Who Should Solve Our Biggest Problems?

0:00From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

0:22When there is a problem, what we really should do is band together and figure out the solution. But I mean, you've seen this in your own organization, I'm sure. That is not always how it goes. Because first, there must be a disagreement on what the problem actually is. And whose job is it to solve the problem? And how are we going to solve the problem? And do you care less about the problem than me? And on and on and on. And as we think about solving problems in organizations, and also how organizations, how companies can solve some of the largest problems, like, for example, climate change, I want to draw your attention to some really fascinating research that I had found, which is about what happens when we let a misunderstanding about who cares about a problem dominate the question about the problem itself.

1:21And here, the case study is climate change and who cares the most about climate change, young people or old people. Maybe that sounds like a silly question. Maybe it sounds like a silly question because you feel like you know the answer to it. But I dug into this because there is really fascinating research, both about what happens when one side believes that they care more about an issue than another side, and also how to understand generational differences in ways that often are lost in conversations about generational differences. Anyway, the result of all this is what I'm going to play for you now.

2:04It came from a podcast of mine that I've since discontinued, which was called Build for Tomorrow. And I think that even though it is not technically about business, which Problem Solvers is a show about business, I think that it will give you a different way of thinking about how to bring people together to solve complex problems, which is ultimately the point of business, is it not? It is to bring teams together to solve complex problems. and to build companies that solve complex problems for others. And this, this is one complex problem. So I am now going to throw it over to me from the show Build for Tomorrow.

2:42If you had to guess, who would you say cares more about climate change? Is it young people or old people? I mean, this may sound like a stupid question, because obviously the answer is young people, right? That's what everybody says. It's why when Time magazine named Greta Thunberg the person of the year in 2019, they wrote that Greta is, quote, a standard bearer in a generational battle, an avatar of youth activists across the globe, end quote. And just consider the weight of those words, a generational battle, like a war between the young who want to fix this urgent problem and the old who are standing in their way.

3:19I mean, Greta says it herself. You can see that among young people, the concern is bigger. And here's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It would be remiss if we didn't mention, I think, the generational dynamic that this challenge represents. And here's how the bigger clash was described on CBS News. I've seen a lot of younger people, maybe they're millennials, some are even Gen Z, saying, look, the world that we are inheriting is such a disaster. And that is because of baby boomers. And they're still holding on to power. They won't let us make changes. Exactly. So you hear enough of this and it stops even feeling like a question.

4:02You know, Gen Z and millennials, they want to stop climate change and baby boomers. They don't. And we're not just talking about government and corporate leaders here who are indeed generally older and incentivized towards the status quo. No, these are claims made about everyone. Broad, general statements about broad, general populations. And that can make climate change feel even more frustrating and alarming because you might feel like, hey, climate change isn't some giant and complex problem. It is totally solvable if only these damn old people would get out of the way. But the problem with that framing is when you look at the data now, there's hardly any gap between old and young and their climate concern.

4:43This is Bobby Duffy, a professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at King's College London. And he looked deep into this issue and parsed the data from the U.S. General Social Survey and found something striking. When you look at the percentage of U.S. adults that are alarmed about climate change, younger generations, Gen X and baby boomers all rank roughly the same. They're just a few percentage points away from each other. And there's more. When you look at different sorts of measures about what people are doing on broader social purpose activities, it's actually older generations who are more likely to be boycotting products or services that are socially irresponsible in different sorts of ways.

5:21Bobby has been working in public policy for nearly 30 years, which I guess probably makes him old in the eyes of some young people. But more importantly, it is long enough for him to see how false public narratives can have very real impact. You think of all the causes that we've got, the one that we need to be united around is climate change. It can take an enormous effort across everyone, really. But we're dividing people on it based on a false understanding of the data. So this has real implications. And if you are a younger or older person who wants to help craft meaningful solutions to this problem, then you need to take this particular fact seriously.

5:59Here, for example, are three problems that Bobby says can be caused by this generational battle. Number one, it kind of kicks the can down the road, which is to say that if everyone believes that baby boomers are the problem and that young people are the solution, well, then the answer to climate change is simply to wait to say, oh, well, there's nothing we can do right now. But let's just wait until young people finally replace the baby boomers in places of leadership and then everything will be solved. But that is not productive for obvious reasons. So what's next? So the second risk is that the older group kind of get turned off by that and start to believe it themselves or get annoyed by it and don't do as much as they can.

6:38Which makes sense, you know, if you are of one generation and everyone keeps talking about how terrible you are. Well, yeah, maybe you're not so motivated to partner up with your haters on something, even if you both agree on it, which leads us to implication number three. Look at climate communications, climate campaign and communications. There's a big gap in having messages that are tailored to fit with that older people's well of concern. There's not really that targeting going on. Imagine the untold millions of people who could be engaged on this issue, but aren't simply because of the broad assumption that they don't care.

