RESET.

WHAT IF THEY'RE NOT THE PROBLEM?

French high school students are taking to the streets. Companies struggle to attract younger employees while shutting out experienced candidates. Different generations, different frustrations, but one uncomfortable question: what if the problem isn't the people, but the institutions they're expected to fit into?

Since late September, French students have been blockading their schools over absent teachers, cancelled classes and inadequate resources. According to figures reported by L'Étudiant, 7.5% of teaching hours were lost last year in French middle and high schools because absent teachers weren't replaced. Behind the protests lies a simple question: how do you prepare for the future when the system responsible for preparing you is already struggling to keep its promises?

But another observation caught my attention.

A few days ago, I heard journalist Adeline François suggest an unexpected connection on RTL radio. Restrictions on smartphones in French high schools had been tightened at the start of the school year, and weeks later students were protesting in the streets. Her hypothesis: smartphones had been the "invisible trigger" of this anger. Once students looked up from their screens, they began paying attention to the world around them, and they didn't like what they saw.

There's no proof that phone restrictions caused the protests, and the problems students are protesting against existed long before September. But the hypothesis made me look at the situation differently. What if this generation isn't simply rejecting the world it inherits, but exposing what the rest of us have stopped questioning?

LISTENING ISN'T THE SAME AS CHANGING

On October 7, after weeks of protests, France's Ministry of Education announced a platform to gather students' views, alongside discussion sessions in schools. Listening matters. But it often takes a crisis before institutions start questioning what isn't working, and it isn't clear what they are prepared to change: the problems within the system, or the assumptions it was built on.

That question reaches well beyond education. Schools and businesses face different challenges, but both are places where generations meet, expectations collide and inherited rules shape people's futures. Both are dealing with a world that no longer looks like the one they were designed for.

TWO WORLDS. ONE WORKPLACE.

Recently, an entrepreneur I'm working with on multigenerational employment shared something a human resources director at a major construction group had told him.

"It's not that we aren't meant to be together. It's that we live in two worlds so far apart that we need someone in the middle to help us reconnect."

That stayed with me. She wasn't describing one generation that was right and another that was wrong. She was describing people who share the same workplace but no longer share the same understanding of it. And she wasn't asking for another policy, platform or process. She was asking for a person, someone who could bridge the distance between two ways of seeing the world.

I wonder how much of what we call generational conflict is really a failure of the institutions meant to bring generations together.

RECRUITMENT EXPOSES THE CONTRADICTION

Recruitment makes it hard to ignore. In an OpinionWay survey for Grant Alexander, 89% of recruiters recognised experience as an asset. Yet roughly one in three admitted having rejected older candidates at management's request.

At the other end of the workforce, companies say they need younger generations, but often criticise them for their attitude to authority, their supposed lack of loyalty or their different expectations of work. Research published by Welcome to the Jungle found that 84% of surveyed candidates had decided not to apply for a job because they couldn't see themselves fitting into the company's culture, and three in four said they had left a job because they didn't feel they belonged. These findings aren't specific to Gen Z. They point to a wider disconnect between people and organisational cultures.

Older candidates can be excluded before they get through the door. Younger employees can get hired, only to find themselves expected to conform to values and behaviours they don't share. The mechanisms differ, but the contradiction is the same: we say we value experience and turn away experienced people; we say we want fresh perspectives and expect younger employees to adopt the thinking of those already in charge. We want every generation in the workplace, provided it follows the rules of the generations that designed it.

So the real challenge may not be making people over 50 more employable or Gen Z easier to manage. It may be asking what we mean by employability, commitment and professional value in the first place. Why should experience become less valuable with age? Why should loyalty be measured in years spent at the same company? Why should authority depend so heavily on hierarchy? These questions challenge the assumptions our organisations operate on.

WE DON'T NEED AN UPDATE. WE NEED A RESET.

We have become extraordinarily good at modernising organisations: recruitment platforms, artificial intelligence, engagement surveys, training programmes, retention strategies. We measure more, analyse faster and optimise almost everything. But upgrading the tools doesn't mean questioning the thinking behind them.

A school can introduce new technology while keeping an outdated approach to learning. A company can automate recruitment while still filtering candidates through assumptions inherited from the past. In both cases, we risk getting more efficient at reproducing the limits of the system we need to rethink.

Modernisation improves how a system works. Reinvention asks whether it still works for the world it serves. That's the perspective shift for me. The question isn't how to make younger generations fit into existing institutions, but how to reinvent those institutions in response to what younger generations reveal about the world.

This isn't about handing everything over to the young. No generation, including mine, has a monopoly on understanding what comes next.

THE PROBLEM WITH MY GENERATION

I'm 50. I belong to a generation that experienced life before the internet, then watched digital technology, social media and artificial intelligence transform almost every part of it. We remember the world before these changes, and we've lived through the transition.

That experience matters, but it can also become a trap. It helps us understand how the world was built, while making it harder to question the assumptions that shaped it. I've watched our tools evolve at extraordinary speed. I'm less convinced our ways of thinking have kept pace.

Which brings me back to that HR director, looking for someone who could reconnect two worlds. I think my generation has a role to play here, not because we know better, but because we've experienced both sides of a profound cultural shift. We can help bridge the gap, but only if we're willing to learn as much as we teach, to stand beside younger generations rather than above them, and to accept that what worked for us may not be right for them. The reset starts with us too.

And bridging generations will achieve very little if the institutions bringing them together remain unwilling to change.

THE WORLD WE LEAVE BEHIND

In my previous Perspective Shift, The Lost Generations, I questioned our tendency to describe younger generations as lost simply because they no longer follow the paths we recognise. Now, watching students protest outside French high schools while businesses struggle with recruitment and retention and sideline older workers, another question emerges.

We ask young people to prepare for the world of work. We ask older people to prove they still belong in it. We ask schools and companies to adapt to changing expectations. But adaptation assumes the underlying model is still right.

The problems facing schools and workplaces are not identical, and they can't all be explained by generational conflict. Together, though, they expose the limits of institutions that keep asking people to fit into structures built around yesterday's assumptions. The world we leave to the next generation isn't necessarily the one it wants to keep building, and the people challenging it may be the ones who can help us see what needs to change.

What if, instead of asking the next generation to find its place in the world we've built, we asked what kind of world it wants to build, and started building it together?

That's where I'd start. Before changing methods. Before upgrading tools. Before deciding what needs fixing.

Perspective Shift #05 · What Makes Us Human