Personalizing the conversation: why age matters
Feb 20th, 2009 by David Svet
Everybody gathers age data, partly because it’s a relatively easy piece of information to get. Most people will tell you how old they are - or at least what age range they fall into. But many businesses and organizations don’t really do much with the information once they have it - or they use it in very basic ways based on assumptions about chronological age.
But if you think about it, someone who turns 60 doesn’t suddenly have a different worldview than they did at 50 - or at 40. In fact, most 60-year-olds will tell you that inside, they still feel like they did when they were 25. They may be older and wiser - experience does count for something - but they are not fundamentally different just because they are getting older.
But if people don’t really change as they get older, does age really matter?
It does if you try looking at age in a different way. In The Fourth Turning, William Strauss and Neil Howe make a convincing argument that there are four generations, based on the idea that a “natural century” - called a saeculum - encompasses a span of 80 to 125 years, or a very long human lifetime. Each saeculum is composed of four seasons, or four generations.
And here’s an important point: there are ONLY four generations. Ever. We may call them different things, but the four generations repeat themselves over the course of every natural century. According to Srauss and Howe, the four generations alive during any cycle of history are Hero, Artist, Prophet, and Nomad. Most of us know them by the names we currently use: the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, and Gen-X.
What about so-called “millenials”? They are just like their great-grandparents - the Greatest Generation! Yes, they are the same as the folks whose life influences were the Great Depression and fighting WWII. You can imagine what that means for the current state of the economy and world affairs, but we’ll save that for another blog post.
So, each generation has unique attributes based on its sequence in the saeculum. Each generation repeats the same attributes every saeculum. By considering age from this perspective, you start to see that people are always part of the same generation, regardless of how old they are. They have values and expectations linked to their generation’s experience of the world. They see the future based on their shared experience of the past. In many ways, age doesn’t indicate how people have changed - it tells you how they’ve stayed the same.
Yes, the fact that someone is old enough to be a parent - or a grandparent - can help you talk to them in meaningful ways. And someone in their 20s generally has different priorities than someone nearing retirement. A chronological view of age does have value for helping you communicate with your constituents. But you should also think about gathering and using age data in a different way.
What would happen if you framed information and started conversations based on what age tells you about a person’s worldview, not how many candles are on their cake?
