Month: February 2012

Back in September 2011 a friend emailed me saying he was planning a new book that will be a collection of articles that follow the evolution of strategic workforce planning (SWP). It is to be divided it into a historical section that will trace the early development of SWP practices, a larger section that will deal with current practices within a cross section of leading organizations and a final section that will offer some thought leader perspectives on future directions for this whole prospect of resourcing workforce capabilities.

He asked me if I would be willing to contribute a piece, saying he was "open to ideas, but I initially had in mind something from you that would be in the future directions section — perhaps suggesting some ways that virtual organizations may pursue to deal with cultural challenges when organizations are loosely tethered networks."

So, ever unable to resist a challenge, I said ok then. Until about the end of November 2011 this commitment remained in the back of my mind. This was partly because I know not much about workforce planning. Indeed given the world as we know it I am rather skeptical about the notion but maybe that is the point of my contribution.

So I sent an email saying "I guess I'm no technical expert on workforce planning, but I think there are some concepts that could be explored around what is a workforce? The thought of planning is also worth scrutiny. Then there's the question of why do we need to plan and over what time frame? The concepts seem to be tied closely to external context i.e. what value workforce planning in the Japanese tsunami scenario, or the collapse of Lehmans, etc. On this one maybe there is value in scenario or contingency planning e.g. what would we do if all the world's engineers were airlifted to Mars and were unavailable to work on earth? This type of thing."

My friend emailed back saying "There's a Churchill quote about D-day that paraphrases as from the time we hit the beaches, our plans were for naught, but the planning connections enabled us to prevail," Curious, and after some effort, I managed to find a more-or-less matching quote but it was from Eisenhower "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." So I ploughed on in my search and finally found Churchill's speech on D-Day, recorded in Hansard, 6 June 1944, cols 1209-1210, where he states that

"The Commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan. And what a plan! This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever occurred. It involves tides, winds, waves, visibility, both from the air and the sea standpoint, and the combined employment of land, air and sea forces in the highest degree of intimacy and in contact with conditions which could not and cannot be fully foreseen."

Later in November, having just come back from China, where the 'War for Talent', is in full play this came to mind and I emailed again saying, "Over the past couple of years I've been working in China with HR people who work for mainly US based multinationals and are very interested in workforce planning which has a whole lot of challenges for them. One of the Chinese HR people's frustrations is that their US HR colleagues don't sufficiently understand the Chinese context. Would a Chinese perspective be of any interest to you/the readers of the book? " He replied that it would. Thus, this week I have been working on that piece.

A quick glance at some facts and figures about China give the barest impression of the challenges and opportunities that face HR professionals and business people as they grapple with business strategies for growth in a country that many outsiders define as a single, comprehensible 'China' but what is, in fact, a country of vivid differences that almost defies definition. As James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, points out in his book Postcards from Tomorrow Square:

'The huge and widening gap between China's haves and have-nots … is only one of countless important cleavages within the country – by region, by generation, by level of schooling, by rural versus urban perspective, even by level of rainfall, which determines how many people a given area of land can support.'

Nevertheless some facts and figures serve the purpose of painting an impression of the scale of the country:
Population: 1.3 billion (2010 census)
Area: 9.6 million km2 (3.7 million sq. mi)
Capital: Beijing (largest city: Shanghai)
Economy: USD 10.885 trillion (2010 estimate) compare with USA: USD 14.624 trillion
Per capita: USD 7,518 (PPP) compare with USA: USD 47,123 (PPP)
GDP CAGR 1980-2010: 10% compare with USA: 3%
Cars per 1,000 capita: 128 (2008 estimates) compare with USA 779
50% of consumed crude oil is imported (42bn gallons in 2005)
China has 20 of the world's 30 most polluted cities and is the world's largest CO2 emitter
Sources: Wikipedia, World Bank

Beyond the facts and figures, an Economist Intelligence Unit report notes that 'in many sectors, China is now an emerged, rather than an emerging, market. It is the world's largest market for cars, air conditioners and LCD-TVs, to name just a few products. No doubt, China will soon be the greatest consumer of a whole host of other goods from medicines to designer handbags.'

