innovation lies in understanding the relationships between trends? In our enlightening conversation with Darrell Mann, a world-renowned expert in systematic innovation, we uncover the third part of the DNA of success and discuss how identifying connections between trends can shape the future. Darrell shares fascinating insights from his 25 years of experience/research working with companies and organizations across the globe.
We also delve into the realm of complex systems and emergent behavior, outlining ways to predict the future by recognizing the relationships between trends and specific conflicts.
But that's not all! We take a closer look at Darrell Mann's research on generational patterns and explore the turbulent period of 2020 to 2025 that he and his team predicted. As we examine how these predictions have been playing out in different parts of the world, we also discuss his research on generational archetypes and the implications it has for understanding Generation Z.
Darrell gives us a fascinating glimpse into the characteristics of this generation and what we might expect to see from them in the coming decades. Don't miss this riveting discussion that could help you grasp the importance of relationships between trends and how they can shape our future.
What if we told you that the secret to successful innovation lies in understanding the relationships between trends? In our enlightening conversation with Darrell Mann, a world-renowned expert in systematic innovation, we uncover the third part of the DNA of success and discuss how identifying connections between trends can shape the future. Darrell shares fascinating insights from his 25 years of experience/research working with companies and organizations across the globe.
We also delve into the realm of complex systems and emergent behavior, outlining ways to predict the future by recognizing the relationships between trends and specific conflicts.
But that's not all! We take a closer look at Darrell Mann's research on generational patterns and explore the turbulent period of 2020 to 2025 that he and his team predicted. As we examine how these predictions have been playing out in different parts of the world, we also discuss his research on generational archetypes and the implications it has for understanding Generation Z.
Darrell gives us a fascinating glimpse into the characteristics of this generation and what we might expect to see from them in the coming decades. Don't miss this riveting discussion that could help you grasp the importance of relationships between trends and how they can shape our future.
Welcome to Stories in Life. You're on the radio with Mark and Joe. We share stories that affirm your belief in the goodwill, courage, determination, commitment and vision of everyday people.
Mark Wolak:
Our goal is that through another person's story you may find connection. No matter your place in life. The stories we select will be inspiring and maybe help you laugh, cry, think or change your mind about something important in your life.
Joe Boyle:
Join us for this episode of Stories in Life.
Mark Wolak:
Welcome back to our continued conversation with Darrell Mann. In our previous conversation, we talked about systematic innovation, the DNA of success, some of the things that people can do to prepare for the future, thinking more about innovation and a little bit less about operational excellence, and how to think about innovation as not just new ideas but being successful in implementing that new idea. So how do you decode what will make you successful? In this episode, we'll ask Darrell to explain a little bit more about his past 25 years of experience in systematic innovation and working with companies throughout the world.
Joe Boyle:
Say Darrell, what differentiates the 2% successful companies versus the 98% that aren't successful?
Darrell Mann:
Yeah, so what we've been talking about so far is, i would say, two of the big three things we've identified. One of the things is making sure that you develop the right solutions, and I think that's where the contradiction solving part of the story comes in. The second part is the ability to translate the solution into the money. It's the execution part, it's the 99% perspiration part, if you like. But the third piece that we haven't really talked about so far is the let's make sure we work on the right problem. I think that's where the majority of innovation attempts fail. Working on the wrong problem.
Joe Boyle:
That's kind of the crux of the whole thing, isn't it?
Darrell Mann:
Yeah, it is, and I think it's a really tough one for people because as soon as you start thinking about what is the right problem, you get into the domain of trying to anticipate what's happening, what's going to happen in the future, and I think we all know if anybody approaches you and says they can predict the future, then it's probably a very dangerous person and you'd be well advised to cross the street to avoid them. But I think it's an area that we spent a lot of our time researching because, again, the idea of someone somewhere solved your problem, but also some of the insights that come from looking at the, okay, well, what is it that makes a successful solution? Help you to understand what to look for when you look at how society evolves. So, for example, I think one of the reasons why the futurist industry is so dysfunctional is all they're able to do is extrapolate along trends. Which means that if, for example, you've got more and more homeschooling, for example, you've got more and more violence in schools. We just need to keep extrapolating along that and say, okay, well, in 10 years time it's going to be, we're going to have even more of that. But unfortunately that's not the way the future pans out. So what we discovered as we worked with General Motors and their marketing people for three years back in the period of 1998- 2001, at a time when, I think, they were really struggling to tap into the desires of their customers. And, it's a pretty big marketing function and they'd collected literally hundreds of market trends, societal trends, and they were putting all this information together. And the other net result was obviously pretty mediocre vehicles, I'd have to say. They kindly brought us in and said can you help us to unravel what's happening here? And the big insight we had and it sounds almost banal to say it is, it's not the trends that are important, it's the relationship between the trends. If we'd had that insight, then it made the whole future prediction story much more easy to accommodate and to believe. So you just you now need to know and look for trends that are going to crash into one another. And sticking with the automotive industry for a second.
