The Bridge Generation

Not all of our destinies are firmly planted upon the ground. Some lifetimes are meant to serve as a bridge from one generation to another. This is the story of such a lifetime.

I spend hours of time, each and every week, sitting among the leaders of major corporations and institutions. It’s my job. My organization consults and designs solutions to help clients evolve and become better versions of themselves. But something lately led me to think that there is a deeper, more ecosystemic revolution at play. And a small but faithful generation is strangely finding itself in the position to transition power from the old guard to the new.

Let me elaborate.

Inside many of our world’s largest organizations sit individuals in positions of power who are part of a generation that is phasing out of leadership. Baby boomers and Gen-Xers are at the helm of many of these organizations. They set the direction and reinforce the culture. But these leaders are not getting any younger. Everyone working in business today is aware of the huge wave of millennials who are poised to inherit the earth. They are a different type of thinker and participant inside organizations and very often, their way of engaging with established principles and culture is in conflict.

But between this old guard and the new guard sits an oft-forgotten generation — Gen-Y.

There’s murky information about what denotes Gen-X from Gen-Y from millennials. Many historians try to group some of these together, but it isn’t rational, it just makes it easier to make their bar charts. Each of these generations came up in a time and place that was different from their predecessor and, as such, have different ideals and, frankly, different perspectives on how to fit into this strange world.

Now, one can certainly point to psychographics and say that it’s more about the mindset and not the actual age of the person that matters. This is 100% true when we are talking about behaviors like how you order your food to be delivered or your thoughts on owning a car, but that’s not my point. We are talking about corporate leadership and, like it or not, but for a few enlightened outliers, most organizations are still stuck in a fairly chronologically-patterned path of leadership appointments. As leaders age out, the next and most senior (often closest in age) leaders are promoted into the seat of power. I see it happen every day. It’s the reality.

The fascinating aspect of this modern scenario is that, by and large, the organizations of today will all need major re-tooling to augment themselves into millennial-led businesses. The old guard is not entirely ready to hand over the keys to what, in their eyes, seems to be an entitled and naive generation that doesn’t understand how the world really works.

The truth is much more complicated than that.

Millennials know how the world works; they just aren’t happy with it. And by and large, they don’t want to play by its rules anymore. But shifting that dynamic inside a large organization is not easily done. Instead, there needs to be a graceful transition of power, one that history will likely forget in the grand scheme of things but which will be integral in bringing the seat change to bear.

This is the demographically small but critically important Generation Y — those born from 1977–1981.

Is this a scientifically defined range for this generation? Sort of. More accurately though, its actually an academically debated one.

Up until the Baby Boomers, society lived with a clean cut off between each generation. Those born from 1920 until 1946 were affectionately dubbed by Tom Brokaw as the Greatest Generation. They fought in World War II, they kept the country running and the economy growing, they built industry and championed a new way of life in a rapidly changing America.

They were followed by the baby boomers — the offspring of the Greatest Generation who came back from war and started reproducing like there was no tomorrow. We made a lot of babies in America from 1946–1965. Approximately 82 million babies according to the Census Bureau. The Boomers rode through an insane time in America — the Civil Rights movement, the Summer of Love, the Vietnam War, the economic downturn of the late seventies, the high-wire, cocaine-fueled 80s, the AIDS crisis, and much, much more. I get it. Boomers have seen some shit. And it wasn’t easy. They earned their place at the table and are, as I mentioned earlier, largely the folks at the helm of many organizations during this day and age.

But this is where shit starts to get a little loose in the eyes of one hobby historian. Gen-X is defined by Harvard University and several other credible highbrow sources as those born between 1965 and 1984. OK, I guess, but not really when you consider that the same people at Harvard say that Gen-Y extends from 1977 to 2004. They outline Gen-Y and millennials as the same group, which doesn’t really make much sense. The competing view from Strauss and Howe, authors of the book Generations and the largely unrefuted experts on this topic, say that millennials are born between 1982 and 2004. They lump Gen-Y into millennials too, but on a different timeline. The overlapping years from the two studies chart a weird grey area from 1977 to 1981.

Four years. Four weird years.

Why is it that two different and highly respected population and generational theory expert groups have struggled with this transitory generation between Gen-X and millennials? My guess is that it’s complex and up until this point in our history, we haven’t needed a “transitory” generation — one that helps an older generation make sense of the large generation that will inherit their roles as leaders in this world. Perhaps it’s because of Moore’s Law. Technology is advancing quickly and the millennial generation who were “born digital” are just too darn good at adopting whatever comes next while the boomers and Gen-Xers are (by and large) challenged with the pace and diversity of information being thrown at them. That weird little Gen-Y group though, they weren’t “born digital”, but they were the first generation to learn how to adopt and integrate technology quickly.

Their little 4–8 year old minds learning technology and a different set of experiences nimbly while their older siblings fumbled through much of it.

Let me pause for a quick second to say that, yes, I realize much of this is perhaps too harshly generalizing — painting with too broad a brush. Sure, there are some Gen-Xers and boomers who are the early adopters — in fact, much of the technology millennials were born interacting with was built by them. But those boomer and Gen-X innovators represent a small portion of that 126 million populace (combined boomer and Gen-X).

So what’s next?

I believe we are entering a short window of time where that hard-to-understand, hard-to-quantify and pin-down generation of Gen-Yers are going to take the helm of most of these organizations that need retooling. They are the translators that speak two very different languages but can straddle the middle and help serve as a bridge that sets up a new, massive generation of optimistic, wide-eyed millennials to lead another revolution.

Gen-Y’s leadership will be short-lived sheerly based on the numbers. There are about 64 million millennials compared to the roughly 10 million Gen-Yers out there. But sometimes it takes a small, nimble coalition of the willing to impart the change we all want to see in the world.

And while it might seem thankless that this generation will likely be lost in the history books due to the nebulous nature of their existence between two large and unwieldy generations, not all generations need accolades and not all responsibilities need to be uniformly understood. Sometimes they are simply the byproduct of being born in a certain time and place.

This essay originally appeared in La Petite Mort, a publication from the Manhattan-based design and strategy studio Sub Rosa.