Yet, as powerful as her initial insights may have been, it was their “experimental creativity” that won the day. To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s all in the doing.
And that’s not all the good news! Researchers are now discovering that our life satisfaction seems to improve as we age, even in the face of our physical decline and our heightened awareness that our days are numbered. Researchers are now discovering that we don’t peak emotionally until well into our seventies and eighties. This is known as “the paradox of aging,” where a certain “settling” takes over. We learn to compensate for our losses by recalibrating our expectations and by ”pruning” our network of friends—casting aside our larger superficial network of acquaintances for a more intimate and more meaningful network of good friends and family. In significant ways, the older we get, the happier we become.
You would think that my own muscle memory would serve me well, when at age sixty I stepped away from keeping school to become an associate with the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford. In what social entrepreneurs call “field building,” my assignment was to figure out how aging Boomers could “give back” in the years we used to call retirement. That was the plan. Over time, however, I would come to realize that my muscle memory would become as much a hindrance as an asset.
At the outset of my research, the prospects were good. According to surveys taken at the time, seventy-five percent of us indicated a predisposition to give back, however that might be defined. Yet, it came with a catch: we would do it our way and on our own terms. That is, we would only work at it part-time, flex-time, our own time and within a fifteen to twenty mile radius of our homes (It’s called “aging in place”). And that’s not all: in return, we expected a good dose of meaning, purpose and in some cases financial remuneration. No surprise here—Boomers being Boomers.
This presented me with a conundrum that I would puzzle over for more than a decade. I had no flash of insight. No muse would come calling. My creative juices went dry. So, I did what an earnest and persevering sixty-year old would do: I would feel my way, over time, eventually to a solution. I networked. I interviewed thought leaders, social entrepreneurs and practitioners. I went down a lot of blind alleys. The cumulative effect of this journey served at least one useful purpose, however. I was learning how to make a useful map of an unproductive system.
Tacit Knowledge, Revisited. And what about that “statue that didn’t look right”? We all possess muscle memory that we draw upon from time to time, share and put to good use in general. I may have had Thomas Hoving’s muscle memory for such things as finding patterns, knowing what can and cannot be achieved in a certain amount of time or in intuitively understanding what hangs people up. I may have had the kind of muscle memory that’s relevant in running a school, writing a grant or in helping a teenager through a rough patch. But my own very muscle memory seemed to be of little use in activating the complex set of tasks associated with changemaking.
Yet, when I was able to join forces with my younger colleague in designing an online group mentoring program, it was my own muscle memory, pedestrian as it’s been all these years, that played a critical role. For it grounded and contextualized the flashes of insight from my younger counterpart. This joining of forces created a powerful synergy indeed.
Like Moses, we may never cross the River Jordan to reach the promised land. But we can position the next generation to build the kind of intergenerational designs that they, in turn, can pass along to the generations that will follow them. We still have the time, the talent, the creativity and the temperament not to mention the core values to serve as the catalyst. And that’s our experience advantage.
ABOUT PARADOXES
In their book, Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works, Roger Martin and Sally Osberg, argue that professional social entrepreneurs possess can simultaneously abhor unproductive and immoral systems yet appreciate the forces that govern them. They can draw upon a deep level expertise in their field yet still function as apprentices. And they have the ability to carry out short-term experiments yet hold fast to long-term goals.
Some of the professional changemakers on this website possess what very few of us have at a young age: the ability to embrace contraries and paradoxes:
Jill Vialet’s creative moment came when a school principal who was at her wits end asked her to do something about the steady stream of students sent to her office. Her flash of insight was to approach the problem indirectly: that is, to change student behavior you change the environment—specifically, the playground. Yet the true measure of her success is what transpired afterward—in the long journey of trial and error and learning to fail early to succeed.
For Mary Gordon, her flash of insight—placing a baby on a rug in a classroom—was tempered by years of experimentation and constant tweaking across a variety of domains and feedback loops.