Latest / The Innovation Show / Why Transitions Are Harder Than We Expect | Teresa Amabile on Reinvention & Life Phases

Transcript

Why Transitions Are Harder Than We Expect | Teresa Amabile on Reinvention & Life Phases · The Innovation Show

• 0:00
  Welcome to a very special episode and series for the Innovation Show here
• 0:04
  in Harvard Business School in HBS Publishing in Klarman Hall in Boston.
• 0:11
  We're gonna start with something a little bit different.
• 0:13
  The question to you is, do you ever prepare properly for the future?
• 0:18
  Even though you know it's coming for you, and this is not death.
• 0:21
  This is something entirely different that will happen to us all, but very
• 0:25
  few of us actually engage with that.
• 0:27
  And we are here with a very special guest from the Innovation Show.
• 0:31
  She's been on the show before.
• 0:32
  It's great to have her on the show again in person this time.
• 0:35
  For the first time ever.
• 0:37
  Theresa Am Abate, welcome to the show.
• 0:39
  Thank you, Aiden.
• 0:40
  I'm so happy to be talking with you again.
• 0:42
  It's great to be with you.
• 0:43
  I, I didn't tell you this the last day, 'cause you, I had this on my
• 0:46
  table here in front of me and I have a little practice on the innovation
• 0:49
  show of wearing a pin that reflects in some way what that episode is about.
• 0:53
  So I brought this, especially it's, this is Venus and for me it represents
• 0:57
  renewal or renaissance, which is rebirth.
• 1:01
  And actually I think of your.
• 1:03
  Work as work in rebirth and renewal.
• 1:06
  So that's a little gift for you that you can, uh, take with
• 1:09
  you into the future as well.
• 1:10
  Oh my goodness.
• 1:11
  And then I couldn't do that.
• 1:12
  I couldn't be an Irishman without giving you something else as well.
• 1:14
  So that's another little gift.
• 1:16
  And while I'm here,
• 1:17
  oh my gosh, I'm gonna interrupt
• 1:19
  the flow, but we'll just leave a flow.
• 1:20
  I wanna thank the crew here that have been setting up for a day and a half
• 1:23
  here, and I'm gonna fill them full of Irish liqueur here with Bailey.
• 1:26
  So Dave, Ellie, and Simona.
• 1:29
  I want to give you guys.
• 1:30
  These as well.
• 1:31
  I'm probably gonna drop them and smash them, but I'll give
• 1:33
  'em to you off camera here.
• 1:35
  Oh, there we go Dave.
• 1:35
  There's Dave.
• 1:36
  Very nice.
• 1:37
  Oh, how great.
• 1:37
  Thank
• 1:38
  you.
• 1:39
  Thank you so much.
• 1:39
  You can set mine aside.
• 1:41
  Make sure
• 1:41
  I don't
• 1:42
  leave without it.
• 1:43
  Dave, thank
• 1:43
  you.
• 1:44
  Thank you for all, uh, your efforts.
• 1:45
  So that's the quick intro.
• 1:47
  I wanna also say thank you to our sponsor, ndl, for running
• 1:51
  and reimagine the technology that drives the world's infrastructure.
• 1:54
  Now with an AI layer, also check out the, the NDL Institute where you'll
• 1:59
  find a plethora of amazing content.
• 2:01
  But let's get back to this show and to the word.
• 2:04
  It's not that, it's something totally different.
• 2:06
  So I'll let you tee this one up because you've asked this to the audiences before.
• 2:10
  You've given them the word and seen what came back.
• 2:13
  So over to you, Theresa.
• 2:15
  Yeah.
• 2:15
  So I, I like to, uh, at the beginning of a talk on this
• 2:19
  particular research, ask people to.
• 2:22
  Hear me say a word, and then remember the first thing that pops into their head when
• 2:26
  they hear the word the word is retirement.
• 2:32
  So I've paused for a second.
• 2:35
  Think about that.
• 2:35
  Yeah.
• 2:36
  So that your podcast audience can think about the word.
• 2:39
  We gave that little game to all of the 120 people we interviewed for this
• 2:47
  research, and the results were really.
• 2:50
  Pretty surprising to me.
• 2:52
  We created a word cloud from the responses to that, to that word, uh, for all of the
• 3:00
  older professionals who we interviewed.
• 3:03
  We had people in other age groups, life stage groups, but the older professionals,
• 3:08
  age 55 plus who were still working,
• 3:13
  the word cloud showed as the most prominent responses.
• 3:20
  Scary.
• 3:22
  Never far away.
• 3:25
  Unknown.
• 3:27
  One person even said, uh, facing retirement is like standing at the
• 3:32
  edge of a cliff staring into a void.
• 3:37
  I was really surprised and, and kind of disturbed by this level of fear and
• 3:42
  negativity about retiring among people who were likely going to be retiring in the
• 3:48
  next 10 to 15 years, so that, that really.
• 3:53
  Struck me and, uh, our, our aim with the research, our aim with the book
• 4:00
  is to help people get some insight into the process of retiring and, uh.
