The reason for launching Evolution Shift

The quick explanation is that I believe that the next thirty years could well be the most important time in the history of humanity. We are approaching a choice point that could determine how our history will be written 300 years from now. We have now entered the Shift Age. The name of the blog comes from that, and the premise that, in the next two decades, humanity might well have the opportunity to take the next major step in its evolutionary journey. The Ultra-Trends that are reorganizing human society, combined with the ever accelerating technological and electronic connectedness could well be creating the possibility for a coming Evolution Shift.

The longer explanation is that this blog comes from a life lived wondering what was next. What was next in my own life, what was next for the United States, what was ahead for humanity and for the world. This has lead me to a general embracing of what was ‘new’, for ‘new’ was birth, new was change, ‘new’ was improvement on the ‘old’ that was restrictive. It made sense that powerful new beginnings might be setting the direction for the future. So living in the new gave an opportunity to taste what the future might be like or could be like.

Consequently, I have tended to put myself ‘out there’ to ‘look around the corner’, to be ‘slightly ahead of the curve’, to be very receptive to newness. Once the new attains a minimal critical mass, it is often identified as a trend or trends. These trends are then projected into the future to paint a picture of what the future might be like. As I look back on my life I realize that often, I was participating in something new that months or years later was labeled a trend. Recent study leads me to believe that trends are just small manifestations of larger Dynamic Flows that course through history; more on that later.

All my life, people said to me that I was a trend setter, that my predictions proved right, that I was ‘ahead of the curve on that one’, that ‘you really do know what’s ahead’. This never struck me as anything other than obvious. That old adage that “what you focus on expands in your life” was the point. Since I was always interested in newness, in what might be ahead, in whether there might be truth in science fiction, in looking at the world from the point of view of where it was going, it seemed logical that I would develop a sense about the near future, that I would gain a developed sense of pattern recognition of events and trends.

During the past few years, as I have researched topics for speeches, I have reacquainted myself with some writers that shaped my thinking years ago. First and foremost is Alvin Toffler, whose wave theory of history is the foundation of historical thinking as far as I am concerned. Pick up any book of Toffler’s and you will come away much smarter about history and its rhythms. I also went back to Peter F. Drucker, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Arthur C. Clarke and John Naisbitt among others. While I dipped back into the works of these visionary futurists and historians, I was spending an increasing amount of time looking around at the world since the start of this new millennium.

A little more than a year ago, I started to develop a sense of what might be ahead for humanity during the next thirty years, a theory based upon what I was seeing, what I was reading and wondering what the logical next step might be for us all now that we were fully in the Information Age — Toffler’s Third Wave. By looking back to view dominant events and forces, looking around in the Present, and then projecting with some probability into the future a couple of alternative paths seemed to develop. The other thing I realized was that we are in the midst of one of those infrequent transition periods in history, and that the last twenty years were a threshold time. In fact I have started to speak about this time, a time I call the “Threshold Decades 1985-2005”.

All of this research and thinking prompted me to start writing a book. It is also important to me that people respond to the blog, to comment on ideas about the future that will be put forth. We are living in a critical time and it is vitally important that together we look at what’s ahead and what choices and options we have.

As stated earlier, the next thirty years could well be the most important time for humanity in its history. We are approaching our opportunity to take the next major step in our evolutionary journey. So, welcome to Evolution Shift.

Look up. Look around. Look within. Or Look Out!