1 + 1 = 10

How do you blend the wisdom of age with the confidence of youth?

One of the great things about being young and naive is you don’t know what you don’t know. They have yet to touch the flame to learn it can burn you. This means they’re not running from an established playbook, they don’t know something won’t work, so new approaches are considered and undertaken. Some fly, some die. Experience collected.

One of the great things about age is you’ve had time to accumulate a bunch of experiences and discover what works and what doesn’t (I’m exempting those who’ve had 1 year of experience 20 times).

But typically:

The young person ignores the older person’s advice (‘has been’).

The older person ignores the young person’s ideas (‘that won’t work’).

The middle aged person rides the middle line (‘that’s safe’).

The goldilocks place is not in the middle, but a blend of the extremes. That is where the magic can happen. But I don’t see workplaces working to create this concoction. The young are treated as inexperienced therefore are considered less able to contribute - so get the menial tasks. At the other end, the older team members are regarded as going a little bit stale (unless they are in the C-Suite, then they’re god) so they get the BAU tasks, not the juicy stuff.   

I think our ability to objectively assess merit within businesses is horribly subjective and riddled with biases and stereotyping (mostly unconscious). The result is businesses are leaving creative opportunities locked in a cupboard. They end up aiming to do what they did last year with the ambitious target of doing things 10% better. 

When they should be mining the naivety of youth for all it is worth and leveraging their elders’ motherlode of experiences. 

But to do this it requires recognition of the value people who are not like you can bring to the table. That means busting stereotypes and recognising biases. None of which are easy. But if you can crack it, then you open the door to capability and opportunity that remains closed to your competitors who are unable to unlock their creative cupboard.

And that my friend, is why many companies find it difficult to truly leverage the opportunities their team’s capabilities present (often signalled by forgettable advertising!).

Call to action time: Buy my…. No. Just cast your biases and stereotyping aside. Get young people into the big meetings and projects with the purpose of hearing and involving them and treat those with great experience as goldmines.