• 4:08
  Show them some ways it can be navigated and relieve that fear.
• 4:12
  And it's much like your work on the progress principle as well.
• 4:14
  For those who haven't heard that, I'll link to that in the show notes.
• 4:17
  Brilliant work that Theresa has done.
• 4:19
  But for me, this was a na natural, excuse the pun, progression where again,
• 4:25
  if you're not preparing for progress.
• 4:27
  The progress won't just magically appear.
• 4:29
  It reminded me of my own career as a professional Ruby player, because
• 4:32
  in professional sports, you have to retire early because your body
• 4:35
  gives up before your brain does.
• 4:37
  So you have to prepare for that.
• 4:39
  And I was very lucky myself in that I was injured at the end of my career.
• 4:43
  That wasn't pleasant to go through, but it gave me the gift of preparation.
• 4:47
  And one of the things you talk about is it takes work to actually retire.
• 4:52
  That's right.
• 4:52
  You know, that was one of the surprises that, uh, that came
• 4:57
  out of the research is that.
• 5:00
  Many people think of retiring as what happens on your last day, on the job,
• 5:04
  you know, at the end of your career.
• 5:06
  But it's so much more than that.
• 5:08
  It is not a one day event.
• 5:10
  It's something that, uh, can take usually at least a year and, and
• 5:15
  sometimes several years to complete as a process from the very beginning.
• 5:21
  The first task, the first of the four tasks that we discovered,
• 5:25
  um, which is making the decision.
• 5:29
  About when and how to retire, and that task can start years
• 5:36
  before the actual retirement date.
• 5:39
  For some people, other people, it happens in the immediate, uh, future.
• 5:44
  Before that.
• 5:46
  All the way through the last task, which is consolidating a more or less
• 5:51
  stable retirement life for yourself.
• 5:53
  And there there are tasks in between that need to happen.
• 5:57
  Everyone who retires, at least in the US has to confront these four tasks.
• 6:04
  The first one, deciding when to retire is not so much of a decision.
• 6:09
  In some industrialized countries where there may be mandatory retirement
• 6:14
  ages, but certainly in the US where it's illegal to have a retirement,
• 6:19
  a mandatory retirement in most professions, that's a big task.
• 6:23
  Making that decision about when and how to retire.
• 6:27
  Uh, the second task is detaching yourself from your work.
• 6:34
  Which for many of us.
• 6:35
  Can be very tricky.
• 6:37
  The third task is exploring and experimenting to try to shape,
• 6:43
  try to build a provisional retirement life for yourself.
• 6:48
  And that final task is to work with those provisional elements, decide
• 6:53
  which of them works and consolidate a more or less stable rhythm and
• 6:58
  routine for your retirement life.
• 7:01
  What I found remarkable about it is, and why I thought it was so relevant.
• 7:04
  Regardless if you're retiring or not, it's really a framework for any renewal.
• 7:09
  So an organizational renewal, you have to go through the same things.
• 7:12
  You can't over identify with the identity or the products that you have
• 7:16
  served your customers with in the past.
• 7:19
  Now you have to actually embrace something new so you can't cling to that past.
• 7:23
  And I saw it as almost the an s curve.
• 7:26
  And you've got to the top of the curve, but you have to prepare for the next one.
• 7:30
  So few of us do, and we do that in all aspects of life.
• 7:32
  We don't prepare for empty nesting or we don't prepare for retirement in,
• 7:37
  from a financial perspective, if even, and I thought that that was just an
• 7:42
  important point to call out, but also something you said about the fear and,
• 7:47
  and standing at the void, all these kind of reactions people had, those people.
• 7:52
  Theresa and our team had studied, and this is a team of emeritus
• 7:55
  professors, high heavy hitters, and all the people you interviewed
• 8:00
  didn't have financial problems.
• 8:02
  And I think that's important to call it because that would be something
• 8:05
  that a lot of people would face, but these didn't, and regardless
• 8:09
  of that, they still had that fear.
• 8:11
  That's right.
• 8:11
  And, and that's one reason it was so surprising.
• 8:15
  I, I want to return for just a second to what you were saying before about
• 8:20
  the work that's involved in retiring.
• 8:23
  The work can be very enjoyable.
• 8:25
  Know many people think of drudgery when they think of work.
• 8:28
  It can be enjoyable and it is for many people, but.
• 8:32
  It's work in the sense that it takes time and effort and attention to prepare for
• 8:39
  and actually have a smooth transition into a satisfying retirement life.
• 8:45
  And that is true for many life transitions.
• 8:48
  And you, you brought up a few, uh, that makes me want to take my little gif
• 8:52
  from you, Venus, and say Yes, you know.
• 8:55
  All of those transitions do involve a kind of renewal, a kind of rebirth, whether
• 9:04
  it's making an organizational change that will lead to a more innovative future
• 9:10
  or making a change in personal life.
• 9:14
  The decision to get married, for example.
• 9:17
  Uh, the decision to start a family.
• 9:20
  Those, those transitions organizationally, personally, do reco require preparation?
