"A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless ... someone's got to make a wake-up call."
-Warren Bennis

How about those alarm clocks? Are we ready to step into the bracing dawns of the days our profession comes of age? Can we take on Financial Planning 3.0?

It has been a while since I first proclaimed out loud that financial planning would be the most important authentic profession of the 21st century. It started with my stump speeches as president of the late, great Institute of Certified Financial Planners. When touring local chapters, I made that claim in a spirit combining aspiration, hope, challenge and, obviously, hyperbole. Frankly, it was meant to get people wondering and jump-starting their imaginations. Does Wagner have a point? Or is he just messing with us? Indeed, how would we know?

Confessedly, I was messing with them just a bit. Yet I mostly believed those sentiments, though I was shy of details. Still, it seemed intuitively true given money's social velocity at the time. As it turned out, I was right. This period of the early '90s enthusiastically witnessed dramatic, meaningful changes. With it came the inception of Financial Planning 2.0. With more than 20 years centered in Financial Planning 2.0, we have cause for both pride and worry.

Although much remains undone, there has been amazing progress as our profession ranges from explorations of our personal and cultural interiors, the generation of potent Codes of Ethics and our universal commitments to significant fiduciary standards and productive expansions of our gardens of knowledge.

At the same time, the world calls insistently for talented fiduciaries to bring this young, authentic profession into being. This is not hyperbole. As the importance of money becomes increasingly apparent, individual human beings clearly need their own fiduciary to help them meet its demands. They need Financial Planning 3.0.

Now, as that becomes reality, I am convinced we are engaging in work of the utmost importance to individuals, communities and the world. It is work worthy of the certainty that we are, indeed, practicing in the most important profession of the 21st century. That said, I also know we must claim it and proclaim it. There is simply too much at stake for too many motivated defenders of the status quo for us to believe such stature will be handed over freely.

That means we must know who we are together as well as fully grasping the inherent nature of our work. It means appreciating the implications of our work and claiming it as our own. It means thinking both historically and futuristically. How did we get here? Where are we going?

Why financial planning? Because financial planners are the only fiduciaries with comprehensive skills working with individuals and families one at a time with respect to the most powerful and pervasive secular forces on the planet. Take note, we are the only fiduciaries with comprehensive skills and sufficient personal and functional understandings of people's personal relationships with money to look at issues both skillfully and holistically.

Moreover, we are the only fiduciaries with comprehensive skills who can do this without overtly destructive political biases-no small thing in the era of the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street and nasty political combat grounded in class warfare and the continuous replay of the capitalist/communist dialectic (as if this is either thoughtful or relevant).

Let's understand how we got here. Visionaries birthed Financial Planning 1.0 over 42 years ago. Loren Dunton et al saw a need to bring multiple skill sets to money-based client engagements. At a time when some states banned the same individual from selling both securities and insurance, these prophets saw that the same fact-finders and personal relationships could simultaneously serve various product purveyors from insurance to securities to taxes to estate planning and retirement planning. Seeing the need, they filled it by creating the College for Financial Planning and its curriculum. With this, they generated the "CFP" designation while planting seeds for the future growth of an authentic profession.

For raw material, they had inherited a 25-year postwar period where money itself was turned inside out. From Bretton Woods and a world where most folks were, at most, one generation removed from the land and its bounties, the world of 1969 was one of increased urbanization, shifting demographics and the mutual interdependencies and political tensions of a money-based culture. In fact, our national relationship with money was changing. We needed folks to help make sense of it. This was Financial Planning 1.0.

Financial Planning 1.0 was just in time for the '70s, when the world went off the gold standard and adopted fiat money as its norm. Inflation raged, housing prices and interest rates soared, a scourging bear market shook the faithful and baby boomers took center stage in a storm. It was increasingly clear that personal financial security was vital to lives well lived. This meant insurance, investments, a good job with benefits, a good home and other attributes of financial safety and security. Industry responded. Financial Planning 1.0 was all about the financial product it generated-and, of course, sales. Some of this product was good to great. Other products-not so much. (See tax shelters, penny stocks, limited partnerships, savings and loan companies and unsustainable life insurance projections.)

Nonetheless, "financial planning" was hailed by industry as "the greatest product delivery system ever." Rewards were for "producers." ("Producers" were the ones with great sales numbers. Plus, they got the compliments on Monday mornings and the trips to Hawaii.)

Later in Financial Planning 1.0, personal computers came to our individual desks. They turned out information instantly and thoroughly. We could crank out customized proposals and detailed analyses with impunity, "selling it by the pound." We were in the middle of one of the greatest bull markets of all time, and we could do no wrong.

With time's passages, we also got the chance to see that there was more to money than just the right product. After 20 years, Financial Planning 2.0 was more than a gleam in our eyes. The profession's leaders thought aspirationally about building an authentic profession. With Financial Planning 1.0 as our foundation, we experienced the realities that money was intensely personal and more intimately involved in people's lives than simple accumulation. Enter financial life planning and solid efforts to understand our personal relationships with money with more than a product sale in mind. We even began to look at money from the miscellaneous perspectives provided by the liberal arts in general. Books were written and lectures were given.

