The aging of the baby boom generation will fuel growing tensions with younger age cohorts now moving into the workforce. These demographic shifts not only herald growing strains on such areas as healthcare, housing and pension systems, but also, even more alarmingly, a potential fading of the appetite for the transformational social and economic change necessary to adapt our technologies, business models, lifestyles and economies to the social and environmental realities of the 21st century.
For business, the resulting social tensions could soon present challenges far exceeding those associated with efforts to fracture the glass ceilings associated with gender, ethnicity or disability. Be clear: this is not simply a question of demographic trends squeezing certain markets – instead, it is an emerging threat to market dynamics we currently take for granted.
The implication is that these challenges will need active, strategic and effective management by the private, public and citizen sectors. For this to happen, we need much better joint working between different sectors of society and between different generations.
However, even gargantuan dark clouds can turn up silver linings, and the demographic and generational challenges offer huge potential upsides. Those who manage to work out how to shape and surf the demographic waves that will pulse through our societies will create huge value, throwing up the next generation of Gates and Buffetts. More specifically, exciting opportunities are emerging to use new business models to meet the needs of the over-50s and, at the same time, to mobilise the knowledge, skills, experience, contacts and financial resources of retirees and those moving towards (an often receding horizon of) retirement.
Running the slider back down the age spectrum, there is also enormous potential to harness the energy, ideology, tech savvy and social networks of the next generation of policy-makers, investors, entrepreneurs, workers and consumers. Business leaders have an opportunity to get ahead of the looming intergenerational tensions and divides – building high performance intergenerational teams better equipped to develop tomorrow’s market and political solutions. Among the emerging solutions, we are particularly interested in the creation of a new business archetype, 'dynamic duos', which we explain below.
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Dynamic duo: Moving well beyond traditional mentoring, dynamic duos are inter-generational (and often cross-disciplinary) collaborations operating top-down and bottom-up, outside-in and inside-out, to the benefit of both partners – while driving innovation and creating significant new value for their organisations.
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As baby boomers continue to age and rising generations are left with the bills (financial, social and planetary) the question is not whether these tensions will boil over into open disputes, but where, how and with what impact on individual businesses, on the markets they serve and on the wider social cohesion that is so essential to the daily operation of capitalism?
Enter the new dynamic duos
So what to do? Elements of the wider solution already exist when you look through the lens of traditional family relationships. In countries where several generations live together under one roof, as in developing economies where this is often a brute necessity, the tensions can be greatly relieved – helping to maintain feelings of mutual respect and compassion. The older generation takes care of the young, and vice versa.
In a related trend in Europe and other developed countries, growing numbers of families are being pressured to live together in an intergenerational melting pot for longer as parents choose to have children later in life, older children find it hard financially to leave the nest, and as aging relatives require more intensive hands-on care. In the same way, we are likely to see a growing generational span represented in businesses as pension provision weakens and a growing proportion of older people work longer.
The baby boomers were defined by many things, but one of them was their appetite to change the world for the better. Now the rising generations are chomping at the bit, eager to make their own mark. Most of the social intrapreneurs we work with are Generation X. The Generation Y cohort is earlier on in the process, but is typically brimming over with ideas and energy, and tends to adopt a 'don’t know the rules, so don’t know how to break them' attitude. These are qualities that will be critically important in driving the multi-dimensional changes we so clearly need in our societies, economies and businesses. At the same time, the growing potential for intergenerational clashes is clear.
Geneneration Y’s numbers are estimated at about 70 million in the USA - this young tsunami is already impacting workforce dynamics. Sometimes also referred to as the ‘echo boomers’ or ‘millennials’, these are generally children of the boomers, born between 1977 and 2002.[1] Though some are not yet even 30, many already have big visions in terms of what they want to achieve professionally, personally and in terms of world change. Some commentators see the Generation Y mindset pivoting around a sense of entitlement, but we prefer to recognise their ambition that needs to be channelled.
Much attention has been paid to the macro aspects of these demographic shifts, but what can business leaders and their companies do at the micro level? Based on our work with businesses and other organisations, the best place to focus attention is on that fundamental intergenerational building block, joint working between the boomers (and older generations) and those coming up behind.
Just as an older Batman had a younger Robin as his side-kick, dynamic duos bridge the generations but with the significant difference that instead of the learning being largely one-way, it now works powerfully in multiple directions. And instead of operating as an adult/child dynamic, these are very much adult/adult. Baby boomers need to recognise the limits of their own abilities when it comes to some of the challenges that require creative ‘out of the box’ solutions – and that the Generation Y group can be valuable collaborators. Similarly, Generation Y needs to see a clear incentive for working with baby boomers – such as an ability to help pave a clear pathway to achieving project goals with investment of their skills, social capital and pathways to funding sources.