Darrell Mann:
For example, if you ask customers about do you want a standard vehicle or do you want customization, then overwhelmingly there's a desire for customization, because I'm different from the other 350 million people in the country, so there's a very definite trend towards customization. At the same time, if you look at automotive trends, there's an increasing desire for safety. Now, ironically, everything that GM and other car companies do to increase the safety of our vehicles we all compensate for by driving worse. Nevertheless, we can see that desire on the part of the customer for more safety. Now, unfortunately for GM and all the car companies, the conflict between customization and safety is such that there's only so many things you can allow to be customized on a vehicle before you start impinging on the safety of that vehicle. If every car that comes off the production line is different from every other one, how are you going to guarantee the safety of that vehicle? So customization ends up being just tiny bits of the vehicle. So we can do the center console, we can change the dashboard a little bit, we can change the what's in the trunk of the car, but not a lot else. Because nobody's really thinking about solving that contradiction.
Darrell Mann:
For one, I think, of the predicting the future in a far more effective way, is to look for the relationships between trends and particular conflict. The second part then take them into the realm of complex systems and the idea of emergent behavior, and so one of the big areas that we've spent our time. Quite strange, actually, because I first saw this generation cycle stuff during that General Motors project actually, and my origins are in the aerospace industry, and whenever when I saw this research on generation cycles, i thought it was the biggest piece of hoax I'd ever seen in my life! And so, we spent a fair amount of time trying to disprove it over the years. And here I am, literally 25 years later, still talking about it because we've still failed to disprove it. There's something in the generation cycle model that says, when you get down to first principles and first principles as far as generation cycles is the way that you were raised by your parents will have an impact on the way you raise your own kids. So some kids will grow up and look at their childhood and say, you know what? That was pretty good, so when I'm a parent, i just need to do more of that. And then other generations they look back at their childhood and say, yeah, well, I'm not going to do that to my kids, and so you get a flip in the behavior of parents. So I'm a Generation X person.
Darrell Mann:
So both my parents worked, and so the characterisation of people like me in the model is "abandoned as kids. So what that meant was that when I grew up, i had a very strong disrespect of authority. I would say, so, whatever my parents told me, I was going to do the opposite. Whatever my boss told me, I was going to do the opposite if I could. And whatever politicians told me, I was definitely going to do the opposite of. So when it came to parenting, generation X became very protective of their kids because they were abandoned. So there's a reaction to that, and so then you get the millennial generation (very protected generation), they've been told you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up. And so we had so many consulting jobs over the last 15 years with millennials in the workplace, millennials have very high expectations, coming into the workplace, expecting to be a CEO in three years time because that's what they've been promised. Then getting quite disillusioned with that. So the millennial generation is a hero generation. They want to do heroic stuff.
Darrell Mann:
We're in a time in history where this generation model says in fact, (we wrote a book in 2012), which said the period from 2020 to 2025, 2026 is going to be a very turbulent period in history. I don't think anybody really believed us at the time. And I wish we'd written the word pandemic into the book. But what we did say in the book is; I can't predict what's going to trigger the crisis period in 2020. But something will. And because we've got lots of societal wobbling dominoes, then it only takes one domino to fall over and it's going to then knock a whole series of other ones over, and I think we've seen that now. So the first dominator fallen over you could say was the pandemic In the UK. You could say it was Brexit. But now we've got the Ukraine war and etc. Etc. Lots of still wobbling dominoes. I predict that's all the things we wrote in 2012, seem to be coming true.
Darrell Mann:
This turbulent period is going to go on for at least another two, three years. The UK is probably going to get the worst of it. I don't think it'll be much better in the US. But if we're talking about education, things like gun violence, for example, then I would say that problem is going to get significantly worse during this crisis period. It might be one of the things that society/ government does something about at the end of the crisis period and people kind of calm down. But I think if I was trying to tackle the gun violence problem, I would probably wait three years, because I'm not going to have much impact in this current three years, but in three years time, when the crisis is settled down, I probably will.