7:15That is a lot of wasted opportunity. Now, whenever I look at a problem, here is a question I love asking. What kind of problem is this? Because the answer may not be obvious. You know, if you have a business and your client base isn't growing, you can't fix it without understanding what kind of problem you have. Is it a product problem, a marketing problem, a consumer education problem? And when we look at why multiple generations are not coming together to address climate change, Bobby says we are not actually looking at a generational problem. We are looking, he says, at a generational thinking problem.

7:48Generational thinking, it is the method by which we give a name to all people who were born around roughly the same time, like baby boomers or Gen X or millennials or whatever, and then assign them traits as if they are a monolith. Generational thinking is a really big idea that has been horribly corrupted and undermined by terrible stereotypes, cliches and myths. That's not to say it's entirely bad or useless. Generational thinking can actually be pretty useful, but we have to be smarter about it. And Bobby has a plan for how to do that, a framework through which to understand how people go through change and how they are shaped and how to understand them and how, once you do, you can have far more productive conversations about things like climate change, but also so much more.

8:33So on this episode of Build for Tomorrow, here's what we're going to explore. We're taking apart the myth of the generational war and asking, how can we understand each other better? And how can that help us solve our toughest problems, climate change included? It's all coming up after the break. With more and more brands looking for smart solutions to help them meet their sustainability goals, innovative paper-based packaging stands out as an ideal choice. Today, makers of everyday items from cosmetics to liquid detergents are now turning to paper as the preferred packaging material. Beyond product protection and retail shelf appeal, paper-based packaging is highly sustainable because it's made from a renewable resource and is designed to be easily recyclable, something that's good for brands and consumers who want to do their part for the environment.

9:21And here in the U.S., paper companies work with private forest landowners to grow and maintain forests at a rate nearly double the volume needed to make the paper, packaging, and boxes we rely on every day. So when brands choose paper-based packaging, they're helping to support the growth of our forests. Paper-based packaging is an easy way to do good for the planet. Learn more at howlifeunfolds.com slash innovations. All right, we're back. So here is our problem. We group people by generations. And in doing so, we often create stereotypes about these generations that the older generation is out of touch and that the younger generation is stupid and lazy.

10:01You've heard it all before. But have you ever stopped to wonder why we do this? Like, where does that idea even come from? And is there a better way to understand the differences between generations? Should we actually even use that word generations? To answer this, We should start at the beginning. So let's back way up to the fourth century BC when Aristotle said this. The millennials don't get off the couch very often. Oh, sorry about that. That was Fox and Friends who also don't get off the couch very often. Anyway, here's what Aristotle wrote. He said the young people of Greece, quote, think they know everything and are always quite sure about it, end quote, which funny enough, I guess also sounds like Fox and Friends.

10:44But here's the thing. Aristotle didn't invent youth bashing. He's just one of the earlier examples that we have of it, because this tradition of shaking our heads at foolish young people is probably as old as civilization itself. It goes back many thousands of years. And in fact, I have already explored why it keeps happening on another episode of this podcast, which was called, There's Nothing Wrong With Kids These Days. Go take a listen. But right now we're talking about something different, because even though people were complaining about the kids these days back in ancient Greece, they weren't actually identifying and naming specific generations the way that we do today.

11:18That is actually quite new. For the past few hundred years, the idea of a generation was pretty limited. Artists and artistic movements were sometimes identified as being of a generation. In 1863, a French lexicographer defined a generation as, quote, all men living more or less in the same time, end quote. But in the Western world, and in France in particular, things changed in the beginning of the 1910s. Books and articles were focused on a new crop of young intellectuals who were eager to make their mark. But then the Great War began. Much of Europe started to call that crop of young people the Generation of 1914, and America started to call them the Lost Generation.

11:57These were people who either died in the war or survived and lived a directionless life. Either way, the war was their defining characteristic, and this was the first named generation in the Western world. Everything after that, from the silent generation to the baby boomers to Gen Z, was following in this model. And as a result, right at the beginning, the concept of a generation was intertwined with generational conflict, which in the case of the lost generation was defined by their feelings about who sent them to war. That sense of a younger generation sacrificed by an older generation and the huge resentments and conflict that created between those different cohorts of people.

12:36But of course, the war wasn't the only major event at the time. The turn of the century was a time of fast industrialization, and that got sociologists and other thinkers of the time wondering about the forces that shape people, which has a logic to it, Bobby says. Humans like to categorize people quite simply into things they are and things they're not and what group we are in and what group other people are in. And that's like that's quite a deep human characteristic. And to be clear, there were plenty of differences to speak of. A young person born in an urbanized America will have very different expectations from their grandparents who were born on a farm.

