The boomer's advantage isn't experience, it's that nobody can fire him

Posted on: 28 October 2026

I am sixty-three, and more and more often I find myself settling in five minutes questions that a group of bright thirty-year-olds, better qualified than I was and more specialised than I will ever be, takes three weeks and a forty-slide deck to resolve. God knows how much I hate slides. The temptation to tell this as a story about wisdom is strong, not least because at my age it is the only story in which one still comes out looking good. It would be a lie, though, and lies cost me more effort these days than the truth, so I will start with the truth. I decide quickly because if I get it wrong nobody fires me. The worst that happens is that someone calls me a boomer, which I am anyway.

I know by heart the speech my contemporaries give on the subject. We were generalists while they are specialists, we see the picture while they see a corner of it. There is something in that, but before we start feeling wise it is worth remembering an article from 2009 that ought to sit on the bedside table of anyone who boasts about their instinct. It was written jointly by two researchers who held opposite views on expert intuition. Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for his work on the systematic errors of human judgement, distrusted it, while Gary Klein, who had spent his career watching how fireground commanders and intensive care nurses decide under pressure, defended it. They set out to compare the evidence and see who was right, and ended up giving the paper a wry subtitle, "a failure to disagree", because they had reached the same conclusions. An expert's intuition can be trusted only when the environment has regularities that can be learned and when the expert has had the chance to learn them through quick feedback on the consequences of his choices. Outside those conditions the expert gets it wrong just as fast as he decides, only with more conviction.

This is where self-deprecation stops being a charming habit and becomes a statistical obligation. The boomers who could not see consequences are not here writing blogs, because in the meantime they closed companies, signed the wrong guarantees or simply stopped being invited to the meetings where decisions are made. Those of us still talking are the survivors, not the average. I have sold five start-ups, and I have known enough fellow travellers to be sure that many of them moved at exactly my speed and simply went in the wrong direction with greater determination.

Having said that, there is one thing I genuinely see before the younger people I work with, although it has nothing to do with being a generalist. Faced with a project I do not look for its strengths but for the point where it will break, and I go after that. Gary Klein gave this habit a name, the premortem, which means imagining that the project has already failed and asking why. He teaches it on corporate courses as a technique, whereas I never learned it on any course. I learned it by walking into walls, repeatedly.

When I opened my first CrossFit gym in Lugano, in the Italian-speaking south of Switzerland, in July 2013, there was no risk department to tell me what might go wrong. If a workout had been badly programmed you saw it the next day on your members' faces, and if the numbers did not add up you saw it at the end of the month in your own bank account rather than in some distant shareholder's. That is precisely the environment Kahneman and Klein describe, with rules stable enough to learn and feedback that arrives quickly and hurts. Forty years spent in places like that do not make you any cleverer. They leave scars, and scars are what let you smell the smoke before anyone sees the flame.

The highly specialised thirty-year-old does not have those scars, and not for lack of talent. He lacks them because the system he grew up in has always seen the consequences on his behalf. There is the legal team watching contractual risk, compliance watching the regulatory kind, the risk manager watching the numbers and a committee applying the final stamp. Each guards its own patch scrupulously and nobody looks at the whole thing, because the whole thing belongs to nobody. When my contemporaries say young people do not think through consequences they are right about the symptom but wrong about the diagnosis, since you cannot feel responsible for a consequence nobody ever let you see.

This is where the mechanism that makes everything so slow comes in. Gerd Gigerenzer, the German psychologist who directs the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and has spent decades studying how decisions are made in the real world rather than in the laboratory, calls it defensive decision-making. It happens when a manager knows which option is best for the organisation and deliberately chooses the second best, because that one protects him if things go wrong. British readers of a certain age will recognise the old line that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. In 2019 Gigerenzer published a study with Florian and Sabrina Artinger covering 950 managers in a large German public administration. Around 80 per cent admitted that at least one of the ten most important decisions they had taken in the previous year had been defensive, and on average roughly a quarter of those decisions were not in the organisation's interest. Preliminary data from large private companies pointed to even worse figures. These were self-reported answers, so reality is unlikely to be any prettier.

That is where the three weeks and the forty slides come from. The modern decision process is not built to reach the right answer. It is built so that, if the answer turns out to be wrong, the blame dissolves across enough signatures that it never settles on anyone. It is an insurance policy, and like every insurance policy it has a premium, paid in time, in missed opportunities and in that feeling familiar to anyone who has sat through an afternoon meeting where everybody already knew how it would end and pretended not to.

There is, however, a part of this my contemporaries like rather less, because it implicates us. We built those structures ourselves, my generation, when we reached positions of command. We built them for an understandable reason, which was to make up for judgement we could not guarantee in every person in an organisation that kept growing. Kahneman liked checklists for exactly that reason, while Klein distrusted them and explained why rather well. A checklist tells you what to do once a condition is met, but deciding whether the condition really has been met takes precisely the judgement the checklist was meant to replace.

The result is a loop that feeds itself. The procedure begins as a prosthesis for a missing muscle, yet a prosthesis worn long enough stops the muscle from ever forming. The fewer people learn to see consequences, the more procedures are needed to see them on their behalf, so the next generation learns even less. The waste of time we boomers observe with a certain smugness is not a flaw in the young. It is the bill for a system we designed, of which they are the users rather than the architects.

If I had to tell someone running an organisation what to avoid, I would start with the most natural instinct of all, which is adding a layer of approval every time something goes wrong. Each extra layer dilutes the blame and weakens the muscle, while the next mistake arrives anyway, just with more signatures underneath. I would also avoid punishing the good-faith error of whoever made the call, because Gigerenzer's study shows clearly that where error is stigmatised, defensive decisions multiply. Take away people's right to be wrong and you take away the only way there is of learning not to be.

Nor would I make the opposite mistake, the one my contemporaries all secretly hope for, which is bringing in a sixty-three-year-old to decide in place of the thirty-year-olds. That would just be another prosthesis, with grey hair and a higher fee. It works for one project and then leaves the organisation exactly where it was, plus a new habit of waiting for someone to turn up and decide.

What is really needed is far less elegant and far more uncomfortable. You have to give the thirty-year-olds real decisions, small enough to fail without bringing anything down but theirs enough to feel the weight, and then let the feedback land on them rather than on the committee. That is exactly the environment in which those of us who now decide in five minutes grew up. There was nothing noble about it, merely nobody organised enough to protect us from ourselves.

We took away young people's right to be wrong and now we complain that they cannot judge. I learned to see consequences because nobody ever spared me them, though I do not count that as a merit. It was simply bad luck, well spread out over time.