Like a fine wine….

I recently dropped in at the rest home where my lovely fruitcake of a mother is resident. She was not in her room, so I went looking for her. I found her with three of her friends settling in for a pre-dinner wine, and they were quick to invite me to join them.

I knew Gwen, who is just shy of 96, but Graham and Dawn were new to me. I was initially slightly annoyed, as I would’ve preferred Fruity all to myself. But I gave myself a quick bitch slap and opened my mind to meeting her friends.

It proved to be a most enjoyable encounter. Graham supplied me with a glass and some very acceptable pinot gris. I discovered he’d been quite an entrepreneur owning several retail businesses. Dawn was a recent arrival as her body was starting to misbehave, but she had full command of her cognitive function. I guessed late 70s, maybe early 80s. Nope, wrong. 90.

They were having fun. In their groove, shooting the shit. They didn’t remotely care what station each had held earlier in their lives. They were simply enjoying each other for who they were, not what they’d done.

I find old people have large stores of wisdom to be mined. But you have to go looking for their gold, as they’re wise enough to know it’s an exercise in futility telling you something you’re not seeking.

I think the work environment is short-sighted with their view on older people. Many workplaces celebrate their youth. Youth have energy, fresh ideas, are less inhibited, and aren’t constrained by experience. Young are way more cooler.

But where we go wrong is that we make the assumption that old means the opposite of all these things. Sure, we can find examples to support this assumption (our confirmation bias working for us), but if one cares to look, you don’t have to go far to find examples that refute it.

But when do you see a workplace shouting about how high their average age is, even if they’re crushing it? They don’t. As they know they’ll be perceived as over-the-hill, yesterday’s news, with little ability to innovate. But the reality is that older people are more creative and productive. In US study, they found the median age of innovators was 47.

So why the fixation with youth when there is evidence to suggest this may not be the best strategy? That’s easy. It’s the common narrative of new equating good, whereas old means dated or wearing out. This holds true for many things, food, your car, your computer. But not everything.

New = good, and old = dated. This is an easy concept to grasp and give blanket application to. Critical thinking takes more work. You have to step back and challenge your assumptions. But before you can do that, you have to accept that we are a flawed decision-making machines. We arrive at many conclusions without realising the Queen Mary could sail through some of the holes in our logic.

Assumptions are automatic, critical thinking is manual. This is analogous to cars, where automatics are easy and require no thought, in contrast manual cars require awareness, deliberation, and skill. Most young people cannot drive manuals these days. Most older people can, and that made them better drivers.

So shouldn’t we be thinking harder about combining the attributes of youth with the wisdom of age in the workplace? A bit of hybrid vigor always outperformed the purebred on the farm, and what workplace wouldn’t want their livestock to be more productive?

Here’s an idea. Have workplaces setting up their own ‘acumen of age’ teams to employ the decades of wisdom hanging out in our retirement homes. And it would only cost a few wines and whiskeys to run. What’s to lose?