Mark Wolak:
One of the things about that research that I thought was really significant is that you studied it across cultures, across continents. Can you mention a little bit about that?
Darrell Mann:
Yes. So part of my desperation to disprove the original model, the original model is based in the US. It's two historians who went back through American history. What I like about the model is parental DNA, this transfer of influence from parent to child. So part of my desperation to disprove the model said okay, well, let's go and look at parts of the world where there isn't that same relationship. So, in other words, the DNA's changed.
Darrell Mann:
So the first place we went was China, and in China there's a much stronger role for the grandparents in the raising of the kids. So we were able to set up a program. We worked with six universities in China, sponsored by one of our industry friends, I have to say. So they found the right universities. But we're working with anthropology professors, sociologists, historians, marketing people, and the lovely thing about China is we were able to go back through two and a half thousand to 3000 years worth of history. Well, the few hundred years of history we didn't share with them, the US model. We just said: look through history.
Darrell Mann:
Can you see any patterns of crisis? Can you then try and understand where those crisis periods come from, what they came back to us with? the first draft of the model was took them about six months to come up with. And you can almost lay on top of the American model and say this is exactly the same. They found the same four generational archetypes. One or two other transition dates were a little bit out of line, but essentially it's the same model. That was an attempt to disprove the model that failed. We now made the model even stronger, this four generation archetype crisis period model. Since then we've been we just finished off the India research. Now We've done programs in Indonesia, we've done Brazil, we've done Scandinavia, we've done Australia, Asia and we're just doing Eastern Europe, which is quite interesting because it seems to be the same model but already switched one generation. But essentially, wherever we go in the world we find the same pattern.
Joe Boyle:
So it's rapidly becoming a global generation model that says when you find that, when you find the same model, is that expected or are you somewhat surprised to find that time and time again?
Darrell Mann:
Yeah, with China, I was completely surprised. So when they first showed up with their results and I say we overlaid it on top of the US ones, but the match was un canny. So I mean, the entire philosophy of our research is you've got to look for the exceptions rather than confirm what you've got. So, deliberately, the way we framed the China research, the India research, the Eastern European one, is we don't show people the research as the US model. We effectively ask them to build their own model and actually establish is there a model at all? Is there a pattern in society? So we deliberately not looking to confirm the model, we're actively looking to find ways of saying this isn't true. That was a philosophy we had very early on in the research team. And I think it's played great dividends since then. It's allowed us to make a lot of progress, much more quickly than I think we would otherwise.
Mark Wolak:
What I'm intrigued with would be your observations of this generation of young people. What are some of the things we might see them do in the next few decades, this young group of people?
Darrell Mann:
Yes, a generation Z. Yes, it's a generation that just come into the workplace now. So the model that we've got says this generation, as the starts after 9-11 changes to the mood of society, parental behavior changes. We're definitely in a crisis period now. Archetypally, generation Z during childhood are summarized as "suffocated. Now I mean irony of irony is when you think about the pandemic you know, and masking kids for the last three years I mean they've literally been suffocated. But what suffocated also has meant has been parents are very protective of their kids. So the helicopter parent webcams in the kindergarten so parents can see what's happening to their child all the time.
Darrell Mann:
Now this generation, this suffocated generation, is heading into the workplace. Then it's becoming very clear they've got very few life skills, very, very fragile. So I was at a sociology conference in November last year, which is very academic, so it's the academics of the world from sociology especially getting together. I mean the number of mental health problems and anxiety problems with this generation is just unbelievable. Yeah, and I think it's a result of this, this suffocation during childhood, not being allowed to make some mistakes that most other generations have been allowed to make. So if you over protect the child, they become a very fragile adult. So I guess the good news is that it's an artist generation, that archetype will be known as an artist generation. They tend not to get actively involved in society itself, but they tend to step back and be great reflectors of society. I think that's what they're destined for, but right now I would say a very compliant workforce, because they're just overwhelmed by the world. Just tell me what to do, not sure who to trust anymore.
Darrell Mann:
So we're going through a phase now of online influencers. And, I think progressively they get found out, as those people got no idea what they're talking about either.
Darrell Mann:
And so you've got a generation who have, i think, are overwhelmed, looking for help, really don't know where to find it at the moment, and I think it's interesting in the last few months, with things like CHAT GPT and the open AI solutions, how have they gone viral? Because I think particularly youngsters are seeing the output from ChatGPT and setting and finding it very believable, which is enormously dangerous. I think It's the old adage of it's about 70% accurate. The problem is that nobody knows which 70%, and so I think you know it's that's already having an impact on our business in that you know we've we thought the AI's were going to be a problem for us, but it's the old situation where the knowledge wants to be free, and that's what Chat GPT is proving. But the freer it becomes, the more expensive wisdom becomes. You know, I think our business is effectively being reframed as a "we're in the wisdom, in the truth, to made these days with other people that our clients are relied on to be able to tell them the reality of the situation.
