Below, Dan Pontefract shares five key insights from his new book, The Future of Work Is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce.
Dan is a six-time award-winning author and a leadership and corporate culture strategist. He has spent over 20 years in senior leadership roles at TELUS, SAP, and BCIT, serving as a chief learning officer and chief envisioner. In 2018, he founded his own firm, the Pontefract Group, to help leaders and organizations improve leadership and corporate culture.
What’s the big idea?
Organizations are overlooking a major, unavoidable shift—the aging workforce—and those that learn to value and integrate people of all ages will outperform those that ignore it.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Dan himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. Demographics don’t care about your organization’s strategy.
According to the World Economic Forum, workers aged 55 and older will make up more than 25 percent of the G7 workforce by 2031. That’s roughly a 10-point jump from 2011. And between you and me, I think the forum is underselling the number. My money says it will be higher.
Here’s what nags at me. Every boardroom, leadership room, and workshop I’ve sat in over the last few years has been obsessed with two topics: artificial intelligence and cost control. Remarkably, neither conversation has included the one demographic fact already reshaping the labor market: the workforce is greying, and it’s happening fast. Organizations are bracing for a robot revolution while quietly ignoring (or not even knowing about) the humans that are about to reshape them. Demographic reality is the one trend you cannot disrupt, downsize, or delay.
Older workers are not optional. They are the scaffolding holding up skills transfer, institutional memory, and cultural continuity across every workplace on the planet. You cannot and will not automate your way out of a people problem. The future of work will be grey.
2. Meet the rivers, rocks, and rubies.
While writing this book, I kept bumping into the same clumsy intergenerational dance. Younger workers were dismissed as naive. Older workers were dismissed as obsolete. And the folks in the middle were catching friendly fire from both directions as part of the sandwich generation in the workplace. So, I thought a metaphor might make more sense, particularly given how unhelpful it is to classify workers by generations in the workplace:
- Rivers are your early-career employees. They move fast, change course often, and make some mistakes, but they carry the kind of energy your organization desperately needs—what psychologists call fluid intelligence.
- Rocks are your mid-career professionals. They are the load-bearing walls of the organization. They are steady, thoughtful, and quietly carrying execution on their backs.
- Rubies are your seasoned employees, full of what psychologists call crystallized intelligence. They hold institutional memory, hard-earned judgment, and a phone book of relationships worth more than any CRM.
Most organizations get policy design wrong. They build programs, perks, and promotions for one cohort at a time, as though rivers, rocks, and rubies exist on separate floors breathing different air. Well, they don’t. A healthy organization looks like a riverbed. Rivers flowing over rocks, polishing rubies, shaping one another by proximity.
When you treat a ruby as an expense to be managed rather than an asset to be mined, you lose a library disguised as an employee. When you treat a river as an intern instead of a colleague, you lose the one question that would’ve exposed your outdated assumptions. And when your rocks burn out from mediating between rivers and rubies, while also tending to young kids and older parents outside of work, then you have lost the plot.
The age crisis is real. The generational labels we keep using are not. Stop sorting people by decade of birth and start paying attention to the riverbed.
3. Ageism cuts both ways.
At 27 years old, I walked into a university faculty washroom during my first week on a new job. An older gentleman at the sink looked me up and down and said, “What are you doing here?” I held up my lanyard. “I work here,” I replied, with a face somewhere between puzzled and iridescent. He dried his hands and said, “Interesting. I didn’t know we were hiring such young people these days.” What a shame. I said nothing and went to my meeting, but the comment obviously still lingers because I’m telling the story a quarter of a century later.
Ageism does not only point in one direction. We discriminate against the grey and we discriminate against the green. In 2007, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook told an audience at Stanford, with a perfectly straight face, that “young people are just smarter.” One year later, he hired Sheryl Sandberg, 15 years his senior, to help him run the company. Or how about 2019, when the “Okay boomer” meme started trending? It did nothing to help the cause. It just added a digital raspberry to a stale conversation.
“Age-biased workplaces lose more talent, innovate less, and collapse faster under demographic pressure than organizations that treat age as neutral or even positive.”
Every major study and research paper on the subject tells the same story. Age-biased workplaces lose more talent, innovate less, and collapse faster under demographic pressure than organizations that treat age as neutral or even positive. And yet, I would wager that every listener right now has witnessed an age-coded remark this year about a junior colleague, a senior colleague, or a middle-aged professional trying to keep it together—or themselves. Ageism is rampant. It may also be the last of the isms we are willing to admit to.
4. Mentorship is multidirectional.
The year was 2009. The Black Eyed Peas were crushing it with their song “I Gotta Feeling.” I was 38 years old. I was mid-career at TELUS as the chief learning officer, overseeing leadership development and corporate culture. That year, I discovered a cluster of so-called older employees quietly producing some of the most useful internal learning content for the organization. They were using video cameras and our in-house habitat video system, which was kind of like YouTube. No prompt, no playbook. These people were just all about purpose. I’d be lying if I said I had proactively considered it because I hadn’t. I was supposed to be guiding the organization, but it turned out they were teaching me.
The real lesson is not who teaches whom. It is that knowledge transfer in the modern organization runs like a roundabout, not a one-way escalator. Every era holds a lane. Rubies carry judgment and networks. Rocks carry execution and memory. Rivers carry fresh eyes and new concepts, and they may break stuff, but that’s okay because we’re all learning. When you build your organization around a single direction of mentorship, you’re going to break three out of every four knowledge flows available to you.
The most intergenerationally healthy organizations I studied did something beautifully boring. They intentionally paired people across age groups. A 24-year-old would coach a 56-year-old on AI tools, and a 56-year-old would coach the 24-year-old on customer empathy and how to recover from a bad boss. Flatten your org chart by age, and you will create a fabulous culture. You may be surprised by who the real students are, too.
5. From grey to gold.
A few years ago, I sat down with one of my mentors, Roger L. Martin, one of the finest management thinkers alive and the former Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. We were stress testing the argument of this book. He listened, he nodded, and then he said something I have not been able to shake. He said, “Organizations recognize the aging workforce challenge. They see it clearly, Dan, yet they lack the tools to meaningfully respond. It’s like the drunk searching for keys under the streetlight, because that’s where the light is, even if the keys aren’t there.” I took that from Roger as a challenge. There is a path for leaders who know the demographics are shifting and who want to stop fumbling in the dark.
“Organizations that treat age as a strategic advantage, rather than a scheduling headache or worse, nothing at all, will outperform their peers.”
The age crisis is not a problem to be solved once and shelved. It is a standing commitment, renewed daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and visible in how you hire, develop, compensate, and, importantly, how you shape the culture that holds it all together. Here is the promise hiding inside the age crisis: Organizations that treat age as a strategic advantage, rather than a scheduling headache or worse, nothing at all, will outperform their peers on retention, innovation, engagement, and trust. Teams that deliberately mix their rivers, rocks, and rubies will make better decisions, probably faster. Countries that invest in older workers will build more productive, stable, and prepared economies. The firm that stops exacerbating age debt and starts shifting toward inculcating the experience dividend will be the firm that future proofs itself.
In sum, the future of work is grey. It is inevitable. It’s happening. But when organizations and leaders, and maybe you, agree to treat the grey as a golden opportunity, that age debt will become a handsome experience dividend.
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