Fostering intergenerational leadership and learning for more long-term, regenerative strategies across business and policy-making.

A key challenge across businesses and policy institutions is to boost our ability to simultaneously face immediate crises while pursuing a longer-term transition to a regenerative economy serving both people and the planet. The current gap between the aspirations set out in the Sustainable Development Goals and their implementation shows how difficult it is to bring both perspectives together. Too often, focusing on immediate challenges and needs trumps our concern for meaningful, systemic change. 

Rebalancing the short- and long-term requires more than technical innovation. Instead, we also need a change in the beliefs, mental models, and relationships informing organizations and institutions. A key dimension of this shift is the generational perspectives and voices included in strategic direction-setting and decision-making. Younger generations hold huge stakes in the environmental crises threatening their future. Yet, they’re largely absent from the decision-making on policies and business strategies shaping our collective way forward: For example, only 18% of global parliamentarians are under 40, while the average age of corporate board directors stands at around 63. 

The New Generational Contract, a joint initiative of the St. Gallen Symposium and the Club of Rome, supported by InTent, seeks to close this gap. We are convinced that enabling a greater involvement of younger generations in leadership is not just an ethical but a strategic imperative, helping to rebalance perspectives across different timescales and to shift towards regenerative strategies. Emerging evidence on three key pathways helps us understand why.

The Potential of Intergenerational Leadership: Three Pathways of Change

First, the current approach of selecting leaders primarily for their experience is sensible if the future environment is expected to be similar to that of the past. Yet, in our volatile times, experience can quickly become obsolete and comes with the risk of becoming prisoners of the assumptions and paradigms that have underpinned past successes. Meaningfully involving younger generations can help us escape this success trap and overcome aversion to changes in the status quo. For example, research finds that more age-diverse leadership teams are best equipped to enable sustainable business model innovation. This is because they combine exploitative learning from past experience and explorative learning towards new, at times risky ideas – enabling both hindsight and foresight. 

Second, the youth-led climate movement of recent years is a prominent example of how, on a global level, younger generations have succeeded in raising commitment to change. The same can happen on the organisational and institutional level: A wealth of findings show that greater age diversity on corporate boards is associated with greater awareness and results on corporate social responsibility and ESG. A recent study in Nature finds that younger parliamentarians are more likely to put meaningful environmental action and long-term perspectives on the agendas of national parliaments. 

Our third argument centres on trust. Trust in the eyes of key stakeholders is fundamental for sustainable collective action. Unfortunately, as the Edelman Trust Barometer shows, public trust in effectively addressing climate change has decreased for businesses and public institutions, particularly among young people. Here again, greater intergenerational leadership will be essential for organisations and policy institutions to address the mounting crisis of institutional trust to be able to shift towards a regenerative economy. 

Moving Towards a Regenerative Future, Together 

To leverage intergenerational leadership for a regenerative economy, our initiative for a New Generational Contract focuses on three workstreams: 

Research: To understand the reasons of where we stand on intergenerational equity, what hinders more meaningful involvement of younger generations in decision-making, and where solutions might lie, we engage in several research projects. For instance, the NextGen Value Creation Barometer is the first-of-its-kind global ranking of national economies’ intergenerational fairness. The Voices of the Leaders of Tomorrow Report surveyed young and senior leaders globally to identify conflicts as well as common ground and a way forward. Lastly, global, cross-generational workshops in the spring of 2023 helped us develop seven principles that detail how younger and older generations envision meaningful and ambitious intergenerational leadership to look like. 

Awareness & Advocacy: Grounded in such evidence and cross-generational consultations, the initiative has focused on raising decision-makers’ awareness on the need to experiment with more meaningful involvements of younger generations both in the business and policy sphere. That’s why “A New Generational Contract” was chosen as the annual theme of the 52^nd St. Gallen Symposium in May 2023, to serve as a global sounding board of the seven principles, and co-create tangible impact across the ca. 50 sessions of the symposium and among the 1000 global participants and ca. 400 corporate, public and non-profit organizations they represent. We sustain this momentum through high-level engagements, such as at the SDG Tent at the World Economic Forum, the United Nations Civil Society Conference, and our annual Cross-Generational Transformation Lab at the St. Gallen Symposium.  

Next to such focused, in-person engagements, global reach of our ideas and insights are enabled through strategic media interventions that specifically target decision-makers, incl. through articles in Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, Fortune Magazine, Yahoo Finance, the World Economic Forum’s Content Agenda, Manager Magazine, and a stream of articles in I by IMD (see here and here). 

Impact Projects: To move from vision and insights to tangible impact, the initiative partners implement a stream of impact projects. These include our Young Leaders on Board project, which brings young, outstanding leaders under 40 into the non-executive boards of forward-looking companies, to foster more long-term, sustainable strategies, and the Intergenerational Skill-share program, which facilitates a skills exchange between generations, upskilling for sustainable development and building tangible opportunities for intergenerational collaboration. 

Flavia Conti Rossini