Below is a 12-slide powerpoint overview of my Leadership Construct known as “20s-As-20s.” It’s a brief and high-level summary of how I believe the two decades of the 1920s and 2020s rhyme with each other—not repeat, but rhyme—in trends, events, and decision-points. I’m offering this to you free of charge. Below are supplemental remarks that provide slightly more context. If you’d like to explore how this construct can work more fully and deeply for you, or for you and your team, please contact me at 317-407-3687 or via email dan@historicalsolutions.com
Thank you for reading!
Slide One, obviously, gets us going.
Slide Two is where I develop my argument that the pandemics of 1918-1920 and 2020-2022 share several shocking commonalities. I frame 1918-1920 as Then and 2020-2022 as Now. Some of you may recall my terms for the public collision as “Warfluenza” then and “Warcorona” now. On the private side, I wrote a while ago about the Life of Death then, and the Life of Doom now. Some of you will remember the extensive research and writing I did on the two pandemics.
Slide Three begins the first of my Eight Features from the rest of the 1920s as stage-setting (and rhyming) for the rest of the 2020s. The Great Resignation is our rhyme of the obsession with pleasure and diversion in the post-pandemic/Warfluenza 1920s.
Slide Four refers to the intense pursuit of prosperity and wealth. I’ll add this note for you—yes, other times and moments have included a pursuit of prosperity and wealth. The difference in the 1920s is the qualifier: intense, severe, obsessive, all-consuming, and so on. It is the ratcheting-up and acceleration to the “nth” degree of a normal feature of life.
Slide Five pertains to science and technology. The high-highs are those achievements which are wonderfully life-altering (think penicillin in the 1920s). Our version might be mRNA research and the various applications of artificial intelligence. The low-lows are the horrible perversions of science and technology—eugenics in the 1920s, and the dark implications of social-media algorithms in the 2020s.
Slide Six captures the fact that mass and size took on gigantic proportions in so many aspects of life. From organizations to events, from effects to implications, big was, and will be, big. Nearly every major professional sport you can think of had its very first celebrity athlete in the 1920s. The chart is one example of m/a activity, in the trending new industry of gaming.
Slide Seven emphasizes the revolutionary and transformative role of newness and experimentalism in the creative world, the creative arts, the creative-thinking economy. New stuff is uniquely bolder and edgier in both 20s.
Slide Eight takes us into some of the most challenging aspects of the 20s-As-20s. The sharpest, most forward, and utterly disruptive point of Major Change is at work here. I say this not to endorse or denounce but rather and merely to describe, to explain. The beyond-new (the avant garde) and the traditional or existing (the status quo) are fighting it out in so many parts of our lives, or at least it sure feels that way. The 1920s and 2020s rhyme in the clearest way in their respective culture wars. Schools were/are only one of many battlegrounds.
Slide Nine is something I’ll bet an adult beverage on—and I’ll never lose. Americanism was a hallmark of the 1920s in both positive and negative forms. I guarantee we are already seeing it in the 2020s and it will intensify as we near the Sestercentennial (250th) anniversary years of 2025 (start of the Revolutionary War in 1775) and 2026 (writing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776). As a heads-up, I’ll be working extensively in this area.
Slide Ten involves the way Americans will look at, behave in, and think about the rest of the world. Necessity, cold-cut self-interest, and more, these will be the narrow filters used in gazing and measuring the other six continents, the waters among them, and the skies above. It’s a chess board now, with the pieces of nation-states and their shifting alliances and partnerships.
Slide Eleven is where you get to work. Think of the eight features as parts of a house built on the four-blocked foundation. Now, with this slide, we’re putting in four doors you will use to come and go. Four practical answers you need to identify to four questions. What predictions proved wrong about the pandemic? What things did you let go of for the best? What of the new and fresh, the invented and the innovated, can appeal to you in an open-minded posture? And what have you held onto and gained a new understanding, appreciation, and awareness of? When you’ve answered these four questions, you’ll establish your starting point in leaving the pandemic behind and stepping toward the rest of the 20s. Do the same with your team and see how everyone’s answers lay alongside each other. What emerges as a similarity (the bonds)? What emerges as disconnections (the gaps)? How do the bonds and gaps act on your quest to move forward as a team and as a leader?
Slide Twelve swings back around and sweeps the stuff together. But I do want to point out an urgent thought shown here for the first time in the presentation: the bonds and gaps will reside in you and your team’s experiences, attitudes, aspirations, and energy coming out of the pandemic. And heading toward the mid-2020s as a team, your ability to plan, collaborate, resolve conflict, rely on resourcefulness, and feel loyalty will be deeply affected by the bonds and gaps uncovered in your respective perspectives on the pandemic.
Thanks so much for taking the time to glance at my 20s-As-20s Leadership Construct. See you Down River. Remember, if you want to immerse deeper in this and really put it to work for yourself, I’m happy to talk further (317-407-3687 or dan@historicalsolutions.com)
All the best, Dan
