From Boomers to Zoomers, generational categories have become a default lens for explaining behaviors at work. They feed into HR policies, team-building strategies, and workplace culture debates. Yet the sociological foundations of these categories are highly contested. Are members of a given generation really defined by shared values and habits — or are we simply projecting coherence onto heterogeneous groups?

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Combining desk research, discourse analysis and foresight framing, we traced the historical emergence of generational thinking and its appropriation by organizations. We studied how generations are constructed through media, marketing, and management discourse — and why this matters. We also conducted qualitative mapping of intergenerational tensions in hybrid workplaces, identifying concrete sources of friction (tool use, communication styles, expectations around hierarchy) and how they might be reframed.

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Rather than manage “generations”, organizations should design for intersubjectivity. That means cultivating cultures of explicitness (e.g. shared protocols around communication), creating space for storytelling across life stages, and investing in collective sensemaking tools. Inclusion isn't about decoding archetypes — it's about making space for difference without presuming it.