Instead, she observes, “it builds in waves, often proceeding via a series of tipping points before exponentiality hits like an express train.” She says: “Most people then see overnight success, but the reality is that transformation is messy—relying much more than you might imagine on coincidences, on timing, and on those rare innovations that change everything.”

System change, she concludes, is generally a long time a-coming. “Time and again, we see real-world transformations build on hard-earned incremental gains achieved over years and decades. So, what will it take, in this decade, to bend the arc of history toward a just, repaired, and regenerative world?”

My answer is that it needs the series of societal pressure waves that I have been tracking since the 1990s to develop unstoppable momentum—an exponentially positive tsunami of change. Starting in 1994, I began mapping a series of societal pressure waves from 1960 to the present. To my mind, these have been the motivating force behind the evolving change agendas mapped in Tickling Sharks.

In the diagram below, you see the broad sweep of long-wave economic cycles (the pale gray line that goes dotted toward breakdown or breakthrough) suggests that we are now in a deepening downwave, but with a new upwave building.

I have explored this “U-bend” for some years, seeing the progressive unraveling of the old economic order as a massive down escalator—with the eventual recovery, potentially at least, as a set of even bigger up escalators.

The implications for us all are profound and will often play out over generational timescales. Meanwhile, the diagram also shows a set of more focused change waves, in tangerine, marked as waves 1 through 6. They have been driving the mainstreaming of a range of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agendas, producing psychological, social, economic, and political shock waves.

Typically, the relevant change agendas have expanded during times of economic growth, particularly toward the end of boom periods, shrinking back during the ensuing recessions—though that pattern may now itself be changing.

Wave 1 peaked around 1970, the first Earth Day, and focused on potential limits to growth. Wave 2 peaked in the early 1990s, with the world increasingly seen through a “green” lens, at least in parts of the developed world. And wave 3, peaking between 1999 and 2001, focused on the implications of a new round of globalization.

Then wave 4, peaking around 2008, saw a feeding frenzy of sustainability commitments being made by a growing number of business leaders, though often with little real understanding of what it required of them. Wave 5 was shaped and surfed by new leaders, among them the astounding Greta Thunberg.

In a time of growing political divides, all this suggests considerable challenges ahead. The very success of the ESG movement has helped trigger political pushback, particularly in the United States. And the swing toward the right in EU politics is another warning sign.

So, will there now be a further, seventh wave in the series?

I suspect so, though its onset may be delayed, and its direction, speed, scale, and ultimate impact remain to be determined. Beneath the turmoil, though, the next economic cycle is building, bringing radically different change dynamics and opportunities.