What those of us further along actually owe the next generation

This article is part of the Wisdom Gap series. You're reading part 4. Here is part 3

The comfortable story we tell ourselves

There is a story that experienced leaders tell themselves about mentorship. It goes something like this: “I am available. I have offered advice when asked. I have been generous with my time in meetings and on panels. I have shared what I know when the opportunity presented itself.”

I told myself versions of this story for years. And for years, I believed it was roughly true and roughly sufficient.

It isn't. And I think most of us, if we are honest, know it isn't.

Being available when approached is not the same as transferring wisdom. Answering questions when asked is not the same as creating the conditions in which real formation happens. Appearing on panels about the future of leadership is not the same as doing the slow, unglamorous, deeply personal work of actually bringing someone along.

The comfortable story lets us feel generous while remaining, in practice, largely inaccessible. And in a moment when the traditional container for professional formation has been substantially dismantled -- when the accidental mentorship that used to happen in the margins of entry-level work is disappearing along with the jobs -- the comfortable story is something we can no longer afford.

Especially when we are the ones doing the dismantling.

Let's be honest about who made these decisions

The generation currently deploying AI as a primary efficiency and headcount reduction strategy is, in the majority of cases, the same generation that benefited fully from the entry-level container now being removed.

We developed our judgment in those early years. We built our social calibration through the unglamorous work of showing up, reading rooms, and navigating hierarchies that had real consequences. We absorbed our pattern recognition through proximity to experienced people who didn't always know they were teaching us, and who couldn't have articulated what they were transferring even if asked. We built our scar tissue through real decisions with real stakes in contexts where people remembered what we did.

That formation shaped everything that came after. It is the foundation on which our careers, our credibility, and our capacity for the sustainability work we now champion were built.

And we are removing it. Not maliciously, in most cases. But deliberately, in pursuit of efficiency gains, profit margins, and competitive positioning. AND if we are being fully honest, with a considerable amount of fear about being left behind by the technology itself.

FOMO, it turns out, is not just a young person's problem.

The entry-level jobs disappearing are not abstract casualties of inevitable technological progress. They are specific developmental opportunities being eliminated by specific decisions made by specific people in boardrooms. People who had those opportunities themselves and are now, in effect, pulling the ladder up behind them.

I have sat in those boardrooms. I understand the logic. I also understand that understanding the logic does not absolve anyone of the consequences.

What we are actually sitting on

Let me be direct about what those of us with decades of experience actually carry. And why it matters more urgently now than it ever has.

We carry pattern recognition that cannot be Googled. The ability to walk into a room and know, within minutes, whether the culture is healthy or performative. To read a set of financials and sense what isn't in them. To hear a strategy presented confidently and feel, in the specific way that only comes from having watched confident strategies fail, exactly where the load-bearing assumptions are most likely to crack.

We carry scar tissue. The decisions that didn't go the way we planned and that we had to live with in contexts where people remembered. The relationships we mishandled and had to repair, or couldn't repair, and learned from either way. The moments we optimized for the wrong thing and watched the consequences arrive slowly enough that we almost convinced ourselves they were someone else's doing.

We carry a relationship to time that the next generation has not yet had the chance to develop. Specifically, the felt understanding, not just the intellectual acknowledgment, that decisions have consequences that arrive long after the decision-maker has moved on.

And here is the part that should stop us cold. The next generation is being denied the conditions in which they would naturally develop these same capacities. Not by accident. By the efficiency calculations of the very leaders who benefited from those conditions most.

We are, in the plainest possible terms, consuming the seed corn. And then wondering why the next harvest looks uncertain.

The hoarding problem

Here is what hoarding looks like in practice, because it rarely announces itself as hoarding.

It looks like being too busy for the sustained engagement that real mentorship requires, while making time for the things that are professionally visible and rewarded. It looks like sharing polished lessons -- the retrospective wisdom that has been cleaned up and made presentable -- while keeping the messy, embarrassing, genuinely instructive failures private. It looks like engaging with young professionals when they are impressive and already on their way, rather than when they are uncertain and most need contact with someone who has navigated genuine uncertainty before.

It looks like waiting to be asked, in a world where the people who most need what we carry often don't yet know the right questions to ask.

