I was having a conversation today with the Board of a not-for-profit organization and one of the participants noted that they “needed to have more younger people” on the Board. I asked “Why?”  Her response was that she was at an age (which I judged to be around 60) when she had a lot of commitments, she needed to keep earning money and just didn’t have as much time and energy to give. She went on to say that younger people had more time, less need for money, and lots more energy for the kinds of projects that needed doing.

Now I don’t know who she was thinking about but almost all of the younger people I know are very busy, don’t have enough time and money and little extra energy for other projects. What I find interesting is that the younger people I know think ‘older people’ have lots of time, enough money, and probably have nothing to do except volunteer. In other words, both younger and older people have similar—if not identical issues—and concerns, but think that it is the ‘other’ who does not. This ‘mirroring’ of each other is not surprising insofar as we do this all the time in virtually all of our relationships. Psychologists call it ‘projecting’ our perspective onto others. We see our own limitations, inadequacies and fears in others. Parents and children often see both the best and the worst of themselves in the other all the time. Unfortunately, our fixation on the negatives accounts for a lot of the problems we experience in our relationships.

If we could see the ‘other’—whether in a family or a Board meeting—as an opportunity to communicate and deal with whatever we think is missing in ourselves or our situation, we might discover that it is our limitations and our differences offer us the biggest opportunities to learn and grow.  

I think that a diversity of age is a good thing in any organization—not because one or the other of us has more time, money or energy—but because we bring to the conversation a different worldview. We are different observers.

No one today knows what the future will be and the rate of change is making even the most sophisticated forecasting tools obsolete. Twenty-five years ago, “futurists” were suggesting that predictions could become a science. Today the field has all but disappeared and their scenarios are no more compelling than a good science-fiction novel.  

Older people do not have the answer for what the younger generations need. Most of us have no idea of how we would deal with the world of our children. By the same token, our children are desperate for something, anything that will help them to deal with a world of permanent uncertainty—which is also a world of infinite possibility. We need their vision and they need our experience. If we can develop ways of bringing our differences to the table rather than just being mirrors of each other, then perhaps together we can create a future worth having—a world that works for all ages.