specialty focus new-found pursuits ; to volunteer and work ; to develop new roles , and nurture others , including grandchildren .
They enthused about taking up new sports ; strengthening social ties ; joining community associations ; setting up enterprises ; and getting active on social issues .
All this started to paint a very different journey to the “ retirement and aged care journey ” businesses and providers had told us about .
More like one with a delightful array of “ hard to access ” opportunity points , but dominated by a mind-bending array of “ hard to avoid ” loss points .
Older people told us the impact of these unaddressed pain points accumulates and becomes very damaging . And that this is what “ ageing ” has become .
They told us that often there was little or no product or service available to help them get over the accumulated losses and get on with their lives .
And , even worse , the well-established aged care products that did address some of the losses came with mandated additional losses .
Not exactly a “ buyers-market ”! Which sent us back to see what we could learn from businesses ’ love of the customer journey .
It seems that “ mapping ” the customer journey has become an essential tool for business success .
Businesses begin with a number of personas , each with a range of scenarios , to ensure maps don ’ t become too generic and miss out on opportunities for new customer insights and questions .
Businesses never stop mapping , with 80 per cent of leaders saying their customers are changing faster than they can change their businesses .
Success for businesses is how relevant they can be to their customers , including the customers ’ experience with the company itself .
So , what would it take to get relevant products and services for older people ?
This is a question of what drives relevance and potency when the consumers of the service are not customers who can walk away .
And where providers don ’ t go broke from providing bad service .
We ’ ve tried individualised budgets ; government-mandated standards ; needs assessment ; person-centred care ; subsidising community leadership and effort ; provider competition ;
constructing a market ; client rights ; consumer engagement ; and a Royal Commission … to little avail .
So , instead , we asked some “ modern elder champions ” what they thought it would take for older people to get relevant products and services :
Chip Conley said they offer older people training in successful life transitions .
Joanne Earl said to include “ career ” and learning plans in older peoples ’ retirement planning .
Lynette Nixon said to deliver digital literacy training and support to all older people .
Julianne Parkinson said to use “ living laboratories ” to co-realise what can be expected from this life stage , then co-design whatever delivers that .
Joe Coughlin said to engage with longevity start-ups who develop products to solve problems .
John Spoehr said to share iterative innovations to re-imagine and learn about what works .
Stephen Johnson said to create an alternative “ learning ” peak-body for providers who address modern elder pain points .
Dan Buettner said to construct communities that nudge older people towards good habits .
John McKnight said success only comes when businesses , aged care providers and freely given community associations work well together .
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It ’ s all about staying independent , filling the day , getting care , and keeping the family happy .
Wolf Wolfensberger said managers need to have lived experience with the products and services they offer .
Ian Henschke said to publicise the new narrative of the “ modern elder journey ” drawn out of the life experiences of the 20 per cent older Australian who ’ ve already done it .
Marlene Krasovitsky said to stop thinking of older people as somehow less than the rest of us . Kay Patterson says to strengthen the protection of the human rights of older persons .
We liked this list for teaching us that aligning several transformative strategies is the way to get relevant products and services to modern elders .
We liked this list for its vision of modern elders , not just as engaged customers but also as citizens and masters of their lives .
But older people told us that in the first half of the “ modern elder journey ”, it ’ s hard to be a customer . And in the second half , it ’ s hard to be a citizen .
This means we ’ re all going to be needed in shifting the “ retirement and aged care journey ” to the “ modern elder journey ”.
With the promise of significant impact and profit for those who make the change . And for those who don ’ t ? Their meagre impact and profit will be entirely the result of holding onto the prejudice that older people are only ever “ consumers ” of whatever we dish up to them . ■ agedcareinsite . com . au 23