This is a good viewpoint of not only work and society today (made up of a hodgepodge of generational differences and similarities), but also a view into how we as Emergency Managers need to communicate - and prepare communities - to be more disaster ready/resilient, across all of the phases. Your sentence "Let me remind you all we're not just preparing for the future of work." can also be "Let me remind you all we're not just preparing for the next disaster."
Personally, I am starting to feel a bit older (but not wiser) when it comes to mentoring and advising folks who want instant answers/gratification/resolution to problems "they didn't create" but yet will impact them massively if they are not prepared to get through them. Look at the differences with corporate (and many times governmental) leadership - "in my day" we fully expected our leaders to have "paid their dues" and come up from the ranks of worker to supervisor to manager to leader, for example. Thanks in large part to exponential technology growth (I blame/credit Moore's Law and capitalism on this), one can become an "internet startup" or "viral social media star" at almost any age and almost instantaneously. It's like calling a lottery winner, your leader. I am personally unsure of how any wisdom I have can be imparted to anyone who views (or is one of) those winners as leaders of the future. When it comes to communicating and actioning on disaster readiness - especially mitigation - emergency managers need more/different tools in our toolbox to effect positive change in Gen Z'ers.
What might also help (and I wish I could include the image here in the comments) is the timeline of which named generation occurred when. I found one with a creative commons license at
This is a good viewpoint of not only work and society today (made up of a hodgepodge of generational differences and similarities), but also a view into how we as Emergency Managers need to communicate - and prepare communities - to be more disaster ready/resilient, across all of the phases. Your sentence "Let me remind you all we're not just preparing for the future of work." can also be "Let me remind you all we're not just preparing for the next disaster."
Personally, I am starting to feel a bit older (but not wiser) when it comes to mentoring and advising folks who want instant answers/gratification/resolution to problems "they didn't create" but yet will impact them massively if they are not prepared to get through them. Look at the differences with corporate (and many times governmental) leadership - "in my day" we fully expected our leaders to have "paid their dues" and come up from the ranks of worker to supervisor to manager to leader, for example. Thanks in large part to exponential technology growth (I blame/credit Moore's Law and capitalism on this), one can become an "internet startup" or "viral social media star" at almost any age and almost instantaneously. It's like calling a lottery winner, your leader. I am personally unsure of how any wisdom I have can be imparted to anyone who views (or is one of) those winners as leaders of the future. When it comes to communicating and actioning on disaster readiness - especially mitigation - emergency managers need more/different tools in our toolbox to effect positive change in Gen Z'ers.
What might also help (and I wish I could include the image here in the comments) is the timeline of which named generation occurred when. I found one with a creative commons license at
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Generation_timeline.svg
credit: Cmglee, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons