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Timelines: Surfing the Fourth Wave

Our waves analysis has been central to my work since 1994, when I began to plot societal pressures since 1960 on the public, private and citizen sectors. On the basis of later work, I would now change the start date of the third Downwave to 2001, specifically in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Subsequently, governments—and particularly the Bush Administration—defined security much more narrowly than had seemed natural only a few months previously. Issues like human rights and climate change were pretty much scraped off the table. The diagram plots the upwaves and downwaves to date again three trend lines: for total world population, for the global rural population (flattening out) and the global urban population (which depending on whose statistics you believe, either crossed the rural trend line in 2007—or will do so in 2008).

From around 2005, however, I thought I began to detect a powerful resurgence, as indicated in the diagram. Indeed, I think we are now already embarked on a fourth wave.Although in the early stages it will have to cope with what I expect to be an uncomfortably recessionary environment, my sense is that its focus will be very much aligned with the themes of our new book, The Power of Unreasonable People—focusing on innovation and scalable entrepreneurial solutions to the great global divides (described in detail in the book). These themes are central to the work of Volans Ventures (http://www.volans.com), launched early in 2008.

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