• 9:28
  They require decision making and they require adjustments along the way.
• 9:35
  Um.
• 9:36
  Adjusting the identity that you hold or the identity that the organization
• 9:41
  holds, maybe morphing that over time and they certainly involve a lot
• 9:47
  of work in detaching from the old.
• 9:51
  Reattaching to the new and discovering along the way what that new is.
• 9:57
  Even if you have planned a path, there are always going to be adjustments
• 10:01
  necessary along the way before you can settle into something.
• 10:05
  The next state that's more or less stable.
• 10:08
  I met our mutual friend who has great time for you, Michael
• 10:11
  Tushman for breakfast today.
• 10:13
  And we were talking about that moment where if you're working with a senior
• 10:17
  leadership team, there's a moment of almost melancholy or sadness
• 10:21
  when there's a realization it's not gonna be the same going forward.
• 10:25
  And you mentioned Venus and Rebirth, but that also means
• 10:29
  a death of the old in a way.
• 10:31
  And I just wanted to double click on that one because.
• 10:34
  If you look at all aspects of life, that's often the most difficult pieces.
• 10:38
  Maybe you've over identified with your career, the persona that you'd created,
• 10:42
  and now that person has to be kind of set free in a way, and you have to do it.
• 10:47
  That's right.
• 10:48
  That's right.
• 10:48
  The work, the work is internal.
• 10:50
  In this case, uh, when you're talking about the retiring
• 10:53
  transition and, uh, that, that.
• 10:56
  There are echoes of that, certainly in organizational transformation as well.
• 11:01
  There is a letting go that's necessary, and I think that's in
• 11:05
  part where the fear comes from.
• 11:07
  Um, many of us don't or can't envision a future where we are a
• 11:15
  different person in many respects, doing different things with our time.
• 11:21
  Just as organizationally.
• 11:23
  Transformation can mean.
• 11:26
  A lot of struggles for individuals inside the organization in, in imagining
• 11:33
  themselves as individuals, as teams, as departments and divisions behaving
• 11:39
  in a new way and doing new things.
• 11:42
  So I, I, I do think that that's where a lot of the fear over retiring comes
• 11:47
  from and it's so important to, to point out again, what you mentioned before.
• 11:53
  We only interviewed people who on a screening questionnaire, and
• 11:58
  we had all the volunteers fill out a, a screening questionnaire.
• 12:02
  We only chose people who rated themselves as at least reasonably.
• 12:09
  Financially secure, if not more financially secure and
• 12:12
  reasonably physically healthy.
• 12:15
  We know from a lot of prior research that health and wealth are two enormously
• 12:20
  important factors in retirement decisions and retirement experiences.
• 12:25
  We wanted to.
• 12:27
  Set those aside as much as possible as major factors.
• 12:31
  Of course, they did enter in to many of the conversations we had.
• 12:35
  They were concerns of many of the people we interviewed, but they
• 12:39
  weren't The overwhelming, overriding concerns that people who are not
• 12:43
  financially secure have, or people who are in poor health experience.
• 12:49
  That thing about not preparing.
• 12:51
  I was thinking about that.
• 12:52
  So there's, I often think about this even physically, is that you're constantly
• 12:57
  atrophying, especially when you get over a certain age, you're losing collagen.
• 13:01
  All these vital parts of keeping you stuck together start to fade, but you
• 13:06
  have to prepare doing the work before.
• 13:09
  You need it so that that whole thing, the Chinese proverb, the best time
• 13:12
  to plant a tree was 20 years ago.
• 13:14
  That's what hits people.
• 13:16
  And I know we've kind of alluded to there's a lot of responsibility on
• 13:19
  the person retiring, but equally you say the organization has to step up
• 13:24
  and the organizations often don't.
• 13:25
  I mentioned sport.
• 13:26
  This is usually what the pattern you see in sport is maybe there's a player,
• 13:30
  they're getting a bit old now, they're a little bit slower, their mind's getting
• 13:34
  faster, but their body gets slower.
• 13:36
  And often a lot of clubs will frustrate that player out so they leave and so
• 13:40
  they're no longer on the books or they might go to a lesser club, et cetera.
• 13:44
  And I had that myself being injured.
• 13:47
  And it's so demoralizing because, and this is where I think the, the segue
• 13:51
  is nice to the progress principle is you're no longer making progress and.
• 13:56
  You don't feel like you're making any kind of contribution and worse than that, you
• 14:00
  feel like in a way you're some type of nuisance or weight on the organization.
• 14:05
  And you see that in organizations as well.
• 14:06
  And it's a terrible way to send somebody off who's given
• 14:10
  so much to an organization.
• 14:11
  We worked with multiple organizations that allowed us kindly to come in and
• 14:16
  recruit their professionals, their currently working professionals and their
• 14:20
  retired professionals, uh, for the study.
• 14:25
  We found that some of those organizations did not adequately
• 14:34
  support their older employees, nor did they adequately
• 14:42
  draw the value from them that they could have.
• 14:46
  At least one organization in our study was able to do that.