Joe Boyle:
So are those the type of inventions that you're paying the most attention to these days? Intrigued by AI, that sort of thing?
Darrell Mann:
It's certainly is. Yes, I mean the research team we've got, they tend to focus in different domains, but yeah, I'm the person that kind of sits over the top looking at all that, all those bits of research, looking for the things where there's, you know, more dynamism, so where things are happening really, really quickly. And so AI is the one that's, I think, is very simultaneously an enormous threat to society but also could solve some enormous problems in society.
Mark Wolak:
Darrell, before we leave the Gen Z discussion, I'm curious if we can anticipate, as parents and grandparents, what might these young children and teens and adolescents become, given that Gen Z is Gen Z. Is there anything there that you think might be worthy of some attention by parents and grandparents?
Darrell Mann:
So I think that the thing I would say is that, i mean, we're coming to the end of Generation Z now. So when the crisis ends and I suspect in the US, whoever wins the election next year is going to have a pretty big impact on that either way. But, when the crisis ends, you get a new generation of kids being born, and so it's almost like society goes through a step change. If you look at the past three cycles in the US, the crisis period in the last cycle was Depression of the 30s, Second World War Cycle. Before that it was the Civil War Cycle, before that it was the War of Independence. So there's no rule that says it has to be war that ends these crisis periods, but the last three cycles it has been. But anyway, I think 2025, 2026, I think the crisis does come to an end, things kind of settle down. And, if you think about what we now know as the baby boomer generation, the generation born in the wake of the Second World War, the generation after Generation Z is going to be archetypally very similar to the baby boomer generation.
Darrell Mann:
So it's all about fresh starts. I think those are the kids that are going to be the, if you like, the next Woodstock generation, consciousness revolution and rethinking the world. So I think the baby boomer generation is, as an archetype, a prophet generation. Prophet, as in Sage, rather than money. It's a very well-travelled, deep thinking generation that develops a lot of experience. They're the ones that effectively rethink what society is going to be.
Joe Boyle:
I really hope you're right about that one.
Darrell Mann:
You know, I'm pretty confident. Yeah, I'm pretty confident.
Mark Wolak:
We're seeing actually students coming out of high schools demonstrating, parents joining them right now around gun violence, but I think also there's some major issues with water, access to water, food and climate, so it's possible we'll see more of that in the years ahead.
Darrell Mann:
Yeah, I think so, yeah, so historically the prophet generations have been great protesters and people power. I think my generation, the generation next to the nomad generation, tends to think that a lot of that protest stuff is actually quite counterproductive. But nevertheless, i think society, the 99% versus the 1%, I think there's probably the half of the threat right now. I think the 99% are realizing that the majority wins if you protest.
Joe Boyle:
And now it's time for Stories in Life, art from the Heart, Deep Thoughts from the Shallow End. Each episode we bring you a poem, a song or a reading just for you. That was My Generation, by the Who from 1965. Man, that was a fantastic 20 minutes or 30 minutes there, a lot to chew on.
Mark Wolak:
Oh, I know, I just couldn't believe how much I heard. I mean just starting with that, if you're gonna try to solve a problem, look for the relationship between trends and that'll help you find the right problem to solve. And then that generation cycles research. I couldn't believe all the information that was in there. But basically by disproving it, by trying to disprove it over 25 years, he's found that it's true that there's a four generation archetype that's been found to be true in China, the US, the UK, Scandinavia, Brazil, Eastern Europe. Fascinating. And then that whole Generation Z piece. These folks are great reflectors on society and we can expect that the next generation of young people will be the heroes, like the World War Two generation was for us in our country.
Joe Boyle:
And the generation after Gen Z will be the next Woodstock generation, the next achiever generation, the changers.
Mark Wolak:
Yeah, fascinating. We got to thank Darrell for that great episode and how much he shared with us today. Thank you, listeners, for spending the time with us again today. What a great episode. Loved every minute of that one. So you can find out more information about us at our website, storiesinlife. buzzsprout. com
Joe Boyle:
And you can find out more about Darrell Mann and his company Systematic Innovation at Systematic-Innovation. com