Hi everybody,
This publication—and the podcast it accompanies—was created in partnership with ENVI, the school founded by Catherine Barba, Carine Malaussena, and Charlotte de Charentenay to help freelancers and entrepreneurs grow their businesses. Through its DO TANK, ENVI helps companies anticipate and act on the transformations shaping the future of work—a mission I’m delighted to collaborate on with such an energetic, innovative, and generous team.
Among these transformations, demographics play a crucial role—a topic I explored in my book L’Atout âge, because I’m convinced it’s one of the most important (and often overlooked) forces reshaping work today. As our societies age and careers lengthen, we need to rethink how we organise work, manage talent, and define success across generations.
That’s precisely the focus of this episode of the DO TANK podcast by ENVI, where I had the pleasure of speaking with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, a global thought leader on longevity, gender balance, and the future of work. Together, we explore how demographic change is transforming careers, leadership, and HR through the lens of 100-year lives—an inspiring and urgent conversation for anyone shaping the workplaces of tomorrow. 💡👇
In HR circles, the demographic transition reshaping our world isn’t getting the attention it deserves. Whilst AI and climate change dominate headlines, we’re overlooking the fact that we’re living longer, healthier lives—and that our career models haven’t caught up.
Avivah has spent recent years evangelising and offering solutions. A former computer scientist who spent two decades working on gender balance in business, the Canadian/French expert now based in London has become one of the leading voices on longevity and the future of work. With her newsletter Elderberries and her Forbes columns, she’s helping all of us navigate the shift from a three-stage to a four-quarter life.
The four quarters framework
“We’re moving from the old demographic pyramid—lots of young and few old—to a square,” Wittenberg-Cox explains. “For the first time, there are more people over 65 than under 18 in many developed countries. It’s a completely new demographic shape.”
Yet our systems remain stuck in an outdated model: education until 25, work from 25 to 65, then retirement. That three-stage approach no longer fits lives that now stretch up to 100 years. Enter the four quarters framework: Q1 (0-25), Q2 (25-50), Q3 (50-75), and Q4 (75-100). The model borrows from accounting and business planning—everyone in the corporate world understands quarters—making it instantly accessible to the organisations that need to adapt most urgently to the new demographic reality.
“What’s really new is the third quarter,” she says. “We didn’t used to have 25 healthy, engaged years after 50 where people still need to work given the financial setup—and still want to contribute.” The challenge? Our career systems, pension models, and corporate mindsets remain designed for the old three-stage life and ignore our stretched lifespans.
The rise of chief longevity officers
Wittenberg-Cox has recently documented a fascinating trend: forward-thinking companies beginning to integrate demographic change into their strategic decisions. Some have even created roles like chief longevity officer. L’Oréal, Portugal’s Fidelidade insurance company, and luxury hospitality group The Estate are among the pioneers she mentioned in a Forbes column.
“It’s about getting the topic onto the leadership agenda in a transversal way,” she explains. These initiatives go far beyond HR and talent—they touch product development, marketing, AI adoption, and the ability to understand consumers in their 50s, 60s, and 70s as a major growth market.
She draws a parallel with the early days of diversity officers. “I don’t think this will necessarily remain a standalone position long-term. It’s more like the first wave of chief diversity officers, when companies started treating diversity as a strategic issue. Over time, it became embedded across the business—and the same will happen with longevity.”
The early movers tend to be companies with an obvious connection to ageing—beauty, insurance, healthcare. But Wittenberg-Cox stresses that the talent dimension matters across all industries, especially in industrial firms where highly specialised knowledge is at risk as boomers retire. “The issues of knowledge transfer and succession planning are not always addressed in time to prepare for this massive departure,” she warns.
Different motivations across quarters
One of Wittenberg-Cox’s key insights concerns the differing motivations between Q2 and Q3 workers. Q2, she explains, is “a more extrinsically driven phase”—people are building families, careers, reputations, and financial assets. Careers are essential to that accumulation.
Q3 shifts to something more intrinsic. “It’s about meaning,” she says. “People have ticked the boxes that were expected of them in Q2. By Q3, they’ve often emerged post-children into an empty nest. They’ve accumulated some wealth. They’re relatively successful. And then it’s like, ‘Okay, what’s next? Is that it? Or is there something more?’”
But there’s another group of women for whom Q3 isn’t about peak performance—it’s about catching up. These are women whose careers were derailed or slowed by the motherhood penalty in Q2, who spent years juggling childcare and / or elder care, who made career compromises that their male partners didn’t have to make. “They arrive at Q3 not in the phase where everyone should slow down, but needing to accelerate and accumulate the things they haven’t had enough chance to accumulate in Q2”. They haven’t built the same financial cushion, haven’t reached the same senior positions, and face Q3 with different urgencies than other Q3 people.
This creates a paradox: just as corporate norms expect workers over 50 to wind down, many women—whether driven by ambition or necessity—are ramping up. Meanwhile, at home, tensions emerge in traditional couples where men expect their partners to join them in retirement whilst women are saying, “Wait a second, that’s not at all what I want to do.”
Breaking down ageism
Ageism, Wittenberg-Cox notes, remains “the last acceptable bias” in many workplaces. It cuts both ways—against the young who aren’t yet in Q2, and against older workers deemed past their prime. “All our systems, everywhere, are designed for Q2. The challenge now is to flex and open up to these different phases.”
Overcoming this requires education and awareness at leadership level, plus fundamental flexibility in career models. “People should be able to work both younger and older in very different ways—more flexibility but with security,” she suggests, pointing to Swedish experiments with “gig security.”
She’s also adamant about the need for intentional intergenerational management. “Companies are already intergenerational—they have four or five generations working in them. The challenge is that it’s unconsciously managed. We need to become consciously competent at intergenerational management.”
Closing wisdom
When asked what she’d tell her 25-year-old self, Wittenberg-Cox laughs: “Don’t worry, it gets a lot better.” To her 50-year-old self: “You’re on the doorstep of the very best years of your life.“ And to her future 75-year-old self? “Stay curious, connected, and explore what’s there. Q4 probably has a lot more potential than we know or expect.”
It’s advice that captures the essence of her work: longevity isn’t a burden to manage but a frontier to explore—both for individuals and the organisations smart enough to adapt.
👉Listen to the full conversation 🎧
This written summary only scratches the surface of the more far-ranging conversation we had with Avivah. In the full podcast, she shares fascinating insights on cultural differences in how various countries approach ageing—from individualistic Anglo-Saxon cultures to more collectivist Asian societies—and her recent observations from Australia’s demographic awakening. She also discusses the concept of the “exposome” (how everything we’re exposed to throughout life affects our longevity), offers advice on creating new rituals for longer lives, and explains why going back to school at 60 was the perfect transition ritual for her own Q3. Listen to the complete episode of the DO TANK podcast by ENVI for the full discussion.
👉Also read: Navigating Change: The Midlife Journey. Laetitia@Work #76
👉Also read: The transformation of age markers. Laetitia@Work #85
👉Also read: Why midlife women walk out of corporate jobs. Laetitia@Work #67
🇨🇭 I’m in Lausanne, Switzerland, today (October 9), to take part in a conference organised by Insertion Vaud about the “labour shortage.” I’ll be speaking about how what we call a shortage actually reflects a deeper structural misalignment between working conditions and contemporary realities — especially the unequal burden of care work carried by women. When 60% of women work part-time, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the millions of work hours that could be regained — if only the motherhood penalty weren’t so heavy.
💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):
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Miscellaneous
🤖 AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity, Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano and Jeffrey T. Hancock, Harvard Business Review, September 2025: “As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.”