• 14:50
  And specifically what I'm talking about is.
• 14:55
  Giving people, even in the final months and years of their career
• 15:00
  assignments, the call for creativity.
• 15:03
  This was one of the most impressive findings, I think from our research, and
• 15:07
  this was actually a quantitative finding.
• 15:10
  Most of our findings are qualitative based on what people said in the
• 15:13
  interviews, but we did use some small surveys along the way with the people
• 15:17
  that we studied, and we found that.
• 15:21
  To the extent that people had assignments calling for creativity toward the end of
• 15:27
  their career, and were able to feel that they actually were being creative in their
• 15:33
  work, contributing to the organization in that way, to the extent that they
• 15:38
  had, that they were more likely to be satisfied in their retirement lives.
• 15:45
  So what happened in those final months and years of the career impacts people's level
• 15:51
  of satisfaction in their retirement life, which was enormously surprising to us.
• 15:58
  What happened at work mattered more than what they were doing outside of
• 16:02
  work before they retired, in terms of predicting their satisfaction
• 16:08
  with their lives after retiring.
• 16:11
  I think it's a twofold impact we saw from this quantitative result
• 16:16
  that there's certainly an impact on the individuals themselves.
• 16:20
  I think it's because they feel, and this came out in the interviews a bit,
• 16:24
  they feel like they are wrapping up.
• 16:28
  A really satisfying chapter in their lives.
• 16:30
  Kind of like they can, they can put a bow on their career and put it on the
• 16:35
  shelf as something great that they did in their lives, and I think that that
• 16:40
  makes 'em feel better about moving on to the next chapter of their lives.
• 16:45
  But the organization benefits.
• 16:47
  If the organization benefits by drawing on the wisdom, the experience, the expertise
• 16:55
  of these people who have often been in the organization for decades and who
• 17:00
  still have great creative capacity, rather than giving them make work assignments
• 17:06
  or something that is so distasteful that.
• 17:11
  I think the organization is hoping they will leave.
• 17:14
  They will just retire.
• 17:15
  This is the way to get them to retire.
• 17:17
  Give them something horrible and boring.
• 17:19
  And you experience that as a rugby player.
• 17:22
  I think you are sort of put out to pasture, although you
• 17:25
  were still drawing a paycheck.
• 17:26
  It's, it's demoralizing and you see it with people where, as you said, they have
• 17:30
  so much institutional knowledge, maybe from the way the organization used to be.
• 17:35
  If that can be implanted to somebody new, I, I often think about, I grew
• 17:39
  up in a lovely, uh, park land and I remember as a kid, my dad was
• 17:43
  responsible for the architecture of the park, the landscape architecture.
• 17:47
  And he replanted the whole driveway and he remembered him telling me this.
• 17:53
  And he used to bore me telling me stuff about that I pretended I was
• 17:56
  interested in, but this stuck with me so that he had these big mature
• 17:59
  trees, but he planted really small trees in between the big mature trees.
• 18:02
  And he said.
• 18:03
  Those trees actually serve to protect the other one while it's growing.
• 18:07
  So it has this shelter, and I often think of it as that kind of handing
• 18:10
  over of the institutional knowledge.
• 18:12
  But if the older tree is like going and going, thanks for your, your service and
• 18:16
  is chopped down, that's how it feels.
• 18:18
  And I, I can see the psychological effect of after all I gave those
• 18:22
  guys, 'cause so many of us spend.
• 18:25
  Countless hours.
• 18:26
  We pull in the assignment over the weekend, we sacrifice our kids',
• 18:31
  nativity, play, whatever it is to do the work, and then all of a sudden the
• 18:34
  organization goes, thanks for that.
• 18:36
  See you later.
• 18:36
  Now, I know the organization doesn't owe you anything, but it surely should give
• 18:41
  you more than the gold watch and a tap on the back if there is, is a gold watch.
• 18:45
  And one of the things you point to is the importance of rituals
• 18:48
  to help people going forward.
• 18:50
  Absolutely.
• 18:52
  Most organizations do mark a retirement in some way.
• 18:58
  We found that that can be surprisingly important to people
• 19:02
  as they're ending their careers.
• 19:04
  Uh, one organization.
• 19:08
  Had a practice of, it was a smaller organization, a relatively
• 19:12
  entrepreneurial young one.
• 19:14
  They had a practice of when someone was retiring, having the whole office come
• 19:19
  together for, for a little celebration.
• 19:23
  And we found that one, one of the very senior level people who was retiring
• 19:28
  from the organization, as I said, it was relatively young, his career,
• 19:32
  there had been 20 years I think.
• 19:36
  He didn't feel great about his value to the organization.
• 19:41
  In his final few years there.
• 19:43
  He just wasn't sure that he was contributing what the organization
• 19:47
  really valued most, but what was said to him in the tributes that people paid
• 19:54
  during that final party, that ritual.
• 19:58
  Meant the world to him.
• 19:59
  I interviewed him, I think 10 times and he mentioned that that final ritual and
• 20:07
  how much it meant in at least five of the interviews I did with him after he
• 20:12
  retired, so that that left him with a great feeling about the organization.