13:13But there was a problem here. And that problem is contained in the title of Bobby Duffy's book, which is the reason I called him in the first place. The book is called The Generation Myth, Why When You're Born Matters Less Than You Think. Because Bobby says, look, there actually are plenty of important ways in which you are shaped by the time you were born into. And we'll talk about them all in a minute. But immediately after the concept of a generation was introduced in the early 1900s, Bobby says it became misunderstood. It was used less as a way of understanding changes in populations and used more as a way to explain changes that people don't like.

13:49You have this tendency to want to identify a single, simple solution to any problem or one particular group or characteristic to blame for a particular bad outcome. And it's understandable. We are busy getting on with our lives. And these shorthands are very helpful in helping us cope with that complexity. But more often than not, it leads us astray because the world is complex and there's lots of parts interacting and simple solutions are almost always wrong. So why were these ideas so sticky, even as they were so incorrect? And for that matter, so obviously incorrect. Bobby says it's because these generational stereotypes had something important going for them.

14:33They were sellable. There's money to be made in terms of exaggerating difference and to give a sense of a problem that you can create a solution to. And what does that even mean? Who could make money off of generational conflict? Well, the millennials don't get off the couch very often. Yes, sure. There's Fox and Friends and every other media outlet that runs stories about generational differences because their audiences click or tune in, but we can't just blame modern media for this. You can find these stories in newspapers going back for decades and centuries, like this one from 1933 headlined, Is Modern Youth a Dim Bulb?

15:12Which said, They're never self-starters like the kids were when I was a boy. They lead synthetic lives. Which then just gets repackaged by the next generation of people looking to sell something, and then the next until every generation sounds nearly identical in the way that that 1933 newspaper story sounds a whole lot like self-help author Simon Sinek today. The best case scenario is you'll have an entire population growing up and going through life and just never really finding joy. The best case scenario, he says. The best case scenario is an entire generation never finding joy. I mean, Simon, why would you say such a thing like that when it is so easily disproven?

15:51An entire generation? But whatever. right? Because Simon has books to sell, just like there are endless consultants who specialize in how to reach or market to or work with or manage each young generation whose very existence is premised on how different and potentially incompatible each generation is from the next. And I guess, hey, you can also buy a$2 ,000 Ouija board on Goop. Who am I to judge how people spend their money? But this stuff with the generations is different because it is not just a matter of money. It has consequences. For example, I was hearing these narratives about young people being snowflakes and entitled and weak and selfish and all these terrible things that just so was not reflected in the students that I was working with and the young people I know in my own life.

16:33This is Carla Vermeulen, an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz and author of the book Generation Disaster, Coming of Age Post 9-11. And so I really wanted to kind of look into this and try and understand the world from their perspective. And here's one of the things she did. Carla conducted a thousand-person national survey of people who were 18 to 29 years old at the time of the survey, which means that they were born between 1990 and 2002. The survey was balanced by gender, representative of the U.S. population in terms of race and ethnicity and other factors.

17:05And it asked these young people... Using one word, describe how others most commonly describe your generation. The number one answer, by far, was the word lazy. And here were the other top answers in descending order. entitled, stupid, selfish, dumb, crazy, lost, ignorant, spoiled, bad, sensitive, snowflake, annoying, and effed. Wait, was it actually effed in there? No, they said fucked. Let us be clear, in the name of science, they said fucked. And there were some more words after that too. Careless, horrible, doomed, weak, and weird. Which is depressing, but also not surprising. Now here is the surprising part.

17:45As a follow-up, Carla's survey asked this, How accurate do you believe that description is? In other words, if you said that your generation is most commonly described as lazy, is that an accurate description of your generation? And the response to that, 41 % of young people said it was not accurate, 19 % were neutral, and 40 % said the negative description about their own generation was indeed correct. So not only are they getting these messages from older people, but a lot of them clearly have internalized them and believe that it's true about their entire generation. And that can't be a positive thing.

18:21No, it cannot. And this astonished Carla, because here you have a generation that is so ambitious and creative and entrepreneurial, but they are not always giving themselves credit for it. And they're certainly not getting credit for it from the older generations. And then I think one of the consequences that is so problematic and so troubling is getting those negative messages, particularly from baby boomers, then fuels animosity going in the other direction. So there's just so much hostility of the young towards the older group. And that includes perceptions, not just that, you know, they're nasty and don't understand we, the young people's lives, but also that they are sort of somehow actively trying to block young people from being able to move up.

19:03And so we get our generational battle and our false divides. It's not necessarily because there is an actual generational battle, but rather it's because we have spent so much time talking about a generational battle that it has created something of a generational battle. And the impact of this is very real, both internally and externally. So quickly to touch upon them both, what Carla's study revealed was an entire generation believing something about themselves that is not true. And there is an actual term for that. Here's Bobby again. There's a broader concept called pluralistic ignorance, where you think you have an image of what the norm is for your group, but it's wrong.

