HRevolution 2011 in my garage?

Jason-

I hope that you had a miserable time in Chicago this weekend, I was home with the kids and watched about 47,000 hours of Curious George. Being a grown-up can be downright brutal at times.

The HR blogosphere (which, fortunately for me, happens to be just around the corner from my house) has been abuzz about a couple of things the past few days. Lots of folks talking (and whispering and tweeting and blogging and screaming) about HRevolution and about China Gorman leaving SHRM, and about what these things might mean to the future of this work.

I do not know China Gorman, but some people that I respect think pretty highly of her and I did see her doing a good job of providing a face for SHRM where it did not really have one. It clearly reflects well on her that so many folks are disappointed to see her go, but part of what I hear in this conversation is concern about the role and direction of SHRM.

In the noisy, “pay attention to me” intersection of HR and social media, SHRM is the easiest target in the world for anyone that wants to find a large credible “friend” or a large credible “enemy.” I think that people who are legitimately about moving this work forward know that SHRM is not the problem or the solution, but contains elements of both as it is a reflection of the craft, and not its creator. I like to throw a stone or two at SHRM from time to time myself. It is fun, easy and safe, especially since the people at SHRM have real jobs and are not likely to have the time to pay any attention to me. I also enjoy being invited (and paid) to speak at SHRM events local, regional and national and the interwebs are chock-full of hypocrites like myself.

We love to throw stones at large institutions, but large institutions (SHRM, the auto industry, congress, Big Bacon) are a product of what we did (and what we did not do) yesterday. Stop worrying about what SHRM is doing. Change your organization, tell your story and help someone else change their organization. If you do these things, you will be moving the profession forward in a very real way.

I personally do not have an organization so I am probably just going to lie down. Talking about change wears me out.

And then there is HRevolution. This was kind of hard to miss because the people that were there spent all last week talking about it on Twitter and on their blogs and in their sleep, they talked about it all weekend, and they are still talking about it right now…as far as I can tell, they are really an annoying bunch of self-obsessed, self-promoting jerk offs and I am filled with rage, bitterness and jealousy that I was not able to spend the day with them on Saturday. I am going on record right now saying that I will be at HRevolution 2011 if I have to host it in my garage and provide the play doh myself.

Since I was not there, my perspective on this unconference is probably the most insightful one and you are all welcome for my insightfulness. And my humor. And my good looks. I would also like to take this opportunity to make it clear that this is technically an unpost on an unblog. I do not know what HRevolution was like and obviously cannot speak to its value, but I do know there was a lot of sharp folks there that are very passionate about this work. But in the spirit of evolution (and revolution) there are a few traits that I believe are becoming increasingly important to those wanting to help create the future of this body of work.

Curiosity: I think that we need to ask more question and do a better job of seeking out information from different places. Questions are powerful and can determine the direction of our growth. Are we asking good questions, big open-ended questions? It can be easy to talk about all of the stuff that we do know, but to wonder about the stuff that we do not yet know is different. Are we looking outside of our networks and our profession for new ideas, new archetypes, new models, new language?

Critical Thinking: Social media is a tricky thing because if we are not careful we can use it to just replace the old talking heads with new more hip talking heads with iphones. Are we using our new tools and new connectivity to distribute power? Are we putting more power in the hands of the practitioner? Are we developing greater discernment? HR has been very susceptible to fads, so called “best practices” and shiny new metrics…even those measuring nothing that matters. Are we getting better at making the decisions that are right for our organizations?

Courage: If you want to help create tomorrow you have to be willing to walk out to the very edge of today and that can be a scary place to be. I would imagine that this topic showed up at HRevolution either formally or informally because I know that there were a lot of smart folks there with a lot of knowledge and expertise. And when you know your stuff it eventually becomes a question of courage. Are you willing to tell the truth and help your organization to tell the truth?