• 20:17
  I'll tell you something.
• 20:18
  He was a terrific ambassador for that organization after he retired.
• 20:23
  Yeah.
• 20:23
  And how much would you pay for that?
• 20:25
  I mean, that's the thing.
• 20:25
  Exactly.
• 20:26
  He was able to help, help the organization recruit great young people.
• 20:30
  And I wanna say something else about young people.
• 20:32
  We did have a, a cohort of, uh, millennials that we
• 20:37
  interviewed as part of the study.
• 20:39
  We don't spend a lot of time talking about our interviews with them in
• 20:43
  the book, but one thing we found.
• 20:47
  In looking for intergenerational conflict, which is talked about a lot in
• 20:51
  the media, we didn't find that in these millennials, nor did we find it in most
• 20:58
  of the older people that we interviewed.
• 21:02
  In fact.
• 21:03
  What we found was that some of these millennials talked about how important
• 21:06
  it was for them to have people who were near the end of their careers
• 21:11
  as mentors, as as teammates, people who had that institutional knowledge
• 21:17
  who could introduce them to customers and, and talk to them about, you know,
• 21:22
  what goes on behind the scenes in the organization and how to work with this
• 21:26
  particular customer, or how to work with this particular supplier or distributor.
• 21:31
  That kind of tacit knowledge is invaluable, and we've found that many
• 21:35
  of the younger employees appreciated it.
• 21:38
  So it's not just nice to treat those large, mature trees.
• 21:43
  Well, yeah.
• 21:45
  It really is helpful to those smaller growing trees.
• 21:49
  It's funny, I was thinking about how you can make somebody feed the
• 21:53
  devalue at the end, but equally you can do that at the start where you
• 21:57
  have maybe a new hire and the new hire comes to work and their computer's not
• 22:02
  ready, it won't be ready for a month.
• 22:04
  They're left kind of floating, checking emails, checking their
• 22:06
  social media, and they feel devalued.
• 22:09
  Or they feel actually, well, what's the point of me being here?
• 22:12
  And that can be the first.
• 22:13
  Opening moment, joining an organization.
• 22:15
  But equally, it's the same, the flip side, and it also made me think
• 22:19
  about how, again, in sport, but also as you've shown in the research.
• 22:24
  When you're in the bubble, when you're in the bubble doing the work, it's very
• 22:28
  hard to prepare for that future develop skills, and you call it some really
• 22:32
  important skills that are needed, say at the end of a career in rugby, they
• 22:35
  try and give you financial training.
• 22:37
  They try and give you, try to understand what skills are transferrable
• 22:41
  into the real world for you.
• 22:43
  But so few players will stop and go, I really need to focus on this, and this
• 22:47
  is where I say being injured was helpful.
• 22:49
  But you say equally, the organization needs to offer those services.
• 22:53
  So financial planning, psychological planning, relational planning,
• 22:58
  exactly.
• 23:00
  Most organizations of medium size or large size do offer regular financial
• 23:06
  planning seminars for, for people of any age and stage in the organization.
• 23:11
  They're mostly attended by the older employees.
• 23:15
  But we didn't find any organization offering a program on the things
• 23:20
  that our research discovered people really need help with.
• 23:24
  And that is the psychological challenges of retiring, including the
• 23:29
  identity issues that we've alluded to, and the relational challenges,
• 23:34
  managing their current relationships at work and outside of work, as well
• 23:39
  as developing new relationships in.
• 23:42
  Retiring and the life restructuring challenges, which are huge.
• 23:48
  Think about it.
• 23:49
  You've had something that structured your life, gave it a rhythm and
• 23:53
  routine for decades in many cases, and.
• 24:00
  That was most of your waking life for decades of your life,
• 24:06
  and now it's going to be gone.
• 24:08
  Those 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week that you are spending in that
• 24:14
  profession are now going to be yours to do with what you want.
• 24:21
  There are people who, who confront that on the first day of retirement rather
• 24:26
  than thinking about it at all beforehand.
• 24:29
  So organizations could do people a tremendous service by offering
• 24:33
  seminars on the kinds of things that we studied in our research.
• 24:37
  One of them was structural and I thought that that was worth calling out.
• 24:40
  What does that refer to in the research?
• 24:43
  So life structure is a term that we use to refer to essentially.
• 24:47
  Everything in your life.
• 24:50
  And we asked people in our study to imagine their lives in
• 24:55
  terms of a, a map, a diagram.
• 24:58
  And we, we had 14 of those 120 people, uh, 120 professionals, 14 of them were getting
• 25:06
  ready to retire when we started our study.
• 25:10
  With their, with their cohort in their organization.
• 25:12
  So we asked them, will you let us follow you as, as you retire, as you
• 25:19
  go through that transition and into your first few years of retirement?
• 25:24
  So 14 people said, yes, I will let you interview me multiple times.
• 25:28
  The rest we interviewed once.
• 25:30
  But these 14 people we came to know very, very well.