With Financial Planning 2.0, different practice models emerged as client-centric financial planners sought to cut or minimize their duties to Industry employers and personal client management systems emerged. Computers and targeted software reduced financial planners' needs to rely on Industry. Many saw the conflicts of interest and "two masters" problems inherent to agency systems and worked diligently to avoid them. The "fee-only" model was adopted whole cloth by many while others developed hybrid practices with notions of closer client relationships and reduced conflicts of interest. Of course, many others remained nestled in Financial Planning 1.0 or pure sales models.

Self-regulation took huge steps forward as Industry leaders developed a meaningful "Code of Ethics and Professional Responsibility" together with some disciplinary rules with teeth. Despite Industry's resistance, common talk centered around fiduciary standards and putting the client's interests first. Collectively, we took many steps to make this a reality, including an aggressive, consumer-friendly lawsuit versus the SEC.

Yet for all that, we did not really step into the world even as the world increased its dependencies on money. On the whole, we did not grasp the importance of our work, much less its power. We did not comprehend the realities and implications of personal finance within an economic system that marginalized the individual yet demanded that individuals play the money game skillfully, mercilessly imposing huge costs for either bad luck or incompetence.
Money skills became survival skills that do not come naturally to human beings, generating unprecedented social forces in the process.

We accepted second-class status, let Industry push us around, accepted shoddy work from our academics and failed to share our insights with the world when it counted. We deserved shame. In 2005, we knew. We all knew. Who knows if they would have listened, but let's be honest. We did not try. Shame on us. In no small part, Financial Planning 3.0 has to do with ensuring such shame does not repeat. At the very least, we should be the early warning system for bad product, not silent accomplices to fraud.

Financial Planning 1.0 was excellent. It formed the core of our emerging profession. Creating something from nothing, it was the greatest advance in history for helping individuals deal with their money. However, it fell far short of realizing the inherent potential of the financial planning profession. It created better product purveyors but failed to separate advisors from Industry as required by an authentic profession.

Unfortunately, Financial Planning 2.0 cannot take us where we must go. There are many reasons. Most prominently, Financial Planning 2.0 continues unsustainable ties with Industry. Simply put, if clients come first, we cannot as fiduciaries serve non-clients. Face it, the laws of agency serve Industry, not the profession.

That will take Financial Planning 3.0. We are witnessing another generational change. As the pioneers of Financial Planning 1.0 gave way to the baby boomers for Financial Planning 2.0, so, too, will we boomers likely watch our successors build something amazing.

I have my hopes. For one, I trust we can transmit our experiences to these worthy successors freely and joyfully. Of course, we "veterans" have much to share. Yes, we have wisdom. Obviously, we should be proud. And we can participate. But we should also acknowledge that batons are being passed. We can be both critics and fans, but we cannot control.

For another, I hope we can sever our dependencies on Industry. Manufacturing, sales and advice are all honorable undertakings, but they ought not be mixed. Farmers grow food for the grocers to sell to chefs who serve their patrons. The patrons get the best of each, but their roles are clear. Fair enough. Simple enough.

Financial Planning 3.0 is in its infancy. From my perspective, it ought to address issues of theory. We do not yet have it. Why does the profession exist? Whose needs are being served? What is its mission and purpose? Where is its bedrock? How ought specialties emerge? These issues will determine the nature of the profession past the foreseeable future.

We need vocabulary and we need separation from macroeconomics in general. Any group that looks at individuals, i.e. our clients, through the lens of "homo economicus" must be viewed skeptically.

What are our profession's priorities? Is it the financial planner's primary duty to maximize the client's money? Or is it to insulate the client from harm or coach with respect to personal missions? Or is it closer to my personal favorite, "to help individuals and families address their personal relationships with money and the fearsome forces it generates"?

An authentic profession needs strong academics. Frankly, ours have left much to be desired. Accordingly, what areas of knowledge and inquiry ought to inform Financial Planning 3.0? I personally see financial planning as the ultimate liberal arts profession. Shouldn't our gardens of knowledge be resplendent with cross-disciplinary relationships?
What public roles ought we play in Financial Planning 3.0? Do we just serve as informed advocates for individuals in matters affecting their individual relationships with money? Or can we provide counterweights in issues of public policy? How can we help leaders and decision-makers grasp the implications of their work without getting caught in impossible politics?

Can we help grow new, perhaps healthier forms of money? Can we develop better methods for making our skills and knowledge accessible to those who want and need them?

Financial Planning 3.0 will be the most important profession of the 21st century because we work with the most powerful and pervasive secular force on the planet. Still doubtful? As with medicine, law and theology, nobody escapes the need to deal with money intelligently and thoughtfully. Because money competency is a 21st century survival skill. Because money has become our primary source of mutual interaction and is an integral part of every issue of consequence facing individuals, government and enterprise alike. Because money touches everything and everybody. Because it is still a taboo and everybody is weird about it. All that being said, the world needs us to step up.

Here's the thing, though. We must step into these issues as best we can and claim our relevance to the 21st century, grasping with conviction that reflects our need to evolve Financial Planning 3.0 and meet its challenges.