Maybe we can dig into these themes a bit more of the next week or two, I know that you will have some interesting perspectives as an internal practitioner.

-joe

The New School of Human Resources

Jason-

Just in time for the holidays! We now have (based on what we believe the future holds for business and the organization) a framework to inform next practices for the Human Resource function. I have compiled, compressed and summarized a bit, but these are the big pieces that jump out at me:

• HR as the Source of People and Relationship Science: Functions like marketing and design seem to have left HR in the dust regarding understanding why and how people do what they do. This includes understanding of community and culture, which are both increasingly critical for business. HR seems resistant to challenging old assumptions and ideologies about people and performance and relationships. There is a tremendous amount of new research available regarding human behavior, that for some reason is not showing up in the HR domain (or business in general). The HR function should aggressively work to integrate knowledge and research (and people?) from the disciplines of social psychology, social cognition, design, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, communication studies, cultural studies, etc. I would say that the people who designed Twitter know more about human behavior than the vast majority of HR professionals and while that is good for Twitter, it is a glaring deficiency for the HR practice, and this is a big part of what makes HR susceptible to the latest fad and to solutions in search of problems.
  
• HR as the Source of People and Relationship Solutions: Human resources needs to fall madly in love with ideas and experiments and the pursuit of new solutions...not just in the implementation of "HR stuff", but also at the intersection of people and work outside of HR. HR needs to spend more time doing and playing and getting more comfortable with question asking, ideation, experimentation, and prototyping, social media, social networking and social network analysis. Mind mapping, decision acceleration, murder-boarding, open space technology and crowdsourcing all need to become standards in the HR toolbox. If a team or department in your organization has a performance problem a culture or collaboration problem or a poor relationship with customers or vendors can you solve it? Do you have an approach and the right tools to solve problems?
• HR as the Keeper of the Flame: If HR is to play a significant role in the organization it will be because it knows (better than anyone else) the people and the culture. If it knows the people and the culture then it should be the keeper of the brand, the legacy and the organizational story. This work is either not done or it is being done by others right now, but I think that HR, which potentially sits at the center of everything could be more ideally suited to to play this role...and this is the role that has the potential to change how we do business. This is really about whether we are who we say we are as an organization and that is something that buisness is desperately in need of right now.

So.

The New School approach to Human Resources...knowing people, delivering solutions involving people and sharing the story with people. Not necessarily easy, but simple and powerful. Also, these are all actionable today. We can do better at these things starting today.

A final comment on this topic...maybe this is not "HR"...I do not care what we call it...it can be called / housed / titled any kind of way, but these are things that business needs and they do represent a large opportunity for HR to become a transformational player.

We all have choices to make.

"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."
-W. Edwards Deming

The Future of H.R. - part 4

Joe,

I've chewed on your list and I think that all of these are important areas for the HR department of the future (and probably of today as well). However, I think that one important thing was left off the list. When you look at this list, you might forget that HR is in the business of people. To that end, I think that HR teams need to become like Tom Cruise's character in "The Color of Money" and become a "student of human behavior."

This isn't anything new, but HR should be the internal expert on why people do what they do. We should be curious and constantly studying the behavior of individuals and teams. Perhaps this isn't unique to the future, but as people continually evolve and change, so must the organization's understanding of what's important to them. Recently, I've heard a lot of talk about how the drivers of employee engagement has shifted during the recession. If HR isn't sniffing around to figure this out, who will be?

You ball. Where to next?

Jason

The Future of H.R. - part 3

Jason-

My man in Amsterdam. Sorry for my slow response, I blame it on the snow.

Good stuff in your last post. I think that having a strong foundation is always a good place to start.

I am going to add some of my thoughts based on where we think things are going.