• 25:35
  We call them our stars because we feature them prominently in the book.
• 25:39
  We tell their stories in some detail, and we found that for those, for those
• 25:45
  14 people, it was, it was crucial for them to be able to, to tackle all
• 25:53
  four of those tasks that I mentioned.
• 25:57
  But they were on their own.
• 25:59
  They, they were on their own.
• 26:00
  Their organization didn't, didn't offer them preparation or planning.
• 26:06
  They did draw maps of their life structure for us, their life
• 26:11
  structure, pre-retirement and of course work or career was there in
• 26:17
  every life map, uh, before retirement.
• 26:21
  And for some of the 14 it was huge.
• 26:24
  It was by far the biggest circle or box that they drew in
• 26:28
  their pre-retirement life map.
• 26:30
  For others, it was, it was a little bit more modest size, but it was there.
• 26:36
  And after retirement, of course, that box or bubble or
• 26:39
  circle, whatever is gone, right?
• 26:43
  But the other context of the life are so important to consider
• 26:47
  in relation to that work life.
• 26:51
  Your relationships, your home.
• 26:53
  Where do you live geographically?
• 26:56
  Uh, where do you spend your time?
• 26:59
  Uh, what other groups and organizations do you belong to,
• 27:03
  both before and after retirement?
• 27:06
  So your relationships, your activities, how you spend your time, where you
• 27:11
  spend your time, all of those things are important parts of the life structure.
• 27:18
  Life structure does need to change after retirement.
• 27:22
  For some people, they simply grow the other bubbles or circles that
• 27:27
  they had in their life beforehand.
• 27:31
  But for many people, they introduce new activities, new places to be,
• 27:36
  uh, into their, into their life map, into their life structure.
• 27:41
  And it, it really stands people in good stead if they spend some time
• 27:45
  thinking about that beforehand.
• 27:47
  You don't have to feel like you've got everything planned out in how you're
• 27:51
  going to restructure your life, but giving it some thought and having
• 27:55
  some ideas, maybe even doing some of that exploration and experimentation
• 28:00
  beforehand can be a really good idea.
• 28:03
  I love, there's a Spartan Warrior mantra.
• 28:06
  The more you sweat in times of peace, the less you bleed in war.
• 28:09
  Not saying that you're in war.
• 28:10
  When you go.
• 28:11
  When you retire.
• 28:12
  I'm
• 28:12
  hearing those sports metaphors coming out again.
• 28:14
  Sorry.
• 28:15
  But
• 28:15
  you can take the guy outta the locker room.
• 28:17
  There's a couple of things I'd just love to lean into.
• 28:19
  One of them was.
• 28:20
  So the importance of the organization.
• 28:21
  You shared some examples of organizations that really benefited from it, but also
• 28:26
  those organizations didn't just train the people, but they kept in touch Afterwards.
• 28:30
  It was like alumni and there was like newsletters and get togethers
• 28:34
  where the person, it was almost like training wheels, helping them go
• 28:38
  on off ramp from the organization.
• 28:40
  Yes, absolutely.
• 28:42
  Let, let me say a a, a few ways that we saw organizations manage this really well.
• 28:50
  Um, both in those final months of the career and then in the first
• 28:57
  months and years of retirement.
• 28:59
  And again, it's to the benefit of the individual retiring, but it's also to
• 29:03
  the organization's benefit to do this.
• 29:06
  So one, thi one or organization from which we drew participants in the
• 29:13
  study had an interesting transition to retirement program whereby
• 29:18
  professionals in, in certain jobs could sign a contract to retire in 18
• 29:24
  months and for those 18 months work.
• 29:30
  Three days a week, get paid for four days a week and enjoy all their full benefits.
• 29:38
  As you might imagine, this was enormously attractive to employees in
• 29:42
  the organization, and we interviewed people who had taken advantage of
• 29:46
  it while they were in their final months of, of their career, and they,
• 29:52
  they did feel that they were really benefiting from this program and kind
• 29:55
  of easing into retirement in that way.
• 29:59
  Having more time in their week to, to explore and experiment,
• 30:03
  but still having part of them.
• 30:07
  That work identity and still feeling like they were contributing there,
• 30:11
  but the organization benefited because it had much greater clarity, allowing
• 30:16
  it to plan staffing and succession because they knew these people are
• 30:22
  going to be retiring in 18 months.
• 30:26
  And they could decide what to do with those positions, who to bring in.
• 30:30
  Did they want to have some overlap between the retiring person and the person who was
• 30:35
  going to be taking over their position?
• 30:38
  How did they want to do, uh, the knowledge transfer during that time?
• 30:43
  And that's another really important piece.
• 30:45
  Many organizations fall down on, and that is having a good
• 30:50
  knowledge transfer mechanism.
• 30:52
  Of course, it benefits the organization, it benefits the colleagues that the
• 30:57
  retiring person has been working with.
• 30:59
  Benefits that team by, by transferring the, the explicit knowledge as
• 31:04
  well as the, the tacit knowledge.
• 31:07
  But it helps, it helps the organization.
