Insights  /  The Lab

In The Wavefront, I share what’s happening where culture and technology meet. At this constantly shifting edge, I help leaders and their companies find opportunities, manage risks, and stay ahead. I’m glad you’re here.

In my first year at Carnegie Mellon’s design program, I had two different instructors teaching two very different futures. Joe Dicey taught printing methods in a dimly-lit basement: paste-up, photostats, cutting type with a knife, and waxing it down on boards. It was craft, and it was how design had been practiced for a very long time.

Meanwhile, in Reese Cluster, a computer lab flooded by natural light and the CRTs of Macintoshes, Charles “Chaz” Palmer was teaching us PageMaker, Freehand, and QuarkXPress. The room buzzed with creative and social energy, serving as the hub of after-hours design time.

It’s tempting to look at that hand-crafted process now and see something quaint. But it was the predecessor that wrote the rules the software later replaced—the grid, the hierarchy, and the way type flows around an image—and now automates.

This issue of The Wavefront looks at this pattern across generations and waves of technology. I hope you enjoy.

Mike Carnevale
mike@carnevale.co

Every generation comes of age riding a wave of technology that the generation before didn’t have or didn’t experience in the same way. They master it in their early careers, build their working lives on it, and, for a while, that mastery remains central to their professional identity. When the next wave arrives, they’re no longer the newcomers, and they face a choice. They can cling to the hard-won expertise that got them here, or let it go and embrace the change.

Boomers rode television and mass media to maximum effect until the Internet dissolved the distribution systems on which their authority was built.

Gen X, my generation, grew up unsupervised and self-reliant, and we started our careers on the upswing of the internet, only to see AI now automating the hard-won expertise we had built over decades.

Millennials did everything asked of them: mastered the web, became the creators who designed and built it, and are now, in their professional prime, having to choose between sticking with the familiar or going all-in with AI-powered tools and processes.

Gen Z is riding the wave up. To them, AI isn’t a disruption; it’s a natural part of the world they came into, just as mainstream TV was to Boomers, the wild-west internet was to Gen X, and the web was to Millennials. But native fluency doesn’t spare them the choice. They still have to decide whether to bet a career on the unknown or hold to the familiar — the same fork Joe Dicey and Chaz Palmer stood at, a generation apart.

It can feel deeply unfair when it’s your turn to shift from wave-as-opportunity to wave-as-existential threat. There’s a sense that you did everything right, and the ground moved anyway. But it isn’t bad luck or bad timing; it’s the cyclical pattern of generational turnings and the history it creates. You’re right on schedule.

I made a short video a few years ago to explain this cycle to my team, summarizing Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning. I have no real explanation for how it has since found 30k viewers, given my next most-viewed video is a montage of my brief glory as the high school’s mascot.

Seeing this laid out in a table makes it easier to understand how waves hit every generation differently. The difference isn’t the wave itself, but where you are in your career when it arrives.

GenXers and Millennials are facing the same wave today, but are confronted with different career choices. For Gen X, established and increasingly in charge, AI prompts the question: What do you do with the leadership within your organization? For Millennials in their professional prime, it’s a question of reinvention, as the work they have mastered is being rewritten under them. Neither experience is harder nor easier. They’re just standing in different places on the beach when the wave hits.

Almost no one experiences a wave in isolation. Most people experience them within an organization, and it’s the organization’s culture that determines how its people respond.

A healthy org has every generation working alongside each other: Gen Z adopting new tools natively, with no old habits to unlearn. Millennials in their prime, with the craft and experience to know how to make great things. Gen X is leading teams and creating the conditions where rules can be bent, broken, or altogether replaced. Each generation is in a different place relative to the same wave. Gen Z’s fluency can support Millennial reinvention. But that reinvention can’t happen if Gen X leadership doesn’t pave the way with vision, budget, and belief in the necessity of change and growth.

Organizations that do this—that can flow with a wave and not cling steadfast to old foundations—have an enormous advantage.

At CARNEVALE, our core philosophy has always been simple: the front of the wave isn’t the threat, but actually the place of least risk, of greatest creative opportunity, and the only point on the curve where maximum market innovation can be realized.

Everything behind the wave is settled with known processes, commoditized work, and value that’s already been captured. At the front is the greatest amount of energy, manifested as growth and market value, all in the disruption itself. Without the wave, there’s nothing new to build. What can’t be automated—judgment, taste, and brilliantly novel ideas—becomes worth more as everything else gets automated.

The Wavefront is where value is born and where CARNEVALE has always focused our work. Our creativity transforms innovative ideas into products that haven’t existed before. We use AI to accelerate around that human core by producing products at the speed this moment demands. The result is tremendous value for businesses, their consumers, and the markets our clients lead.

There’s always another wave. The only question is whether you read it as the thing that washes away what you built or the thing that lets you build your future foundation. It’s almost always both.

This article previously appeared on The Wavefront.