Maybe we can work through the actual implementation and tactics involved with each of these together, but I am going to identify what I see as some of the next competencies for an HR crew…not necessarily individual competencies, but things that an internal HR function will have to be good at doing, supporting, sharing, finding or showing:

• technology: Human resources needs to become the resident expert on all things "social technology." I am not talking about systems or softwares that are specifically for HR, but the other stuff. HR should know social networking and social media inside and out, observe what other organizations are using and should be experimenting constantly. Not only for use in the work of HR, but also as opportunities to make other functions within the organization more successful.
• innovation / creativity: Human resources needs to fall madly in love with ideas and new solutions. We can no longer afford the expertise of what is "not realistic" here what "will never change." HR needs to support, promote and lead by example in tapping into the ideas of everyone in effective ways. Mind mapping, decision acceleration, murder-boarding, open space technology and crowdsourcing all need to become standards in the HR toolbox.
• speed: In my experience HR tends to tackle issues in a very methodical way. We spend a few months talking about an issue, agreeing that it is important we spend a few months researching that issue and then a few more months developing a plan and planning our massive roll-out. I think that there will probably always be some of this, but that HR needs to learn how to take small steps quickly...HR needs to get in the habit of experimenting and prototyping. In the year that it takes us to make a decision and plan a roll-out of something new we could have implemented several different versions in several different departments and learned a great deal.
• community and culture: I don't think many people get organizational culture and that applies to HR as well. Culture is huge. Culture is king. HR needs to be good at understanding organizational culture, knowing what its characteristics are and knowing how to help it evolve in the right direction. HR could probably learn some good stuff from people that have built and managed vibrant on-line communities.
• stories: I think that one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of HR is good stories. Real stories. Stories are more powerful than policy and more powerful than powerpoint. HR needs to become good at collecting and telling big stories.
• brand: This roll has been taken from them, but I believe that HR must become the keeper of the brand. This is going to require some hard work, as I do not think that there are a lot of HR folks that are up to speed on the art and science of the brand, but I think that this could be one of their most significant contributions to organizational success.

I would like to talk further about how these things translate into the shape and form of the HR function, roles, responsibilities and all of the other etc. stuff, but how do you feel about these?
-joe

The Future of HR - Part 2

Joe,

I think your lists summarized our prognostications accurately. So, it's on to the implications for human resources as this future emerges. I'm going to propose to we take turns outlining one concept at a time.

As a foundation for this discussion, I also want to clarify that I believe that the purpose of human resources for organizations now and in the future is to ensure that the organization has the human capital it needs to achieve it's objectives. Human capital for me means the right people in the right place doing the right things at the right times. Hopefully this definition of HR is at least fairly close to how you define it. How an HR function realizes this purpose in the future is the question we have in front of us.

As I look at our list of what's coming in the upcoming years, it jumps out at me how much needs to change and how much there is to learn. In order for our organizations to navigate this change, we need to build new skills, knowledge and perspectives quickly. To make this happen, the HR organization of the future really needs to master skills in teaching, coaching, and developing others. This means that where HR and training organizations are separate today, they cannot be separate in the future. Each interaction that HR has with an employee or manager should be treated as a teachable moment where they are empowering the individuals with new skills and abilities.

Here's a few things that HR departments need to consider today to begin preparing:

• Start with your HR team. Develop a learning culture with your team where they experience what it means to teach and be taught, coach and be coached. HR will need to be the model of learning in the organization.
• Evaluate the talent of the HR team. If your current staff has been focused on reactive, problem solving, compliance activity, some of them may not be suited for a learning focused team. The HR professional of the future needs to have strong people skills and a desire to help others learn and grow. Be diligent in setting new standards and diligently manage your talent pool to the skills you need in the future.
• Invest in teaching coaching skills to your HR staff. They need the formal tools to help others (particularly leaders) learn and grow. Coaching is not an intuitive skill and it requires training and practice.

What are your thoughts?

Jason

The Future of H.R. - Part 1

Jason-

Hope you had a good thanksgiving holiday, sorry for not getting back here sooner. Life happens.