19:39And it's shown that that can be really powerful in your own behavior. So this was studied in terms of the drinking cultures at US colleges, where everyone thought that everyone else was loving the drinking cultures. Everyone kept going with it. And actually, when you broke it down and spoke to people separately about it, actually, loads of people weren't enjoying it either, but they just felt they had to keep going. And then there's the external impact. Like, how do people outside a generation treat people inside the generation. We already talked a bit about how that impacts our understanding of climate change, and we'll get back to that in a few minutes.

20:12But just to look at the impact on a totally different issue, let's take a look at what happens in the workplace. Like, OK, here is a clip from the show Good Morning Britain during a segment called Are Millennials Bad Workers? They've been wrapped in cotton wool. They think the world owes them a living. They think just by turning up, it's just going to be. They don't understand the concept of hard work. And this lady isn't saying anything new. It's a feeling that was echoed throughout the business world and was driven in part by a belief that young workers have no sense of loyalty, are not dedicated to their jobs, and simply won't stick around long.

20:48That's just a misreading of the data because young people always turn over jobs quicker than older people. And actually, when you look at the long trends back to the 1980s and before, it's actually older people that are moving jobs more quickly to date than older people did in the past. and young people's speed of turnover in jobs has actually not changed very much. But if bosses think that there's something wrong with their younger team members and that these people are more likely to leave quickly or otherwise not engage deeply in the work, well... It can decrease that engagement between leaders and younger employees.

21:21If you come with that sort of mindset of, yeah, we've got an excuse to make it the generations for their problem, not our problem. And that's the big risk from an organization's point of view. when they start to externalize this as an issue and not see it as something that they can do anything about. Managers won't invest in young people because they believe young people are bad workers. And then because the young people are not invested in, they very well may become bad workers. And then each side resents the other. Once again, the perception of a problem actually creates the problem. So is there a better way to do this?

21:55To look at a broad population of people and understand what makes them different? Bobby Duffy says, yes, there is a better way. It's not actually that complicated. Instead of organizing people in one way, by sorting them into generations based on the year they were born, we need to look at them in three ways. Three effects that explain all types of change, all the change we see in society and as individuals. That's a big claim. Let's see if he can live up to it. So what are these three effects? The first is called period effects. Where something happens and everyone is affected to some degree.

22:30And that's usually big things like pandemic. We've all been affected by the pandemic or a financial crisis in some sort of way. But this can also be more subtle, slow moving shifts like changing cultural norms. And just to reemphasize what Bobby said, the important thing about period effects is that it impacts everyone. The pandemic, for example, has in some way shaped every single person who is alive right now. So let's move on to the second effect. The second effect is called the life cycle effect. We change as we age. We've got lots of evidence that people's priorities and behaviors change as they age, as they leave home, get a job, get married, have kids.

23:07And retire and get older and so on. When you look at life cycle effects, you're able to compare how different generations acted at the same age. What did millennials do in their 20s that baby boomers also did in their 20s? Because that's just a thing you do in your 20s. This is the life cycle effect. And finally, there is the actual quote unquote generation, people being shaped by when they were born. Bobby calls this the cohort effect. Where a generation is different from another generation because they've grown up in different circumstances and had different sorts of experience during their more malleable, formative years of late teens and early twenties.

23:46Bobby says that when you evaluate change this way, you start to get clarity on what really drives people. Because here's the big problem with our current understanding of generations. There's always some truth to them. You know, you can point to any particular generation and say, these people do this. And you can find examples of whatever you're talking about woven into the very large group of people you're talking about. But what is the cause of what you're talking about? And is it a defining characteristic of this group of people or simply a reflection of the time or age they're living in? For example, remember a moment ago when we were talking about millennials and Gen Z leaving jobs faster than other generations?

24:21Bobby said, That's just a misreading of the data because young people always turn over jobs quicker than older people. This isn't a cohort effect with a behavior that's inherent to people born of a specific year. No, this is a life cycle effect. Young people, no matter what year they were born in, do not tend to stick around at their jobs very long. Here's another example. People talk about young people today as having an unusual level of activism, but not true. Older generations have also become much more purpose-driven and make decisions about what they buy based on a brand's mission or commitment to sustainability.

24:54This is a period effect. It's something we're all doing together as a result of shifts in our economy and culture. The better we understand this, the better we know what we're looking at. For example, why are young people living at home with their parents for longer? It's because housing is more expensive and they're earning less than their parents did at the same age. This, again, is a period effect. It's not because they're inherently lazy and expect things to be handed to them, which would be a cohort effect. If you want to understand the future, you really need to understand which is the dominant effect here.