Experience or Youth?

While building a team or when we are looking at restructuring because of crisis, there is always a tendency to look at just cost as the major driver. Often that would mean going down on the collective experience of the team. The argument in favor of such a strategy is to show how fast the technology and knowledge changes and how the old knowledge is no longer relevant; in short experience may not have that much weight and cannot justify the cost in these fast changing times. Is that true? Some learning from experiments with birds show an interesting view.

White-crowned birds experiment - capturing 30 birds on their migration to south California, Mexico - from Alaska/Canada in Seattle. Shipped in crates blindfolded to Princeton, New Jersey. 15 adults and few near adults made it back after course correcting from East to South West. The young ones did not fare that well. Similar European experiment where the birds are exposed to magnetic pulse and transported to a different location yielded opposite result in the sense the adults did not fare well while the young ones did the course correction to their destination - "The ‘map’ is established by experience." - the research paper notes!

Inference is that while the magnetic map is 'learned' and if that learning was confused by the magnetic pulse, adults who rely on their learning fail. On the other hand, the NJ experiment did not change their learning, just posed a new problem and adults solved it by their accumulated learning on migration while the young ones that did not do any prior migration could not course correct.

So if we consider the current crisis and pandemic is a new problem that can be solved with past learning - because we as humans faced prior pandemics and economic recession - we will value experience as it is just a new problem. Question is whether the world - Government, Private Organizations - will consider it that way? Time to remind us of the quote from Bernard Shaw - to combine the experience with youth!