The Lifecourse Method

To know where people are today, focus on their generation, not their age.

People never "belong" to an age bracket. Rather, they belong to a generation which happens to be passing through an age bracket—a generation with its own memories, language, habits, beliefs, and life lessons. Back in the 1950s, we called rising 50-year-olds the "power elite"; in the 1990s, we called them the "cultural elite"—a shift having more to do with the experience of living Woodstock vs. D-Day than with anything new about being age 50. Put differently: You learn less about a traveler by looking at the train station you find him in than by looking at the baggage he left home with.

To know where people will be tomorrow, focus on the life trajectory of their generation.

Generations never stand still. Like individuals, they strive, mature, and transform—always motivated to overcome basic personal and social challenges that they define for themselves early in life. Some generations (like Mae West's) start wild and later on slow down; others (like Gloria Steinem's) start off cautiously and later on speed up. From year to year, a generation's choices are buffeted by fads and events. But in the long run, its life trajectory is invariably governed by its archetype.

To know where a certain age group will be tomorrow, focus on the cohort shift.

The attitudes and behavior of every age group undergo constant flux. From one decade to the next, youth can turn from do-wop to acid rock to rap; midlifers from gray-flannel to midlife crisis to spiritualism; elders from reclusive apathy to senior-citizen entitlement to other-directed compassion. Most companies, public agencies, and nonprofits desperately seek clues about future swings in a particular age group—but they won't find them until they understand the next generation due to "age into" their target zone.

To know where society will be tomorrow, focus on the turning.

You may gather data on all the latest demographic and technological trends, but if you don't know what season of history it is—spring, summer, winter, or fall—you still won't know whether to sow or reap. From Henry Ford to Henry Kaiser and from Bill Levitt to Bill Gates, great innovators possess the ability to anticipate entirely new currents in the public mood. The future is never linear, and the further ahead you need to plan, the more you need to see around the next great bend in social time.

Respect and make use of the past—for history is the great teacher.

The world is full of market and social forecasters. But few have a definable method, and even fewer have road-tested their method—as LifeCourse has—on five centuries of past events. For those who have the key, the past can be a treasure chest of parallel lifecycles and instructive scenarios. To comprehend today’s “Millennials” for instance, reacquaint yourself with the original powerhouse “G.I.” generation—and to dig deeper into the uncertainty and fragmentation of the ’00s—take another look back at the 1930s or 1860s. History’s echoes deserve attention not just because they bring us closer to our past, but because so much can be learned from them.