Wisdom Is No Longer Hierarchical

I’ve been wondering… why do we assume that wisdom always flows from older to younger? And what might we be missing if the generations coming after us are not just inheriting the future - but already sensing it in ways some of us cannot yet see?

Gen Z has been the "talk" of the office since they first stepped into the building - usually through a cloud of frustration, "quiet quitting" headlines, and an endless stream of think-pieces questioning their work ethic, loyalty, and expectations. They’ve been examined, labeled, and debated for nearly a decade, often reduced to a list of “demands.”

But what if their behaviour is not a list of “demands” at all? What if it’s a signal - inviting us to look more closely at the conditions shaping work, leadership, and meaning itself?

If this really is a signal, what does it show us when we look closely? According to Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey,89% of Gen Z say that having a sense of purpose is essential to their job satisfaction.This isn't a "perk"; it’s closely linked to mental wellbeing. At the same time, Randstad’s 2025 Workplace Blueprint shows the average early-career job tenure is now just 1.1 years.Often dismissed as disloyalty, this is better understood as a pragmatic response to a broken ladder. With entry-level job postings dropping by 29% since 2024, they aren't hopping away from opportunity - they are pivoting because the traditional rungs are missing.For many of us (myself included) commitment once meant staying - dedicating years, even decades, to a single institution. What Gen Z is revealing is not an absence of commitment, but a different relationship to it - shaped by a world that no longer offers stability in the ways it once did.

This skepticism has evolved into a desire for deep psychological distance. Recent research by workplace mental health platform Unmind reveals that 46% would choose to be "severed"- a reference to the television series Severance,where employees’ work and personal memories are split. When work is no longer a site of purpose - when it demands presence without meaning - it becomes something to be survived, or better yet, forgotten.This is the paradox Gen Z is living inside: work asks for everything - time, attention, identity - yet offers little room to be whole. This is not a desire to forget work altogether, but a signal of how intrusive work can become when purpose and boundaries erode. When work stretches into every corner of life - time, identity, attention - without offering meaning or dignity in return, people instinctively look for ways to protect themselves.

From aKnowledge Mindfulness perspective, the impulse to fragment is not the solution; it is the symptom. We do not become wiser by splitting ourselves into a “work self” and a “real self.” Knowing, Being, and Doing were never meant to be separated. When systems ask for constant performance without care or meaning, people adapt by creating distance - not because they reject work, but because they are trying to preserve what remains whole.This is the birthplace of “Taskmasking,” where47% of Gen Z workers admit to pretending to be busy just to appear productive. To me, this reveals something deeply concerning about how leadership is being practiced. If half of your workforce is "masking" their reality, you aren't managing talent - you are managing ghosts. They aren't rejecting work; they are rejecting the corporate theater that requires them to maintain a "work persona"that 52% say feels entirely separate from their real selves.Seen this way, the problem is not that Gen Z resists work - but that many workplaces no longer know how to hold people as whole human beings.

It’s important to pause here and acknowledge the nuance. Gen Z is not a monolith. Their relationship to work is shaped by geography, economic conditions, and political realities. A graduate in London navigating a housing crisis inhabits a different world than a solopreneur in Dubai, or a young worker in Texas balancing healthcare access and job security. What varies are the conditions; what remains consistent is the sensitivity to misalignment - and the refusal to pretend things are working when they are not, coupled with the drive to adapt to that reality. Yet, across these divides, a consistent pattern of "deprogramming" emerges. As 25-year-old Olivia explains in Dazed, it is an unlearning of the corporate fantasy - the slow dismantling of the belief that devotion to work will be reliably rewarded. Work is being “decentred” not out of apathy, but because the traditional markers of the “good life” - home ownership, stability, and security - are no longer secured through a 9-to-5. As those guarantees weaken, the logic of total institutional devotion begins to collapse.

A recent Forbes analysis, drawing on data from the Harris Poll, found that nearly six in ten Gen Z workers already have a side hustle- a higher proportion than any other generation. Rather than signalling diminished ambition, this reflects a shift in how ambition is lived: through portfolio careers, independent work, and multiple income streams that reduce reliance on a single employer.

Culturally, this shift is becoming visible far beyond the workplace. As Dazed noted, 2025 saw a wave of youth-led mobilisations in varied countries such as Kenya, Peru, Nepal, Morocco and Indonesia - often described, imperfectly, as a “Gen Z uprising”. These movements did not share a single ideology or outcome, but they did share a refusal to accept systems they felt no longer represented them.

What this reveals is not a rejection of leadership, but a challenge to how authority is earned. Authority is no longer granted by title, tenure, or institutional position alone, but increasingly tested through credibility - the alignment between what is promised, what is practiced, and what people actually experience. In a world defined by uncertainty, many young people are not waiting for permission to lead; they are learning to act, organise, and respond inside the unknown.

None of this is without cost. Living in constant adaptation - building parallel paths, holding uncertainty early, and carrying instability without institutional buffers - demands an emotional and cognitive labour that is often invisible. Sensitivity to misalignment is a form of intelligence, but it is also exhausting when systems fail to respond.

So why should older generations care? Beyond the fact that Gen Z are our children, colleagues, and future leaders - they are already shaping the conditions in which leadership must now operate. They are forcing us to ask whether leadership itself still offers a life worth living - not just a role to perform.

Over the next decade, Gen Z will move from the margins of the workforce to its centre.. But more urgently, as we increasingly offshore knowledge to AI, the only thing left that truly creates value is the human bridge: how we learn, sense, and make meaning together.

We cannot afford to lose intergenerational Knowing.But we must stop treating it as a one-way street where the “older” teach and the “younger” absorb. In a world of thinning certainty, wisdom is no longer a destination reached by tenure alone; it is a quality of attention sustained through change.

Every generation carries forms of wisdom shaped by the conditions under which it learned to live, work, and lead. None of us arrive neutral; we are all formed by the worlds we grew up inside. The point is not that one generation knows more than another. It is that each carries knowledge the others cannot access alone.

Some organisations are already experimenting with this shift. Companies such as PwC and Unilever have introduced reverse mentoring programmes, where younger employees support senior leaders in navigating digital tools, emerging cultural norms, and new ways of working - while experienced leaders offer strategic context and perspective shaped over time. The value lies not in role reversal, but in mutual recognition: each generation carrying a different kind of intelligence.

And if Gen Z is already forcing us to rethink how knowledge and wisdom travel, Gen Alpha will likely make the question unavoidable. Because they are growing up not just with AI, but with its consequences already woven into daily life. If we don’t learn how to listen across generations now, the gap will only widen.

This is not something I’ve observed only through research or reports. I’ve lived it. In my own work with leaders across generations - wearing different hats as a professor, a leader, a mother, and a researcher - I’ve noticed that the most meaningful learning rarely flows in one direction. It emerges in moments of listening, friction, and shared uncertainty. Again and again, I’m reminded that wisdom does not arise from knowledge accumulated over time over time, but from treating it as a living system - one that stays responsive to what is emerging now.

When these forms of Knowing meet, something more mature - and more humane - emerges.

With care for “All,”Dr. Laila Marouf and the KMD Team