We have been working on this question of Where Will We Go? for a while now and I think we are now getting to the good stuff. Before we start zeroing in on what all of this means for human resources work, I want to summarize what we have discussed so far.

We started by giving some thought to how business might be different in the future, and some of the key influences that we identified were:

• Importance of Innovation as opportunity for competitive advantage
• Increased rate of change
• Disruptive technology
• Importance of individualization and customization
• Importance of trust
• Importance of design

We then considered what these key influences might mean to the future of the organization, and we came up with:

• Organizational culture is going to be very important
• Understanding the value of ideas and information is going to be very important
• There will be a new relationship "of equals" between org and employees and org and customers
• End of management as we know it
• Transfer of authority, access and decision making to employees and customers
• Mo flatter, mo better
• Learning as super competency
• Transparency will be king
• Flexibility as a new norm
• Manager/leader as coach

Does that seem to accurately capture our conversation up this point? Let me know if there is anything I have left out or misrepresented. If we are both good with this, we can now move on to consider what this means for human resources.
-joe

The Future of the Organization

Jason-

So, let me try to summarize what we have pointed out as key influences changing business:

1. Innovation is becoming a prime opportunity for competitive advantage
2. The rate of change is increasing
   
3. Disruptive technology
4. Choice is becoming increasingly important (you said individualization and customization, can I lump those together as "choice?)
5. Trust is becoming a prime opportunity for competitive advantage
6. Design is becoming increasingly important
   

Does that accurately capture what we have sketched out so far?

I think that this seems like a decent list and that there is some evidence to support each of these trends. As I think about what this means to the organization, this is what comes to mind for me:

• Organizational culture is going to be really, really, really important. Culture has always been important, but culture plays a huge role in an organizations capacity to innovate, adapt new practices and technology, and build relationships based on trust. Honesty, transparency and authenticity are becoming critical and that is a big change.
  
• Understanding the value of ideas and information is becoming critical as are access to information and tools to share and organize information.
• The relationships between the organization and its employees and between the organization and its consumers will have to become much more interactive and "two-way" in nature. Employees and consumers (past, current, potential) have valuable information about a great many things and it is no longer feasible for that information to slowly "trickle up" to key decision makers. Employees and consumers have to be viewed as as scouts and forward observers.
• There is little (if any) case remaining for the profession of management as we now know it.
• Organizations are going to need to find ways to put more power and tools and resources into the hands of employees and consumers. I think that organizations will become less about specific products or services and more about building community and providing that community with platforms upon which they can build what they want and need.

Looking forward to seeing what you have to add to this.

-joe

Previous Posts in this Series:
1- Where Will We Go?
2- Game On
3- Thinking About Where We Will Go
4- Thinking, Take 2

Thinking about where we will go . . . take 2.

Hey Joe,

Good thoughts and thanks for getting us rolling on our Business 2020 discussion. I've been thinking and collecting notes on this topic since you first posed it. Predicting the future is a more daunting task than I originally anticipated.

Two issues you raised were on my list as well.

• Rate of Change. Speed is becoming critical. Not only the speed at which you change, but the speed at which you can adapt to the change around you.


• Technology. The disruption of technology has only just begun. Increasingly, more jobs will be replaced by technology leaving people searching to find different ways to create value.

Here are a few other thoughts I have about what the future might look like.

1. Individualization and customization of products will not longer be a differentiator but an expectation. Customers increasingly expect their products to be unique to their needs. As an example, the NFL has begum promoting that you can now order jerseys and shirts from your favorite NFL Teams from their website where you choose the design, color and what it says on the back. We expect to be able to customize everything and that will continue.


2. Trust is officially dead. Skepticism has long been a label of Gen X, but every generation is growing increasingly skeptical. People get lied to or spun everywhere they turn and it seems that there's no one to trust. So, transparency and full disclosure will no longer be a choice but a requirement on the part of organizations. Companies who can build loyalty and trust over time through their actions will have an advantage.


