Employers Can Better Compete by Investing in the 50+ Workforce
By: Michael Netzley
Tags: Longevity, Talent, Cryptocurrency, Brain, ICO

Employers Can Better Compete by Investing in the 50+ Workforce

Extend My Runway (EMR) “turns silver into gold.” We support longer lives and careers via Asia’s first data-driven platform for improving brain performance. EMR combines neuroscience with Ai to deliver a personalised, scalable, and blockchain-secured brain performance solution. By joining our ICO, utility token holders become amongst the first to build a better brain. Michael Netzley, Ph.D. Follow Dec 9, 2020 · 6 min read

The future is already here…It’s just distributed unevenly. - William Gibson

Take a moment and answer this before reading on — at what age do/did you experience your PEAK mental performance? It’s that moment when your brain is at its very best. Age 18? 28? 38?

If you are like most people I ask, then very few of you selected an age in your 50s or 60s. And that is where you could be wrong. There is no one age when the brain PEAKs at all its mental functions. Instead, brain performance is unevenly distributed much like the future described in our opening quote. Different mental abilities PEAK at different points across your lifespan.

Learn the Surprising Behind PEAK brain performance and age.

People are living longer with more healthy years in the middle. This means that employers and employees both may be missing out — leaving value on the table — with current talent and performance management approaches that overlook PEAK mental abilities.

This is especially critical for knowledge work.

The Science of PEAK Performance May Surprise You

For now, let me just summarise the neuroscience (watch for a follow-up blog post explaining this in detail) by saying that in general your brain PEAKs at:

managing complexity from 45–55

innovative cognition (yes, innovation) in 50s

strategic focus at around 60

integrated reasoning (your platinum cognitive ability) in early 60s.

To understand why PEAK mental performance matters, ask yourself this. Would your business benefit from employees who, during the course of the day, deliver PEAK ability to focus on what matters most, think innovatively, integrate diverse forms of thinking into work or decision processes, and better manage the increased complexity of today?

I am willing to bet most of you answer “yes.” Unfortunately, many businesses do not yet benefit from the full range of PEAK mental abilities. Instead, we leave value on the table by subscribing to people and talent practices that overlook the new demographic reality of living and working longer.

So what needs to change?

Here are two key ways we can adjust our thinking.

We Currently Favour Physical Health over Brain Health

Today, people need both a healthy body and brain. During the early 20th century huge portions of the population earned a living with a strong back. It was physical labor and lives were shorter. Today, more people earn a living with their brain. It’s knowledge work and lives are longer.

Through improvements in medical care, nutrition, employment conditions, pharmacology, lifestyle and more we are now in the 21st century benefiting from increased longevity.

“The greatest gift of the 20th century was the addition of 30 years of longevity.”

- Prof. Gary Becker, Nobel Laureate

Increased longevity means that employers are for the first time seeing employees who are exhibiting PEAK mental performance in their 50s and 60s. Unfortunately, the old narrative and assumptions about age mean that we can all too often conveniently overlook these PEAK abilities (and the science), stop investing in people 50+ who possess so many business-critical abilities, or worst case move people 50+ toward the door.

Having looked at the science, we believe deeply this is a mistake. Think about the consequences of not making these proactive investments. If we wait until there are irrefutable signs of age-related cognitive decline, then there is no getting back the business-critical thinking capabilities.

There is no restorative fountain of youth when it comes to our brain. Our investments need to be proactive if businesses and employees are to benefit.

“We don’t wait until we have a mouth full of cavities before we pay attention to our dental hygiene and start brushing our teeth every day. But that’s exactly what many of us are doing when it comes to our brain health.” - Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience

We Currently favour Memory Over Higher-Order Thinking

One primary frame for thinking about the brain overemphasises memory and under-appreciates many other important cognitive abilities.

At a certain level it makes sense. “Where did I park the car? What was that person’s name? Dang, we had a meeting?” Such experiences are very noticeable when they start to happen and it’s only human that we place great value on what appears to be declining or being lost. At times it seems this is all we talk about when it comes to the brain.

But as mentioned above there are PEAK and business-critical abilities that occur later in life. As one door slowly begins to close, other doors begin to open. These opening doors, which we currently under-appreciate, open up to better ability to manage complexity, innovation, strategic focus and integrated reasoning to name a few.

The impact of this oversight is perhaps nowhere more forcefully highlighted than the Pro Publica report revealing that when people involuntarily lose their job at age 50 or after, 90% do not recover their earning power. One could look at the data and conclude that employers like cheaper and younger employees whose strengths include memory and processing speed.

Ask any ageing expert and they will reply, “Isn’t it obvious?”

But there is more to knowledge work than simply remembering a lot of stuff processing it all very quickly. Mother nature knows this, I believe, and hence the doors to more important higher-order cognitive skills open later in life. Mother Nature does this by design. The doors opening to PEAK cognitive ability later in life have name plates that say managing complexity, innovation, strategic focus and integrated reasoning.

The question before us is not young versus old. This is not and never will be, for me, a game of age politics. Instead, it’s about helping companies and employees learn to integrate the entire spread of higher-order thinking abilities so that:

companies are better able to compete

employees retain autonomy and work how they want for as long as they want

governments having more “space” to deal with significant demographic change, the cost of public programmes, and so on.

Everyone is better off if we pursue the opportunities now being revealed by demographic change and science. The older workforce is a talent windfall.

The Opportunity (or Challenge) is Only Growing

The magnitude of this missed opportunity is rapidly growing.

By 2050, “1 in 6 people in the world will be over the age of 65 (16%), up from 1 in 11 in 2019 (9%)” according to the United Nations report, World Population Prospects 2019 .

. According to the World Economic Forum, “Global projections for 2050 are mind-boggling: 1.6 billion people aged 65 and over and a $400 trillion retirement savings gap. That means a $250,000 shortfall for the average retiree, who will struggle to pay for basic expenses such as housing, food, and healthcare.”

People are not prepared for retirement. Stanford’s Douglas Bernheim, in a U.S. study supported by Merrill Lynch, concluded that baby boomers are saving approximately one-third of what they need to maintain preretirement living standards during retirement. The same pattern generally holds around the globe. Singapore data also reveals this same trend.

Act now, and these changes can become an asset; wait, and these changes become a challenge. We need to act now, but also act wisely.

Reskilling Alone Will Not Be Enough

Reskilling with in-person or online courses isn’t scalable enough to address the size of this issue, and does precious little to address the brain performance side of the equation. Instead, I would assert these classes treat the 55 or 65 year old as if they were still 32 — here is a bunch of knowledge we want to push at you, so that you hear it from us, and so that you know and remember.

That’s mostly memory, not the higher-order thinking that we need in a knowledge economy.

To meet future needs we all need to better understand longevity, the evolving nature of brain performance, and how to proactively protect, develop, and leverage higher-order thinking.

Everyone wins if we do.

On December 18–23, we at Extend My Runway are launching the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and you can join us. In addition to a wonderful opportunity of tapping into a growing and severely underserved longevity market (Make no mistake: This is and will be a global growth industry for decades to come), you help us in our mission to build better brains for business and extend professional careers for people over age 50.