It looks like approving AI adoption strategies in our organizations without asking: what was this role actually building in the person who held it? What happens to the pipeline of human formation when we remove it? Who is accountable for that cost?

I have done these things. I am not proud of any of them. And I think they were, in each case, a form of self-protection dressed as appropriate business judgment.

The sustainability community, of all communities, understands the cost of treating formation capital as an externality — a cost to be minimized rather than an asset to be stewarded. We make this argument constantly about natural capital, about social capital, about the long-term costs of short-term extraction.

We need to make it about ourselves. And about the decisions we are making right now, today, about AI deployment in our organizations.

What deliberate wisdom transfer actually looks like

I am not arguing for martyrdom or the dissolution of appropriate limits. What I am arguing for is intentionality. Intentionality applied to the questions of what we do with what we know, and to how we deploy AI in ways that account for the developmental costs we are currently treating as invisible.

Deliberate wisdom transfer has a few specific characteristics that distinguish it from the comfortable story.

It is sustained rather than episodic. Real formation doesn't happen in a conversation, a meeting, or even a series of meetings. It happens through ongoing proximity. Through being present across multiple situations, including the difficult ones, over enough time that the person you're working with begins to absorb not just your advice but your actual way of navigating.

It is honest rather than polished. The most valuable things I have ever received from people further along were not their curated success stories. They were the moments when someone trusted me enough to say: here is where I got it wrong, here is what it actually cost, here is what I would do differently. That kind of honesty is a profound act of generosity. It is also, in my experience, genuinely rare.

It is reciprocal rather than hierarchical. The most effective intergenerational exchanges I have witnessed were not transfers from the knowledgeable to the uninformed. They were genuine exchanges, in which the person further along offered pattern recognition and long-horizon perspective, and the person earlier in their journey offered proximity to current reality, fluency with emerging tools and contexts, and the specific kind of questioning that only comes from someone who hasn't yet learned what's supposed to be impossible.

The next generation is not coming to us empty-handed. They are coming with things we need too. The wisdom transfer works in both directions, and right now, it doesn't work as well as it could.

The specific ask

Let me be as concrete as I know how to be.  We created this problem, and vague good intentions will not be sufficient to address it.

First, inside your organizations. The next time an AI adoption decision crosses your desk that involves eliminating or substantially reducing entry-level roles, ask the question that is almost never asked. What was this role actually building in the humans who held it? What is the plan for building those capacities another way? Who is accountable for the formation that is being removed, along with the headcount?

These are not anti-technology questions. They are stewardship questions. And they are exactly the questions the sustainability community has spent decades insisting that businesses ask about natural capital. Apply the same standard to human formation capital. Now. Before the gap widens further.

Second, find one person. In the early stages of their career, who is genuinely trying to do meaningful work at the intersection of business and sustainability. Not the most impressive person in the room. Not the one who already has three offers. The one who is uncertain, who is asking real questions, who hasn't yet learned to perform confidence they don't feel.

Commit to sustained engagement with that person. Show up consistently. Share the failures, not just the frameworks. Create the conditions in which they can ask the questions they're actually sitting with, rather than the questions they think they're supposed to ask.

And then stay in it long enough for something real to transfer.

What's actually at stake

The sustainability transition is not ultimately a technical problem. The technologies we need exist or are close enough. The economic models that could replace extractive ones have been demonstrated. The science has been clear for decades.

What the transition requires is human beings capable of holding the long view under pressure, building trust across genuine conflict, making decisions whose benefits arrive after they are gone, and caring enough about what comes after them to absorb real costs in the present.

Those human beings do not emerge automatically. They are formed through experience, consequences, and proximity to people who model a different relationship with time and responsibility.

We are those people, for the next generation. Whether we act like it or not.

We built our formation on conditions we are now removing. That is the debt. Deliberate, honest, sustained wisdom transfer is how we begin to repay it.

The container is gone. The formation still has to happen. And the only way it happens now is if we choose — deliberately, uncomfortably, and with the same long-horizon thinking we have spent our careers arguing that business needs to adopt — to make it happen.

It is time to practice what we preach. Loudly, and in the specific direction of the people coming up behind us.

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