Imagine if you had the ability to time travel: to fl it forward to the end of next year or further forward to 2017 and then backwards to 2007. If it was possible to move forward say twelve months and spend a day in the future, I wonder how different life would be. I have often mused about this. What would a person from 1956 make of life in 2011? What would we think if we could spend a day in 1956? I suppose it would depend on the year. If the time travel was barely twelve months we wouldn’t notice much. Or would we?

 

In some years there might be a new prime minister or US president but in other recent years there’s probably not that much difference between life now and then. The giveaway that you have in fact moved into the future might not be a change in the world order or the invention of flying cars; it’s more likely to be small differences that you notice in everyday hairstyles, fashion clothing, eyewear and technology readily apparent on the street. Indeed, I think there’s a hierarchy of things that change with time. Some things take years, decades, to change; others change annually or even by season.

 

Oddly, the things that seem to change most quickly are the things we keep closest to our bodies. Get out your family photograph album (itself an artefact that ceased to be invested in following the mass market adoption of digital cameras in about 2003) and look at pictures of yourself in 1990. (Generation Y might like to consider themselves in 2005.) Apart from the fact that you were some years younger, what has most changed? I think what you would say is your hairstyle, clothing, perhaps even the people you are pictured with. Is anyone wearing glasses and do they look odd (the glasses, not your friend) by today’s fashion? What about the watch or jewellery? Are they also somehow distinctively ‘so early nineties’?

 

Now look at a similar group photograph from today. If not directly evident from the picture, someone will have a mobile phone. Either in their hand or jammed in their pocket. Between 1990 and today the mobile phone has emerged as personal artefact as important to contemporary society as was the watch or jewellery to the residents of 1990s. (Groups of generation Ys in cafes always intrigue me: they chat and socialise with one hand on a latte and a mobile phone in the other. And often the phone will be in use drawing in third parties to virtually join the happy throng.)

 

From this exercise it is easy to see what changes most quickly over time in the lives of ordinary people. Employers, friends, even partners come and go. Fashion rises and falls. Technology infiltrates our lives and then recedes only to be superseded by something newer, brighter, better. In studying that picture of yourself perhaps with a group of friends in 1990, is it possible to recall each person’s occupation or employer? I suspect that of those people still with us two decades later no-one is in the same job. And in fact I would go so far as to say that most of the establishments that provided employment for this group of people have changed: morphed into some other entity most likely. This evidence from the past is evidence for the future. Consider your life, your relationships, your occupation, your dress and ornamentation: it will all be so different in twenty years; it may well be on the way to being very different within ten years. What I have enjoyed most about writing The Big Tilt is that it is as much a story about the minutiae of life as it is about the big issues that are likely to shape the new decade.

 

In the decade since I wrote The Big Shift (2001), which predicted a sea change shift in the 2000s, my life has changed. This book, and others, put me on the corporate speaking circuit and opened opportunities such as a weekly column in The Australian newspaper. The column especially focused my mind on big issues and on the minutiae of demographic and social change over a decade. The speaking exposed me to business and community groups in all parts of Australia and beyond. I started speaking about sea change and tree change, then generation Y, then the skills shortage, then the global financial crisis, then Big Australia and then the future.

The questions from business were as consistent as they were illuminating: ‘what will our customers look like in ten years?’ My demographic interpretations of the Australian market and nation were vigorously tested by business, by journalists, by bloggers and others. I typically speak more than a hundred times a year. On a busy day I might present at a breakfast in Melbourne, a lunch in Sydney and a dinner in Brisbane. And in between there is the business of managing my advisory practice and responding to media calls. On some days the calls start at 6 am with breakfast radio. My kids have grown up with Dad ‘doing interviews’ in the most bizarre of circumstances. Not that this is a complaint. I have enjoyed every moment. And the more media, speaking, writing and advisory you do the easier it gets. (Although I must say I am now looking to slow things down somewhat.) The reason I am explaining all of this is because there are very few people who have had such exposure to business, to the media, and to the broader Australian community on the subject of demographic trends. And, more to the point, even if there are people who have had this experience they have not chosen to put their observations into a book. And that is precisely what this is: a unique insight into the way in which Australian society and business has changed over the last decade and how it might change over the next decade.

 

The book is organised into themes that reflect Australian interests from a social, cultural and geopolitical point of view. There are chapters on generations, gender, tribes, technology, the global financial crisis, Australia, as well as on what I regard as the more ethereal or even whimsical, such as belief and behaviour which is, by the way, my favourite chapter. Each chapter presents a series of observations about modern life. The observations are included on the basis that they illustrate how life is changing and that they do so in an amusing, interesting or thought-provoking way. In the middle of the book I provide a map of Australia that shows some of the quirkier — I think more interesting — perspectives of the Australian continent and its cities, towns and regions. I trust that you will enjoy reading The Big Tilt: What happens when the boomers bust and the Xers and Ys inherit the earth as much as I have writing it.