Today’s anouncement by Huffington Post of Biz Stone’s appointment as strategy advisor for social impact is a sign of the times, just that we haven’t been looking very hard at our own times. It is over a decade now since David Brooks introduced the Bobo, the bohemian bourgeois and we are somewhat trapped there and in TEDland, so let me introduce you to the Crocus Class, the post-Bobo creative consumer who prefers making things and creating small changes to drinking Chardonnay. The Crocus Class has an antipathy towards technology for its own sake and may even reject it out of principle, though not if it facilitates small acts of change. They yearn for useful apps not the cloud.  The signs of an expiring Bobo class are still around us. TED, the conference for ideas worth spreading, is an Academy Awards of Bobo-ism, a class dedicated to ideas above actions. But the Crocus generation are do-ers.  They are modest people without large salaries or a Prius in the drive. They are motivated not by guilt but by creative pragmatism. They are more Maker Faire than SXSW. They are content to make their mark through small acts of creative application and a philosophy of contribution. Neighborhood transition is for them what being in a start up was ten years ago. They are not exactly children of recession but recession has allowed them to bloom, and bloom is the right word. They might not grow tall but they do take a small lead.  Take a look at the Dutch website Tweetjemee.nl. Its purpose is to enable people who want to buy reasonably priced and well prepared meals to connect with people can cook. This kind of pairing of folks began on dating sites and then spread to gambling but it is now extending to the world of purpose and meaning. Research on public attitudes that I published on the Harvard Business Review website last year suggests why.  People are responding to recession by taking an extra step forward in personal responsibility. One of the big surprises at the peak of the recession was the number of people who went out onto the web to talk about personal betterment. Betterment became a significant meme, and yet it is also an expression of something deeper. Over the past five to ten years people have begun to see the world in a different way. They no longer see a world of infinite progress, which was the defining mindset of old capitalism. They see a world marked by lateral shifts and permanent declines in the institutions around them. More significantly they seem at ease with this change.  For almost the whole of the 20th century the western worldview was dominated by the idea of progress. That idea meant whatever went wrong we would return to this path – of scientific progress or technological innovation and wealth consumption – on a road to a greater civilisation.  That belief is now gone or rather it is help dear only by politicians. People more generally are content to adhere to a naturalistic metaphor to explain their world. I call this the new naturalism. This is not the soft underbelly of society.  The new naturalism is marked by a hard nosed interpretation of events, shorn of easy dreams. New naturalists draw on the natural world of ecosystems to explain the institutional world around them. They see decay and decline as well as growth and they are at ease with negatives because decline of some form is ‘natural’. To the new naturalist ideas, institutions, companies and people decline decay and die. And that’s all right.  Do the new naturalists belong to the creative class? No. Richard Florida’s creative class is a demographic with a broadly based skill-set where the new naturalist has a distinct frame of mind.  For those in the crocus revolution however the objective is to sidestep institutional decline and to aim for personal betterment. They will ally with other revolutionaries to achieve that. Therefore the recession has led to an uptick in websites where people help each other to access bargains and deals (and that’s why Groupon has been such a hit) or to share rides or even to share their care or to cook a meal or to lease out a spare room or let backpackers take the couch.  Once they start to look around at people like them new naturalists begin to realise they are empowered. Think about the world wide web. It is not an invention of a large corporation. It was engineered by a scientist who was not even a software programmer. Tim Berners Lee was primarily a user of communications who wanted the system to work better for him. He went out and made it happen  The new naturalist mentality is to forge small narrow paths that make sense. They are empowered by each other.  The education system and politicians are out of tune with the Crocus revolution. These new naturalists are people that want to grow outside of institutions which they identify as being in decline. Innovation for them is not about reviving systems that don’t work, not about working heard at the firm. It is about the small steps they take towards personal betterment, often even in conjunction with people they do not know. In the post-Bobo world a different kind of aspiration is breathing new life into a declining, decaying bourgeois culture. And this is what companies need to understand. It’s only natural it should.
The rise of a new cadre of people whose main interest is in creating small acts of change is percolating up around us.