Dynamic duos go beyond mentoring
Organisations have long used techniques like apprenticeships, buddying and junior partnerships to bridge between the generations. More recently there has been growing interest in mentoring, which has often worked top-down, with the senior partner cascading knowledge and experience to the junior. But as the need for energetic, effective intrapreneurship grows and as the appetite for younger people to get involved is further stimulated, so the need for more sophisticated intergenerational exchanges and partnership will intensify. As a result, expect to see intergenerational issues surfacing increasingly at C-suite level. Be clear: we are not calling for a new breed of chief generational officers, but the new market dynamics mean that the management and development of intergenerational capital is going to be a core competence for growing numbers of businesses.
At their best, dynamic duos are a 21st century adaptation of mentorship focusing on mutual respect, multi-way transfer of insights and new skills, on action and, critically, on deliverables – in crucial new areas like social innovation and sustainability. In the process, senior executives can help by transferring knowledge, skills and personal contacts, while ensuring that institutional memory is retained. They can help younger generation managers, eager to assume greater responsibility, find effective ways of translating their ambition into realistic and relevant action.
Instead of the negativity of ‘dead men’s shoes,’ this dynamic partnering could go a long way to ensuring intergenerational hybrid vigor, spurring much-needed creativity. This will require new language to describe older managers stepping out from executive responsibility and becoming effectively non-executive advisers and counsellors. These people potentially can become the ‘go-to’ wise counsellors in their organisations, sought out for their insights, connections and ability to anticipate and neutralise the constraints typically created by the organisational culture. A key challenge will be to ensure that such senior staff are not seen to have been shunted aside – but, instead, are celebrated for willingly assuming valuable new roles.
Tomorrow’s talent
While it would be eminently possible to pluck out the Magic five, seven or 10 ingredients of dynamic duos, it is clear that success requires not only the right people and the right internal support, but the right timing, the right external networks and, something that is much harder to quantify, an ability to spot and exploit that critical business success factor, serendipity. As a conversation starter, a few do’s and don’ts are suggested below.
Do's
- Design in a degree of creative tension – friction maketh the pearl.
- Take an experimental approach to the use of dynamic duos in relation to such areas as social innovation and sustainability.
- Launch pilot projects to promote greater interaction and joint working between the generations.
- Ensure the right combination of top-down and bottom-up dynamics.
- Consider matchmaking processes driven by younger people, rather than – as is more typical – by their seniors.
- Build in candid feedback processes.
- Monitor progress, pooling experience on how to identify and overcome both internal and external barriers.
- Consider creating an internal website or Facebook site to link those interested in social innovation and sustainability and promote sharing, testing and refining of their ideas.
- Be patient: true social innovations take time to evolve and embed.
Don'ts
- Don’t delay.
- Don’t overlook the huge potential for dynamic duos and similar partnerships to ensure the persistence of the best of your corporate culture – and evolve it for new market conditions.
- Don’t forget personal chemistry – the best dynamic duos survive and thrive because the partners create the human equivalent of hybrid vigor.
- Don’t focus solely on the internal agenda – build dynamic duos that bridge with external organisations and agendas.
- Don’t view such initiatives as corporate citizenship – explore the possibility of using them to investigate and map out future market opportunities.
- Don’t forget that even the best dynamic duos will have a shelf-life.
- Don’t obsess with duos when trios, quartets or septets may be the way to go.
Business leaders tend to operate top down, whereas the intrinsic nature of the dynamic duo approach is a hybrid of top-down and bottom-up, and, critically, of inside-out and outside-in. Be experimental. Serendipity often flows from mixing it up and from having everyone move beyond their old comfort zones. By creating the conditions in which such internal partnerships form and develop, companies and other organisations can then move on to promote the evolution of the necessary networks that connect change agents both internally and externally.
For those aiming to catalyse a growing number of dynamic duos to drive change, it is crucial when developing ‘matches’ to understand the importance of personal and organisational chemistry. There may even be something to learn from the models of the best dating agencies —to liven things up, consider have the process driven by younger people. As in so many other areas of human relations, it is crucial to set clear expectations at the beginning of the process, creating a culture of frequent, candid feedback. Never an easy challenge, but potentially even more challenging when you are dealing with Generation Y.
Finally, something of a public health warning. Dynamic Duos are no sort of panacea for the demographic and related challenges our societies and economies will face in the coming decades. Over time, however, they could have a profound catalytic impact on business mindsets, behaviors, cultures and paradigms. In the process, they could shape the new forms of intergenerational contract that will be increasingly center-stage as we mark and move beyond the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Brundtland Commission report Our Common Future in 2012, which first introduced the concepts of sustainability and intergenerational equity into the political and market mainstreams.
[1] www.usatoday.com/money/workplace/2005-11-06-gen-y_x.htm