3. Design will be king. The ability to anticipate customer (and employee) needs and desires and design products and services to brilliantly meet those will differentiate the successful from the rest. This isn't just artistic design, but product design, brand design, communication design, organization design, etc. (Think Zappos, iPhone apps, and the Obama presidential campaign--all examples or brilliant design in one way or another).

It seems that we are collectively becoming more impatient and demanding as people. We want things our way, right now. I don't see that this trend will turn and certainly this trend will impact not only how we do business, but how we design our organizations as well.

On to the topic of the organizations of the future.

-Jason

Thinking about where we will go...

Okay, I will get this thing started.

Again, no crystal ball here, but these are some significant shifts or movements that I believe provide some valuable context for the discussion about the future of HR / Talent / OD.

I think that there are three forces currently changing business that will continue to change business for near future...and they are all inter-related to some degree.

1.) Innovation. For more and more organizations, more and more industries and even communities, regions and countries, innovation is the biggest and best opportunity for competitive advantage. This is significant and causing a lot of friction in organizations not built for innovation. The increased importance of innovation will continue to change the structure and strategy of organizations as well as the culture and the role of management and leadership.

2.) The rate of change. We live in a world of increasing volatility. New products and services are introduced more often than they used to be, executive leadership changes more frequently than it used to, ideas and information travel much more rapidly than it used to. This is also significant and will reward organizations that are nimble and most able to integrate new ideas and information and.

3.) Disruptive technology. I got a Motorola Droid phone last week and let me just say that we are not in Kansas any more. I bought my first PC in 1993 for about $2,500 and the phone that I bought last week for right around $100 and carry in my pocket does more for me than that Gateway computer ever did. Moore’s Law, the democratizing nature of Web 2.0 and the explosion of mobile devices all mean more and more power and choice in the hand of individuals...whether they be employees (current, past or potential) or customers (current, past or potential). This also is significant.

There are a lot of things changing in the world of business today and there will be a lot of things changing tomorrow. We continue to become more of a global marketplace, sustainability is becoming increasingly important, our economy is shaky...all of these things and many more are relevant. But I keep coming back to these three things as key drivers of change in the nature of organizations and how we get work done.

In my next post I will talk about how they are and will change the organization.

-joe

Predictions.

Jason-

I hear ya man. 2020 is a long, long way away. And, as you mentioned, things are changing more and more rapidly all the time. I am not necessarily looking for specific predictions about things ten years down the road...as I am not sure that will be of much value, but what will be some significant shifts playing out in the next ten years. For example will organizations continue to move away from hierarchical models towards networked models? And if we believe this to be true, what might that mean for HR (or Talent, or OD) or whatever we want to focus on.

And you can have your seat at the table, and I hope that it is a comfortable one. I believe that the action is moving away from the table out to the front yard, so that is where I am headed. I look forward to seeing what you have squeezed out of your crystal ball.

-joe

Where will we go?

Jason-

I have read, participated and listened to much talk in the past 18 months about the future of HR. I personally am not a fan of most of this conversation as it tends to be about "fixing" things that are in place today. My personal opinion is that business, organizations and how we create value are going through some really significant transitions and we need to have some clarity about that before we can really think about what HR (and Talent and OD and Leadership, etc.) needs to become. I like the points that the HR Bartender makes here about the future of work.

I personally am done talking about that illustrious seat at the table. I am done talking about HR as a strategic partner, yadda, yadda, yadda. I am however, very interested in how work and the organization is changing and how we as professionals in and around HR might play a valuable role tomorrow and the day after.

Over the next week or two, let's consider 3 questions. We can work through them one at a time and why dont we each provide 5 answers per question.

Looking down the road 10 years:
1.) How will business be different
2.) How will the organization be different
3.) How will work be different

So, lets meet back here in the next couple of days with 5 ways in which we think business will be different in 10 year...deal?

-joe