Living longer is generally described as gaining more years. True, but incomplete. It also exposes us to more complexity.

More years also mean more time for the world around us to change. Technologies emerge and disappear. Institutions evolve. Jobs and industries are transformed. Financial products multiply. Healthcare becomes more capable and more complicated. Families change shape. New risks emerge. New choices become possible.

And, of course, we change too.

We become parents, caregivers, patients, managers, retirees, widows, grandparents, and sometimes students again. Our health changes. Our incomes change. Where and how we live may change. The people who depend on us change, as do the people we depend on.

Longer life means greater exposure to both kinds of change. That may be creating a personal challenge and business opportunity we have only begun to recognize.

Longevity Is Changing the Entire Life Course

Much of today’s longevity conversation focuses on older age. But the consequences of longer lives don’t wait until retirement, age 65, 75, or some other milestone birthday. The impact of longer life ripples across the entire life course.

Education no longer necessarily ends in our early twenties. Careers may contain multiple chapters, with new technologies demanding repeated periods of reskilling. Parenting can overlap with caring for older parents. Retirement may involve several transitions rather than one departure from work. What we need from home may change as the lives we live change.

Consider the 45-year-old managing a team at work, two teenagers at home, and a mother who suddenly needs help getting to the doctor. Or the 68-year-old who is still working, learning another generation of workplace technology, and beginning to make decisions about what comes next. Or the vibrant 85-year-old who must work harder to maintain the life they want to live.

One person may simultaneously be an employee, caregiver, parent, patient, investor, and homeowner.

Organizations tend to meet us with a product, service, or solution for one version of us at a time. The irony is that we live all our roles at once.

Complexity Often Lies Between the Transactions

I think of this emerging challenge as a “Complexity Economy.”

Someone may have more information than ever and still be less certain about what to do. She may have multiple products intended to protect her future but no clear picture of how they work together. A technology may promise greater capability while requiring her to learn yet another system. A family facing a major transition may discover that the services they need sit across professionals and institutions that were never designed to work together.

There may be no shortage of information, products, services, or expertise. The complexity lies in how to put them together across one longer, coherent life.

Businesses have become remarkably good at making individual products, services, and transactions easier. The harder problem may now lie between them.

Here is the uncomfortable part: every company involved may be doing its job well.

A product works as promised. A transaction is faster. More choices offer greater personalization. Better information is available. More experts are there to help.

And still, a person’s life can be harder to navigate. Complexity can grow even while every individual part of a system is getting better.

Think of a twist puzzle. Every piece works. Move one, and the relationships among the others change. There is no single piece to fix. The challenge is navigating the whole.

Most organizations are built around discrete products, functions, transactions, and services. People experience complexity across lives.

Four Business Capabilities for the Complexity Economy

In a world where living longer is the new norm, greater exposure to change and related complexity is also the new normal.

So what does an organization need to be good at in a world like this? How much complexity can organizations reasonably continue to leave for people to manage alone?

From the person’s point of view, at least four capabilities are emerging.

Curate information. Information and choice are abundant. Attention and the ability to determine what matters are not. Value increasingly comes from helping people distinguish signal from noise and translate information into action.
Design experiences. Making one transaction easy is different from making a complicated journey understandable. Decisions connect to other decisions, often across domains and organizational boundaries. What matters is how well those pieces work together from the person’s perspective.
Extend capability. Technology should do more than automate transactions. Its greater value may be helping people do what they could not easily do alone: understand choices, remember, anticipate, coordinate, act with greater confidence, and often live with greater safety.
Cultivate trust. Complexity requires us to rely on experts, institutions, technologies, and recommendations we cannot fully evaluate ourselves. Trust becomes more valuable, not less. The question is not simply whether an organization can complete today’s transaction or deliver a service. It is whether it has earned the right to be relied upon tomorrow.

These are unlikely to be the only capabilities that matter. But they have something important in common. Each reduces the burden of complexity the individual must navigate alone.

Delivering these capabilities may require organizations to become something more than they are today. Not necessarily bigger, but broader in how they understand the lives of the people they serve.

From Complexity to Confidence

What do these capabilities ultimately provide people? Perhaps it is confidence.

Not confidence that life will become simple or that uncertainty will disappear. Instead:

Confidence that I understand enough to make a decision. That I know what comes next. That I have the capability to act. And that when I cannot manage everything myself, I know whom or what I can rely upon.

That kind of confidence may become increasingly valuable in a longer life.

The goal is not to eliminate complexity. Much of it cannot, and perhaps should not, be eliminated. More choices, technologies, and possibilities can make lives richer as well as harder to navigate.

The opportunity is to help people navigate that complexity with greater confidence.

What should we curate for people, and what should remain theirs to decide? Where should technology remove effort, and where should it enable greater capability? How do we create a coherent experience when someone’s problem crosses domains and organizations? What must an organization do today to earn the right to be trusted tomorrow?

These are not simply questions about engaging people in the marketplace.

They may be questions about what organizations will need to become in a society where people are living longer and living differently.

The Complexity Economy: What Longer Lives…