• 31:09
  Certainly it helps that person to know.
• 31:15
  That they are valued right up until their last day.
• 31:18
  What they know, what they've learned.
• 31:22
  Matters.
• 31:24
  So let's give people some practical actions.
• 31:26
  So there's the four a's.
• 31:28
  Uh, so there's, uh, alignment, awareness, adaptability, and agency.
• 31:32
  The four A's.
• 31:33
  That actually is a framework for our audience.
• 31:35
  If you're facing retirement and don't leave it, start now.
• 31:38
  If you're 10 years from retirement, start now.
• 31:40
  That's one of the big messages I get.
• 31:42
  But this framework, I'd love you to share this and then may maybe we'll land the
• 31:46
  ship on purpose being the final element.
• 31:49
  That sounds great.
• 31:49
  Aiden, can I say something else about what organizations can do
• 31:53
  please?
• 31:56
  After a person retires a savvy organization, we found one in
• 32:01
  our study will keep in touch.
• 32:04
  With those retirees.
• 32:07
  Afterwards, we saw, um, a newsletter for retirees, a social media group.
• 32:13
  A couple of the organizations had a social media group that they, they made available
• 32:20
  to people who were retired, occasional parties sponsored by the company for.
• 32:27
  For people who have retired, some part-time contract work opportunities
• 32:32
  can be extremely attractive in helping people to make that transition,
• 32:37
  especially your more valued employees making that transition.
• 32:41
  And you know, we found even just calling retirees, alumni.
• 32:46
  Replaces a negative stereotype with a positive one, and organizations that do
• 32:52
  this right, that treat their alumni well after they've retired, have created.
• 33:00
  Great ambassadors for the organization out there in the community, whether
• 33:04
  it's with recruiting new employees or engendering goodwill toward the
• 33:09
  organization within the community, so that, that's really important
• 33:13
  for organizations to keep in mind.
• 33:15
  That's the A of alumni.
• 33:17
  Let's share it with audience, the forays where people can prepare
• 33:22
  both as the organization, but mainly for you if you're the protagonist.
• 33:25
  Yes.
• 33:26
  We found that for individuals.
• 33:28
  The first A that's important is trying to create an alignment, a
• 33:33
  good alignment between yourself.
• 33:35
  That is everything about you, your identity, uh, your various
• 33:40
  identities, your needs, your values, what's really important to you,
• 33:45
  what matters to you, your health.
• 33:47
  So a aligning that self as you are now, not as you were at midlife,
• 33:52
  but as you are now aligning that self with your life structure.
• 33:58
  And that is all the context of your life, everything in your life.
• 34:02
  And if someone is, is approaching retirement in a fruitful way, in the
• 34:07
  final years of their career, they're going to be making this assessment.
• 34:12
  How well does my current life structure with career as a big circle, how well
• 34:18
  does that match the self that I am now?
• 34:22
  And ideally at some point.
• 34:24
  A person will recognize, okay, having work, having career in my
• 34:30
  life doesn't match the self that I am right now for whatever reason.
• 34:37
  So it's time to make change in life structure by removing that and that
• 34:42
  is enabled by the next two, as that kind of realignment of self and life
• 34:51
  structure is enabled first by awareness.
• 34:54
  That's the second.
• 34:55
  A, you need to develop a keen awareness of who you are and what's important
• 35:01
  to you, and what your needs are right now, what your values are right now.
• 35:07
  And I. A clear-eyed awareness of what your life structure really is.
• 35:12
  What are the dynamics going on in your life?
• 35:15
  How are they impacting you?
• 35:17
  And you, you at some point will make a move on your life enabled by the third A,
• 35:23
  which is agency, and that's being able to proactively change something about your
• 35:28
  life structure or maybe about yourself to bring them into better alignment.
• 35:34
  The big change we've been talking about in the life structure is removing work,
• 35:38
  removing career, and realigning that life structure in a way that better matches who
• 35:44
  you are, the self that you are right now.
• 35:47
  That doesn't mean having no work at all.
• 35:49
  You might decide to do some part-time contract work for your employer.
• 35:53
  You might decide to find a different job that's based on an advocation you've had,
• 35:58
  as we saw some people do in our study.
• 36:01
  But.
• 36:02
  That realignment is, is enabled by having a sense of agency.
• 36:08
  Okay?
• 36:09
  I'm gonna make a proactive move here, but you have to remember, not only
• 36:14
  do you impact your life structure, but your life structure impacts you.
• 36:19
  There are things going on in your relationship, your family, your community.
• 36:24
  That you have no control over, and that's why you need the
• 36:27
  fourth A, which is adaptability.
• 36:31
  You have to be able to adapt to things that happen in your life
• 36:34
  over which you cannot exert control.
• 36:37
  So that's where you have to make adjustments in yourself, in your
• 36:40
  attitude and in your approach, and maybe adjust other things in your life
• 36:45
  structure to accommodate the big change.
• 36:48
  The change could be positive, right?
• 36:50
  Uh, birth of a Grandchild is, is a positive event for, for many older adults.
