Amplify Festival 2015, June 5th - Aging

“Aging is not just about Old people. It is about life changing for all of us,” said Michael Hodin of the Global Coalition for Aging, speaking at Amplify Festival 2015. “It is a change in life course, which over the 21st century, is a huge market trend which is disrupting everything.”

“If you’re going to live to 80, 90 and beyond, everything changes. That extra 30 years or so has a profound impact. These two pillars on health and financial work both on the individual level, and ought to work on the public policy, global and institutional level.”

“Low birth rates are not fully appreciated in most places. Correlating almost perfectly with modernization and urbanization. Country after country is experiencing this culture of low birth rates to the point we are literally depopulating.”

He showed a chart where the Replacement level, the difference left between births and deaths, by 2050 will be nearly the same as the birth level. The global birth trends have been slowing dramatically since 1975. In other words, the world population will be stabilizing if not shrinking. The implications of our current age for retirement is a lot different then when it was originally set by Otto von Bismark when he was uniting the principalities of Germany in the 1880s as the basis of a common social contract with citizens.

Mark Halverson of Accenture’s Wealth Management Practice introduced the panel on ‘Recalibrating social architectures for longer, healthier and more meaningful lives’. Rebecca Wilson, CEO of Starts at 60, shared some interesting statistics. “I started two years ago to see if those over 60 wanted to engage each other. The human rights coalition told me they wouldn’t be.”

Showing a view of a senior care home full of people in their eighties, “That’s what the Today Show overlays describing over 60 year olds. You can’t help but laugh. This is a problem we’ve got. 60 Year olds are young; they’ve vibrant, they have so much to bring.”

Over-60 seniors are healthy; living well; keen to work; wealthier than ever; and tech savvy. “95% say they are in good health. 40% plan to travel overseas in the next year. 70% eat out at least monthly. 40% said they want to stay in the workforce longer. Only 25% have a mortgage. 68% don’t have a financial planner. 61% call themselves well competent on technology. ”

“People that are older, face so much ageism and so many challenges because of their age, and technology can be a way to mediate that to overcome it and harness it for their own interest,” said Tom Kamber of Older Adults Technology Services.

He shared a tale of Madelyn Rich who had come into one their centers while undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, and started learning technology at age 68. After a few lessons, she started creating a web page, Accents by M, to sell handbags that she sews.

At a Digital Entrepreneurship fair, one of the younger people in the audience asked, ‘Do you sew them yourself? Why don’t you pay one of the younger people to do it?’ Madelyn said ‘Well, because I don’t get the same quality. I would rather make less money and express myself through my bags and get the relationship with customer that I wanted.’”

Ken Smith of Stanford’s Center on Longevity. “Somehow over the last 5 years, the landscape of the talk about aging has changed a lot. It is on the front of the New York Times. You’ve seen Google launch Calico as an enterprise on aging.”

“We still are having an Industrial Age response. We still think of aging as older people as a separate group, not us. In a not scientific research, I looked at AngelList, a site for startups. On startups on aging, 120 out of the 135 were either about caregiving or about healthcare. That left the remaining 15 that were actually targeted at the older individuals themselves. Our response is in the Industrial Age paradigm is on how do we care for them, and how do we scale that.”

Quoting Atul Gawande’s book, Being Mortal: “Safety is what we want for those we love. And autonomy is what we want for ourselves. I think what we see are the safety responses, not the autonomy responses. And so I think if we are looking to move to that post-Industrial Age, we need to be talking about inclusion of older people, understanding what they know. Instead of what can we do for them, ‘What makes a good day?’ What are the aspirations of someday at age 80.”

Ruth Finkelstein of the University of Columbia’s Aging Center introduced the paradigms of how we can reframe our environments and concerns around aging.

“The first point is that I want us to think about aging not only in terms of income and health, even though it is enormously critical. It is necessary but not sufficient. Number two, we are going to be approaching aging from a life course perspective, which means to think about aging when we are old, the cat is already out of the bag. It’s too late. Thirdly, I want to talk about the relationship between successful aging and the environment. Lastly, I want to talk about strategies for changing workplaces. How do we achieve that from our perspectives as employers?”

Ms. Finkelstein said, “One dose of education at you get in the first 20 years of your life simply couldn’t be adequate for the next 90 years. It’s preposterous on its face. Furthermore that we are not going to engage young people in work or a whole lot of pay is also a mistake for the young, and for the middle and for the old.”

“We don’t even slack in our pace of work to care for our families or our parents, or if we do, we do it under enormous pressure. Wouldn’t it be helpful if we had the help of the younger and the older generation at the time? What I’m talking is the relationship between all these things. ”

“The data about the effect of a 30year vacation [after 60] is shockingly clear. None of us have the resources to amuse ourselves fully and sufficiently for thirty years with no framework, and no structure. It might be better had the earlier part of our lives had been more diversified and we had more resources. You go from this time when you know what to do, to a time when that is not available to you and you are defined by its absence. Not surprisingly, you go into an emotional decline, a physical decline and a cognitive decline.”

See all the days at Amplify Festival:

• June 1st - Innovation management (Dr. Norman Lewis, PwC), Video surveys (Matthew Barnett, Verbate)
• June 2nd - Futurism (Stuart Candy, U of Toronto), Healthcare Design (Lorna Ross, Mayo Clinic), Bitcoin (Jon Matonis) 
• June 3rd -  Ecosystems (John Hagel, Deloitte), Company Transformation (Sanjay Purohit, Infosys), and Strategy Planning (Simon Wardley, LEF)
• June 4th - Innovating Publishing (Paul Cameron, Booktrack), Education (Heather McGowan), Long-term Innovation (James Moody, Sendle)
• June 5th - Aging (Michael Hodin, Ruth Finkelstein, Ken Smith, Mark Halverson)

Rawn Shah is a Director & Social Business Architect with Rising edge, an independent consultancy focused on work culture, collaboration, and the future of work. He is also Partner at Ethos VO, Ltd., the innovation networked organisation in the UK. He is based in Tucson, Arizona, USA, and can be reached on Twitter, or LinkedIn.