When I'm 64
Points covered
1 Ageism destroys irreplaceable organisational knowledge, the tacit wisdom no onboarding process can replace
2 The community pays a price, too; social capital, mentorship, and identity erode when experienced people are pushed out
3 The mental and physical toll on those excluded, what happens when purpose, identity, and belonging are taken without cause
This might sound like a pitch for Peter and me and a promotional shtick for Combined Arms Consultancy, and in a way it is. But reflecting on what we bring to the table with over 80 years combined experience in a range of disciplines and fields, the life experiences cannot be learnt from a book or a degree, although it can be said that between us, Combined Arms Consultancy have more degrees than a thermometer.
What does this actually mean?
Mark Twain said history does not repeat; it rhymes. Many observers see these observations through the lens of geopolitics, as it should be, but why not consider it as a platform for the corporate world?
Many of the challenges that we face in business, financial pressures, recruitment, culture, and supply chain are not new; they have happened many times before and will undoubtedly repeat themselves in the future.
So why alienate and ignore people who have lived through these challenges in the past and call upon their experiences? It does not make sense.
How useful would it be to have within your team someone who had seen the cycle before, who knew why the third quarter always went sideways, which client needed a phone call rather than an email, and which internal battle wasn't worth fighting? An individual who has made mistakes you are about to make and has learnt from them.
The unfortunate reality is that these individuals are, in all likelihood, no longer with you, especially if they have hit that dreaded age limit.
It's interesting, Bill Maher, the exceptional American satirist, has stated many times that the only acceptable prejudice left is against the people of a certain age. Imagine if you got rid of people who are black, Asian, gay, just because they are black, Asian or gay. It would not be acceptable.
So why not see someone who is in their 60’s in the same light?
It is funny that the retirement age, 65, was instituted in the early part of the 20th century, largely because people died generally before they reached 70. Also, the work that most people did then was physical, and with age, the body degrades, so physical labour becomes that much more problematic.
So now review your teams, there are many people over 65+, not including the owners, of course. There's a reasonable chance they're gone. Made redundant. Eased out. Offered a package they couldn't refuse. Replaced by someone cheaper, younger, and — let's be clear — someone who doesn't know what they don't know yet.
That is ageism at work. And it is costing us far more than we realise.
The knowledge you cannot write down, and let's not forget the culture that is lost with their departure and the IP that they take with them. Why would an organisation do that? I do not get it.
Every organisation has two types of knowledge. The first kind lives in files: policies, procedures, reports, and strategy documents. You can store it. Back it up. Hand it to a new hire on their first day.
The second kind lives in people. It doesn't have a folder. It has no filename. It is the accumulated weight of thirty years of pattern recognition. It is known that this supplier will bend if you push, but only once. That this kind of customer complaint always precedes a bigger issue. That was the last time we tried this approach; it unravelled quietly over eighteen months, not all at once.
This is what the academics call tacit knowledge. I call it wisdom. And wisdom cannot be documented, no matter how good your knowledge management system is. It is not on the balance sheet.
When a senior employee walks out the door — not by choice, but because someone looked at their age and made a decision — that wisdom leaves with them. Permanently.
The new hire who replaces them, we hope, will be capable, but that is not always the case. It is a gamble. In my experience at the university, businesses can spend months rewiring graduates from a university mindset to a business and culturally aligned mindset. Universities do not get people ready to enter the workforce; they just, hopefully, give them the academic grounding that can be adapted.
And even then, they will spend the first three years making decisions without context. They will repeat mistakes that didn't need repeating. They will misread situations that an experienced eye would have caught immediately.
And nobody will connect the dots. Because the person who could have connected them is gone.
And there is an elephant in the room, AI. Many of the white colour positions are under threat, but at the moment, at least AI is not wise, is not intuitive and does not have your unique experience base that an older person has, critical variables in making the right decision, so why the bloody hell would you get rid of that resource?
This is the conundrum at the heart of modern business
We live in an era of obsessive knowledge management. Organisations spend millions on systems designed to capture, organise, and protect their intellectual assets. We have intranets, wikis, CRMs, and databases. We talk endlessly about institutional memory.
And then we systematically discard the people who carry the most of it.
Think about that for a moment. The person with thirty-five years in your industry. The one who has been through two recessions, a market disruption, a company restructure, and a global pandemic. The one who has built relationships that took a decade to earn. We call their knowledge an asset when they're in the room. We call them a cost centre when they turn fifty-five.
But there is also an often-not-discussed outcome, not a business outcome, but a societal one.
The biggest medical challenge that the Western world is now facing is not obesity or cancer; it is isolation. That's funny if you think about it, as in no time in history have we been more connected through social media.
Generally, the discourse focuses on the young, but what about the over 60’s, you know, the people that corporations dispose of.
The two greatest factors in suicide are lack of connection and lack of purpose, so why discard someone just because they are older than you?
The research on this is sobering. The World Health Organisation identifies ageism as a significant driver of poor mental and physical health outcomes in older populations. Studies consistently link forced early workforce exit to elevated rates of depression, cognitive decline, social isolation, and reduced life expectancy. One meta-analysis found that ageism is associated with a 7.5% reduction in life expectancy among those who internalise negative perceptions of their own ageing.
This is not a small thing. We are talking about people dying sooner. Not because of illness. Because their sense of purpose was taken from them.
The link between purposeful engagement and health is not theoretical. It is well-documented. Meaning matters physiologically. When people lose the structure, the identity, and the sense of contribution that work provides, particularly when they lose it through exclusion rather than choice, the consequences are real and lasting.
Indignity is a particular kind of wound that is never seen until it is reflected upon at their eulogy. These are people who once shaped strategy. Who navigated crises. Who built teams from scratch and held them together through difficult years. To be rendered suddenly irrelevant not by what you did, but simply by how old you are, is a specific kind of diminishment. It does not heal quickly. And for many, it does not heal at all.
There is an irony here.
As stated at the outset of this piece, the retirement age, created over 120 years ago, was based on a physical working environment, where your physical shape directly impact on your working capacity.
Now work generally is intellectual, cerebral and service-based, where your physical capabilities, though important, are not the defining factor. It is your brain and experiences that matter. And short of a cognitive decline at 60, that organ is as effective as ever. But you know what research indicates that a male brain does not fully evolve until their mid-20’s, and that is the brain leadership is prioritising over experience.
This is not a universal model; however, it is more of a Western one. In the East, age is venerated, it is respected, and it is listened to; in the West, it is all about youth and looks. I wonder if this is a factor in the rise of the Asian tigers, just a thought to ponder.
As I finished this article, I could not stop reflecting on the Beatles' hit ‘When I’m 64’. At the time, I though how old is that, now that I am past that age, I realise it is not that old after all.
Is this conversation worth pursuing for your enterprise? Please reach out
Asking questions never asked, Combined Arms Consulting