The Most Expensive Bias in Business … Is Ageism Wasting Your Best Cognitive Assets?

If I have said it once I have said it a 1,000 times, always keep you learning account open for deposits.

Some of you will recognise the name Steven Kotler, Author, Journalist and the cofounder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective and professed world leading expert on human performance. I stumbled upon his recent book ‘Gnar Country‘ which apart from leaving me envious of anyone who can find the time to ski 86 days in one year, it opened my mind up to a new dimension in Cognition with a reference he made to a book ‘The Mature Mind – The Positive Power of the Aging Brain’ by Gene D. Cohen, an American geriatric psychiatrist and a leading researcher in mental health and aging. Cohen transformed the scientific and public understanding of cognitive aging, challenging the long-standing belief that aging inevitably leads to mental decline. Instead, he showed that the aging mind can remain engaged, creative, and capable of growth.

Between these two books I found an interesting line of thought. To coin a phrase repeated like a religious mantra in Kotler’s ‘Gnar country’  – See the line, Ski the line – I applied the same logic. The harmony I deduced from this literary blend was:

• Cohen addressed what naturally emerges with age and why late-life creativity works.
• Kotler, what can be forcibly unlocked under stress, explaining how to hack creative states on demand.

What came through resonantly to me was the neglect of our very human potential viewed through these two dimensions. In boardrooms across the world, diversity is discussed with increasing sophistication and not a fair bit of derision, yet one of the most damaging and least examined biases remains quietly embedded in hiring and workforce strategy, ageism. Too often, experienced professionals are viewed as past their peak, resistant to change or surplus to innovation. This assumption is not only outdated; it is economically irrational in a world faced with an aging population. 

As Gene D. Cohen’s work on cognitive aging shows , modern neuroscience and organisational evidence tell a different story. Older adults are not declining cognitive liabilities. They are underutilised cognitive assets and many organisations are systematically leaving value on the table.

The belief that performance peaks early in life is rooted in a narrow definition of intelligence, speed, recall and raw processing power. Yes, some cognitive functions do peak earlier, but business leadership is rarely about speed alone. Strategy, judgment, risk calibration, systems thinking, ethical reasoning and pattern recognition, these capacities often strengthen with age. The mature brain integrates information more holistically, draws on deep experiential memory and regulates emotion more effectively under pressure. These are not soft skills; they are decisive advantages in complex, high-stakes environments.

Gene D. Cohen showed that intelligence does not simply decline, it reorganises. With experience comes what he called developmental intelligence; the ability to synthesise complexity, see second and third-order effects (The Terry Pratchett https://terrypratchett.com/ fans amongst you will recognise this as a theme in his Tiffiny Acin series) and navigate ambiguity without overreaction. In an era defined by geopolitical risk, regulatory flux, AI disruption and systemic uncertainty, these capabilities are precisely what boards claim they need, yet often screen out at the CV stage.

The irony is stark. Many organisations lament short-termism, shallow leadership benches and fragile decision-making, while simultaneously pushing out the very people most capable of long-horizon thinking. Ageism does not just harm individuals; it degrades institutional memory. When accumulated knowledge exits the organisation without structured transfer, firms are forced to relearn expensive lessons, usually in public, and usually at speed.

There is also a cultural cost. Homogeneous age profiles create echo chambers. Innovation suffers not because older professionals resist change, but because teams lack cognitive diversity across time, the interplay between fresh perspective and lived consequence. The most resilient organisations are those that blend generational strengths, energy with judgment, novelty with context, speed with restraint.

Policy, work design and corporate culture must catch up with reality. This means rethinking rigid retirement norms, designing roles that value mentorship and systems stewardship, and creating career arcs that allow reinvention rather than abrupt exit. It means measuring contribution by impact, not by proximity to youth. Critically, it means leaders must examine their own assumptions about fit, pace and potential.

The future of work is not a race for the youngest talent. It should be a contest for the most capable minds, regardless of age, ethnicity, sex, or the plethora of personal identities. Businesses that continue to sideline older professionals are not being progressive, they are being wasteful.

In a world where experience is hard-won, complexity is accelerating, and mistakes are increasingly costly, the question for leaders is simple, can you really afford to discard your most accumulated intelligence?