The Disruption of Age

These days it’s rare to attend a business technology forum without some new “disruption” being raised.  

“What is the next big thing?”,  

“How will it change the workplace?”,  

“What new skills do we need?”…  

But in recent times, I’ve been hearing a lot more about a different type of business disruption and had cause to experience it firsthand. It’s a disruption that has been around since business began but has never been formally acknowledged or mitigated in any formal or systematic way. That disruption is the collective challenge of caring for aging parents, a challenge that presents typically inescapable and increasing demands on time, scope, and budget.  

In a world of accelerating product change and shortening release cycles, maintaining a work-life balance as a technology executive has never been under so much stress. Attend any executive function and you can readily spark a conversation about the difficulties of mixing an executive career with family life. That difficulty is sadly amplified when it comes to dealing with the declining health of aging parents.  

For me, that amplification began just before Christmas 2015 when I was the CIO of a large, fast paced and growing Australian travel company. After a period of making the case for modernisation I was moving the company into the delivery phase and things were proceeding well. A lot of the usual balls were in the air, but it was de rigor for someone in a C-level technology role. My team had things in hand, so I decided to take the family on a long-awaited trip to the UK to celebrate the festive season with relatives.  

On Christmas Eve I got the phone call from my brother, “Please come home, Mum’s had a stroke, and we need you.”.  

After a few hours of deliberation, we dropped our plans, rescheduled our flights and were back in Australia on Christmas Day to find my mother had been irrevocably paralysed and would need 24-hour care for the rest of her life. Within a few months the stress accelerated what turned out to be Alzheimer’s Disease in my father, and so began the next phase of my life, my career, and my learning. 

In the same way that everyone expects a technology executive to personally know how to fix everything from an erratic home internet connection to an overly complex corporate WAN, my family assumed I would be able to problem solve my way through my parents’ issues. As such, I was left with a range of new burdens and decisions to make, most of them significantly more important than whether the CRM database was filtering for the right campaign targets.  

But the reality was that life at work had to continue and my initiatives and responsibilities at the office also needed attention.  

Like so many C-Level executives, I was of middle years with parents in their later life. Like so many technology executives I had to face the challenge of balancing the management focus needed in a faster and faster evolving technology landscape with the time needed to protect the well-being of my family and the ever-increasing needs of my aging parents. 

But it’s now coming up to ten years later and like so many who have gone through a similar journey, I’ve not only survived but maybe I’ve come out of it a better person. A kinder, more patient and better communicating person. Maybe even one with a higher “EQ”.  

It’s been hard, very hard, and I know there is no good end in sight but the skills and resilience that have become innate through my role as a technology leader had equipped me to handle the uncertain and complex needs of my aging parents. 

• As technology executives we must be good at quickly learning and adopting new scenarios and expectations, strategising how to bring them into the workings of the organisation. This works almost as well for supporting aging intelligence as it does for incorporating artificial intelligence into a business ecosystem. 

  
  

• Many of the skills I used every day at work came into play to help my parents: time management; solution architecture; contract negotiation; vendor management; team management, communication, issue resolution, just to name a few.  

  
  

• While many are backed by the government, aged care services are largely profit-making businesses, and the care product that they deliver is designed with the maximum profit in mind. Just as we use our skills to drive the best outcomes for our businesses, we can use them to drive the best outcomes for our families.  

  
  

• On the ground, the staff caring for your parent will often appreciate a professional and collaborative approach to problem-solving. Each day brings unique challenges and the growing number of people in aged care means staff are often overrun. Any well-reasoned help is to everyone’s benefit. 

  

While many in my wider family were despairingly putting their heads in their hands or offering platitudes of help, the resilience I had developed through many a system malfunction came to my rescue. We underestimate how much resolve and emotional intelligence we gain by working our way through a crisis, and if you have been in the game long enough to be an executive, chances are you have a few stories to tell. That resilience allowed me to function pragmatically and inventively under the most demanding of circumstances.  

There are millions of executives worldwide who are handling this issue and many companies who are indirectly suffering through the distraction or loss of their best people. In the same way that organisations and governments have granted extended maternity and paternity leave to support the challenge of childbirth, they must now also consider sharing in the professional challenge presented by support of the aging. To avoid this reality is to risk losing key personnel that usually have the financial independence and career confidence to leave their roles to give full support to their loved ones.  

Parental Leave needs to take on a new meaning and if we want to be able to keep good executives, we need to accommodate the needs of the entire life cycle.  

There will come a day for us all when we need the helping hand of our families or close friends. Do we want it to be a disruption or do we want it to be a prepared and elegant assist.  Most tech executives are good at looking over the horizon. How do we prepare our companies now for that business continuity plan?  

As Jim Rohn says, “Do something today that your future self will thank you for.”  

If we can get it right for ourselves, maybe others will reap the benefits, and we can all grow older with grace.