Professional sport provides perhaps the most visceral example of career transitions in modern society, as the athletic potential of performers is usually limited to perhaps a decade, after which their physical strength wanes and they’re no longer able to maintain their competitiveness.

There have been numerous examples of athletes struggling to come to terms with this transition, whether due to the changes in routine, changes in their income, or changes in the status and adulation they enjoy.  Physical transitions such as these are visible and in your face, but Harvard’s Arthur Brooks believes that similar transitions are likely to befall us all during our careers.

Past our peak

In From Strength to Strength, he argues that there are two distinct forms of intelligence within us all.  Fluid intelligence, which is perhaps what most of us associate with the word “intelligence”, covers our ability to solve problems, think flexibly, and to reason.

The second form of intelligence is crystallized intelligence, which covers our ability to form insights based upon the stock of experiences and knowledge we’ve built up during our lifetime.

Brooks believes that these two forms of intelligence peak at very different points in our life.  For instance, we tend to have the highest levels of fluid intelligence when we’re young, with crystallized intelligence then peaking when we’re much older.

Indeed, the crystallized intelligence that we so strongly associate with raw smarts tends to peak around our thirties and forties, and so it’s quite possible that we all go through a mental transition just as profound as the physical transition that professional athletes go through.

Changing tack

The problem is that few of us realize that such a transition in our capabilities is taking place, and so we fail to appreciate that what helped us to achieve success in our younger years is unlikely to help us achieve success in later years when our abilities change.

“If you have experienced professional success in the early part of your career, and your job involved new ideas or solving hard problems, you have fluid intelligence to thank for it,” Brooks writes.

As this form of intelligence declines, doing what we did when we were young is unlikely to be enough, and Brooks highlights the challenges this can present, especially if, like the professional athlete, we have grown used to success and attached to our way of achieving it.  Continuing to strive along those same lines is unlikely to deliver the results we so crave.

Whereas the need to transition is evident from the very beginning of a professional athlete’s career, however, Brooks believes that knowledge workers are largely oblivious to this need.  He argues that business schools and similar educational establishments instead promote an endless stream of hard work and for our ambitions and intelligence to follow a consistent, linear path.  This can create both an ignorance of the importance of our transition to a focus on crystallized intelligence and especially of how we might make the shift.

New skills

Perhaps the first step in adapting to these changes is to view them in a positive light.  It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our declining capability is overwhelmingly negative.  This can be especially so if we placed great pride in our successes and status during our career.  If what got us where we are is no longer enough it can result in a hit to our esteem.

Brooks reminds us, however, that the crystalized intelligence curve can open up a whole host of new avenues to explore.  For instance, he cites a number of professions where the ability to join dots together can be hugely valuable, such as historians, teachers, and mentors.  Indeed, in 2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything, Mauro Guillen, dean of the Cambridge Judge Business School underlines the importance of this lateral thinking.

“The main message of the book is that you have to engage in lateral thinking because you have to be able to draw connections between things that may seem completely unrelated,” he explains. “Once you dig into them, however, you begin to see how all of the different pieces interact, and you then realize that babies in China are connected to what’s happening in shopping malls in the United States.”

An aging society

As a report from the UK’s Government Office for Science demonstrates, our societies are getting progressively older and so it’s beholden that we get better at aging successfully, both as individuals and as a society.

“As the population ages, so will the UK workforce. The productivity and economic success of the UK will be increasingly tied to that of older workers,” the authors explain. “Enabling people to work for longer will help society to support growing numbers of dependents, while providing individuals with the financial and mental resources needed for increasingly long retirements.”

The report highlights how the proportion of the working age population aged between 50 and the state pension age will grow from an already significant 26% in 2012 to 34% by 2050, which represents a growth of some 5.5 million people. As a result, the economic fortunes of the UK will increasingly be dependent upon this older workforce.

The modern elder

For Airbnb’s Chip Conley, the key is to lean into the concept of the “modern elder”.  In his book Wisdom at Work he outlines a number of benefits that older workers can bring to any organization that demonstrates that aging doesn’t need to be regarded as a sign of decline.

He suggests that the archetypal modern elder exhibits wisdom in a number of key ways:

• Good judgment – the inherent experience of older employees can give them a perspective and ‘environmental mastery’ that can allow them to handle problems more productively.  Bumps in the road are inevitable in any process, so it’s invaluable having people who are not only all too aware of this but who have overcome them in the past.
• Unvarnished insight – experience affords one a clearness of view that can allow an elder to cut through the clutter to focus on what really matters in a situation.  What’s more, because they have been around the block a few times, there is less need to impress or prove themselves, which can lead to greater authenticity.
• Emotional intelligence – Chip says that knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens, and those modern elders are capable of great self-awareness, empathy and have excellent control of both their own and others’ emotions.
• Holistic thinking – the brain naturally loses speed and memory as it ages, but is more able to see holistically.  This ability to ‘recombinate’ from multiple domains has tremendous value in a range of fields, not least in innovation where pattern recognition is key.
• Stewardship – more and more organizations strive to be good corporate citizens, and Chip argues that elders are able to appreciate their small place in the world and put their experience to good use for future generations.  It’s a desire to give rather than take.

We’ve seen platforms emerge, such as Your Encore, to enable organizations to tap into the wisdom of older employees, but whilst these platforms operate on a gig economy style model, Conley argues for a more fundamental reassessment of age in the workplace, and the value ‘elders’ can bring to the way our organizations function.  With most western societies experiencing a tremendous demographic transition towards an older, greyer society, it’s a shift that cannot come soon enough.