• 36:57
  It could also mean something that's really tragic, like the, the
• 37:00
  death of a, of a longtime spouse.
• 37:04
  Adaptability is crucial and you can, you can learn and practice
• 37:11
  these skills, these four A skills.
• 37:13
  And in our book we talk about ways that people can do that.
• 37:17
  Purpose is a huge one that comes out there time and time again, you
• 37:20
  said about awareness of yourself, your values, all this kind of stuff.
• 37:24
  We talk about organizations not usually being explicit about that, so maybe
• 37:29
  the exec, senior leadership team are clear on purpose of an organization,
• 37:33
  mission statement, et cetera.
• 37:34
  But as you go down the lifts of the elevator in the organization.
• 37:37
  People are less and less clear, but equally we are.
• 37:41
  So, we very rarely start our career and go, okay, here's what I'm about.
• 37:45
  Here's what drives me.
• 37:46
  This is the kind of careers that will satisfy that for me.
• 37:49
  We do that at the start.
• 37:51
  We don't do it at the start, I should say, and we don't do it at the end.
• 37:54
  And I think that that's a nice top and tail to see that this is not a
• 37:59
  linear line of life going from left to right, it's actually a cycle.
• 38:03
  And if you treat it like a cycle, you'll actually go, well, that just repeats
• 38:06
  itself in a different context later.
• 38:08
  The context, me not being working for an organization.
• 38:11
  So purpose is really what drive should drive you at the end.
• 38:14
  And I and I, I've seen some people retire and wither terribly.
• 38:19
  Once they retire, because it's like they don't have a purpose anymore.
• 38:22
  Their kids have grown up, the kids aren't at home.
• 38:24
  Maybe they're living abroad and now their purpose was derived from
• 38:28
  work and that's gone for them.
• 38:30
  Yeah.
• 38:31
  Maybe their purpose was derived from work.
• 38:32
  Maybe it was derived from family, maybe it was derived from both,
• 38:36
  and those have changed drastically.
• 38:38
  Right.
• 38:40
  What we found in our research was that.
• 38:44
  People do need a sense of purpose.
• 38:45
  They need to feel that they matter, that they matter to the world
• 38:51
  in whatever that means to them.
• 38:55
  It doesn't have to be purpose with a big P. It doesn't have to be, I'm going to be.
• 39:01
  Doing something that changes my society, changes my community.
• 39:05
  For some people, that is the kind of purpose that they need to find in that
• 39:10
  next chapter of life after career.
• 39:13
  It can happen through working with nonprofits.
• 39:15
  It can happen with starting a nonprofit for heaven's sake.
• 39:18
  It can.
• 39:18
  It can happen in a number of ways.
• 39:22
  There are also many people who find purpose in a small P kind of way,
• 39:27
  and that is finding satisfaction in their day by day activities, feeling
• 39:34
  that they're contributing, that they matter in that way by perhaps serving
• 39:40
  as a volunteer in their community by.
• 39:44
  Spending more time with their grandchildren if, if
• 39:48
  they're able to do that.
• 39:49
  For some people, they find purpose in traveling, whether
• 39:53
  it's just traveling within their own country and getting to know.
• 39:57
  People in a deeper way or traveling the world.
• 40:02
  So purpose doesn't mean just one thing.
• 40:06
  It is important for people to find, but you can find it by doing that
• 40:11
  exploration and experimentation that is so necessary in where you.
• 40:17
  Spend your time and what you spend your time doing as you approach retirement and
• 40:23
  after retirement, you will find things that will be satisfying to you, that will
• 40:28
  give you that sense of purpose, but you have to exercise agency in finding it.
• 40:35
  You're not a victim.
• 40:36
  That's one of the things I really realized reading the book as well as you have
• 40:40
  agency, you can't just be there like a Turkey waiting for Christmas, essentially.
• 40:45
  I wondered what your final message was.
• 40:47
  What, what out of everything you found was most touching and maybe
• 40:52
  that you can talk to our audience and say, here's my message to you.
• 40:55
  If there's one thing you do, this is the one that that really stood out for me.
• 41:02
  If I could give the audience one piece of advice, it would be to do
• 41:09
  spend time thinking about retiring, no matter what your age and stage of life.
• 41:16
  And if you are retired, do spend some time thinking about whether your life
• 41:21
  structure currently is meeting your needs.
• 41:24
  Don't be afraid to start.
• 41:28
  Experimenting with something even now that might be the right path for you in
• 41:34
  retirement, but don't get trapped into feeling that you have to have it all
• 41:38
  figured out because that is impossible.
• 41:42
  Beautiful.
• 41:42
  And I want to just thank again, Dave Simona and Ellie for taking the time
• 41:46
  here at Christmas time over in in Boston.
• 41:49
  Thanks to our sponsor, NDL as well.
• 41:51
  And most of all, thanks to the author of the Progress Principle and this
• 41:55
  brilliant new book, retiring Theresa Amle.
• 41:57
  Thank you very much.
• 41:58
  Thank you, Aiden.
• 41:59
  I've really enjoyed it.