The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles: The ‘smarts’ of the older worker
The Misconception
Welcome to our EncourAGEEQUALITY quiz. What do instant noodles, bifocal glasses, the Victa lawnmower, KFC and Roget’s Thesaurus all have in common? The people who invented them are all classified as ‘old’ by todays standards. Momofuku Ando invented the instant noodle in his late 40s. Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals at 74. Mervyn Richardson invented the Victa lawnmower at 59. Colonel Sanders introduced Kentucky Fried Chicken to the world in his 60s and Peter Roget created Roget’s Thesaurus at age 73. Also, let’s not forget M/s Barbara Knickerbocker-Beskind who became at 91 years of age the oldest conceptual designer employed in Silicon Valley.
These stories are important because they fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that the older we become the more our cognitive capacities decline until we are reduced to doddering old fools living in a twilight world of forgetfulness and lost agency. Not only is this view of older people patronising but also erroneous. Let’s set the record straight.
Debunking the Misconception
Neuroscience research keeps revealing that our brains experience ongoing physical change as we grow older. Fortunately, this research is moving away from the dismal characterisation of ageing as an inevitable process of brain damage and decline. Intelligence is more than just an IQ score and our cognitive capabilities are instead reflecting complex neural interactions characterised by reorganisation, optimisation and enduring functional plasticity that can enable the maintenance of ongoing worker productivity.
· A 2015 meta-analytic study of cognitive tests taken by people of all ages found that four types of proficiencies didn’t fully ripen until people were in their 50s: vocabulary, maths, general knowledge and comprehension.
· A 2002 academic study found that older adults were as efficient as younger adults in terms of cognitive processing of complex information. Other academics have found no differences between the performance of older and younger adults when completing a problem-solving task.
A recent book by the Yale Professor Dr Becca Levy ‘Breaking the Age Code’ confirms a number of types of cognition improve in later life, among them metacognition or thinking about thinking; taking into account multiple perspectives; solving interpersonal and intergroup conflicts; and semantic memory. Other types of cognition tend to stay the same, such as procedural memory, which includes routine behaviours.
Research does confirm as we age our information processing speed does diminish but this does not mean our overall information processing capability is reduced. The knowledge we have already developed over our life, our work experiences and skills act as powerful resources to offset potential losses in information processing speed and assumed productivity.
· When economists at the Max Planck Institute of Social Law and Social Policy studied the performance of 3800 workers over a four-year period on a Mercedes-Benz assembly line, they found that older workers kept pace with the younger colleagues by committing fewer severe errors.
· A survey of typists aged 19 to 72 found the older typists had slower typing speeds but still finished assignments as quickly as their younger peers. Experience delivers a performance boost.
· A 2013 meta-analysis of 98 studies demonstrated on complex tasks typical of clerical and higher-level occupations, the experience of older workers mitigates effects of reduced information processing speed and performance.
What is known is that older brains are more diversely wired and use many more connections than younger ones, because of the many associations made over the course of our lives. This becomes reflected in the notion of wisdom. Wisdom comes from the accumulated set of things we’ve seen and experienced, our ability to detect patterns in those experiences, and our ability to predict future outcomes based on them. Wisdom offers us the possibility of examining problems and decisions with an increased probability of enriched and better outcomes. Nonetheless, there is an important caveat. Not all older people are wise, and ageing does not automatically assume a development of wisdom. However, the chances of becoming wiser certainly increase with becoming older.
How Such a Misconception Maybe Harming Your Business
Does your business place an emphasis on speed of execution? If so, are you aware of the need for rework because of mistakes, impacts on deadlines or delivery of sub-optimal solutions?
Are your workforces skewed toward a younger demographic? Are you missing an opportunity for improved quality in outcomes?
Gernot Sendowski, head of diversity at Deutsche Bank in Germany, neatly captures the benefit of age-inclusive workforces in his observation that in Deutsche Bank’s experience: ‘In operational work older employees can be slower, but they make up for that with fewer mistakes, so in total they are no less productive. If we had teams with only older people, they’d be too slow; if we had teams with only younger ones, there’d be too many mistakes.’ The bank’s answer is to deploy multigenerational teams.
As Carl Honore observes in his book ‘Bolder’: “There may be some business problems you cannot solve unless you have the deep knowledge and experience of the domain expert – and you’re more likely to have that if you are older and wiser.”
The evidence shows that declines in older worker cognitive capacities are greatly exaggerated. Research is continually helping hit this negative older worker stereotype out of the park.
If the above evidence and questions have encouraged you to reflect on your workplace dynamics, please contact us and let us help you take practical steps to transform your existing workplace into an inclusive age-neutral one that develops your competitive and performance capability.
References
Applewhite, A. (2016). This chair rocks: A manifesto against ageism. Great Britain: Melville House UK
The Economist (2017). “Footloose and Fancy Free: The recently retired may have a promising future as entrepreneurs and giggers” (July 8th)
Farrell, C. (2014). Unretirement: How baby boomers are changing the way we think about work, community and the good life. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Harshorne, J.K., & Germaine, L.T. (2015). When does cognitive functioning peak? The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the life span. Psychological Science 26 (4) 433-443
Honore, C. (2018). Bolder: Making the most of our longer lives. Simon & Schuster. Great Britain.
Kelley, C.P., Soboroff, S.D., & Lovaglia, M.J. (2017) The Status Value of Age. Social Science Research 66, 22-31
Levy, B. (2022) Breaking the age code. Vermillion. London
Levitin, D. (2020) Successful Aging: A neuroscientist explores the power and potential of our lives. Dutton. New York
