Ecosystem
The wider system that sets the goal and holds the budget and mandate: insurers, health systems, cities, families, and older people themselves as contributors, not just recipients. This is where problems, and their edges, get defined.
The problem
There is no product called longevity.
The tools exist. The capital exists. Capable people are working on the right problems. And still, prevention stalls, because it is both a public and a private good, and the public side isn’t funded.
We are using picks and shovels where we need high-speed rail. Great conferences, serendipitous networking and a pay-it-forward mentality are doing the heavy lifting of a missing infrastructure. That is not a system. That is goodwill covering for the absence of one.
The dividend
The benefit is real. It just doesn’t show up on anyone’s line item.
Jeff Maltz’s SilverRide will run two million rides this year. The prize isn’t the trip. It is chipping away at the roughly thirty percent higher mortality that comes with social isolation. That value is obvious to everyone at the front line and to no one holding a budget.
Multiply that across a population and five more healthy years is worth on the order of five percent of GDP. Prevention is the highest-return investment nobody is structured to make.
Directional, grounded in longevity-dividend economics: one added year of healthy life expectancy is valued in the tens of trillions of dollars. Scott, Ellison & Sinclair, Nature Aging (2021).
The framework
Three layers, one loop.
System outcomes don’t change because of one clever intervention. They change when the layers reinforce each other, and keep turning.
Infrastructure
The connective layer and common language that links data, insights and ideas. It needs a shared evidence base, shared-cost models, and above all a common vocabulary for what we are even measuring. We lack an ontology for longevity.
This matters more now, not less: the AI agents that will do the heavy lifting run on language. Get the vocabulary right and scale follows. Louis Tenenbaum points out there are only five typical bathroom configurations in most post-war homes. That one fact turns a bespoke nightmare into something you can design, prove and scale.
Experiments
Small tests on the ground. Trust before technology. Real people, real budgets, real bureaucracies, colliding with the idea early enough to learn what actually breaks.
It isn’t static, it’s a loop. Evidence from the experiments feeds the infrastructure. The infrastructure makes the case to the ecosystem. The ecosystem funds the next round of experiments, ahead of where the last one started.
The method
Strategic Doing
The discipline for getting loosely-joined networks, with no shared boss, to commit and move together. Short action cycles, reviewed every thirty days. It is the cadence that keeps the loop turning.
After Ed Morrison, Purdue Agile Strategy Lab.
The venue
Living Labs
The real-world settings where the experiments run with real stakes. Where trust and friction surface early, and a human stays in the loop.
The where. Strategic Doing is the how.
Proof
The loop is already turning.
SafelyYou
Natalie Barman watches over twenty-five thousand older adults and still keeps a human in the loop. The fall turned out to be candy left in the bottom drawer.
Adult day
Ariana Myers on serving the missing middle, the people who fall between Medicaid and self-pay, and are invisible to both.
HomesRenewed
Louis Tenenbaum treats the home as the care setting we now depend on but never designed for.
The ask
Ninety percent of older Canadians would take a free grab bar. Almost nobody gets one.
The shared vocabulary. The evidence base. The shared-cost models. Someone has to build the middle layer, and events alone won’t. If that is work you are doing, or funding, let’s talk.