For many non-Chinese multinationals (MNCs) China is an important market but not an easy one to enter or work in. 'China is making greater demands – especially on foreign companies with proprietary knowhow and cutting-edge technologies. Competition is already brutal. To build a winning business in China, foreign multinationals must now plan even more meticulously – as well as make tangible contributions to the host country's continued economic development.'

In this kind of situation the concept of 'workforce planning' defined as the process of getting the right people, with the right skills in the right jobs at the right time is almost laughable. The plan won't work. There is no way that HR staff can follow a systematic route to:

• Identify current and future numbers of employees required to deliver new and improved products and services.
• Analyze the present workforce in relation to these needs.
• Compare the present workforce and the desired future workforce to highlight shortages, surpluses and competency gaps.
• Plan how to address the gaps
• Address the gaps

But maybe the planning is worthwhile. So this past week I've been talking with seven Chinese HR Directors about (to quote Churchill) "conditions which could not and cannot be fully foreseen" in relation to their workforce challenges and how they think things will move forward. These are not on the scale of World War 2 but there is some resonance in reworking Churchill's statement. It is true to say that Chinese HR practitioners are involved in a "vast operation [which] is undoubtedly [one of] the most complicated and difficult that has ever occurred [in recent HR circles]. "

More on this when I have fully assessed and interpreted the responses.

During the past week someone asked me if I would come and teach an internal consulting skills course to her team. Simultaneously I had to submit an article for publication. (I am a regular columnist to the Chinese publication HR Value). What better synergy than spending time working on a consulting skills proposal, an article on consulting skills and then a blog piece on the same topic?

From a writer's perspective this is actually three totally different pieces of work as the audience is different, and thus the style, tone and content have to be different. Nevertheless the basic ideas are the same so there is marginal time saving in sticking to one topic. In fact this could be a good idea anyway. I came across a blogger who only ever writes about simplicity and earns his keep by consulting on simplicity. So the question I ask myself is "is singular focus better than scattergun?" But that is not to answer here.

Before looking specifically at consulting skills and the reasons for developing them let's answer the question "what is consulting?" Briefly, it is a method of exploring with a client an issue, problem, or question that he or she has, and then working with the client to develop a method of addressing the situation and together implementing the agreed solution. It is a relationship of collaboration and partnership and not one of command and control.

For HR professionals their 'client' is usually a line manager or operational business person. Traditionally an HR professional supplies technical expertise related to all aspects of the employee lifecycle. This includes recruitment and selection, training, career development, performance management, reward and recognition, succession planning, and employee law. In doing this transactional work HR staff are usually:

a. Firefighting in this arena. For example, many companies have very high employee turnover sometimes an average of 30% a year. Keeping the pipeline of new employees flowing to ensure business continuity in this situation is a challenging HR matter.
b. Being reactive to issues and problems as they arise. This usually results in HR staff deploying a 'solutions' based approach which may get the desired result but does not allow for other, perhaps better, results.

An alternative approach to the fire-fighting or reactive one is the consulting approach. Taking a consulting approach is more likely to result in the right solution to the issue. So how would an HR professional with consulting skills handle the line manager's request for a new performance evaluation process?

Take this example. A line manager emails his HR business partner saying "I want a new performance evaluation process. This one doesn't work." The HR business partner goes to see the line manager who says that his staff are not as productive as he wants them to be. He says that he wants the new process to include more levels of performance, higher rewards for high productivity, and penalties for low productivity. But the HR business partner does not go ahead and design a new process. Instead she asks a series of open questions, in four categories, to find out more about the situation.

Category 1: To get the background and context to this presenting problem. In this case the presenting problem is low productivity. So the HR consultant could ask questions like:

• What do you think contributes to low productivity? What stands in the way of getting to high productivity?
• How long has low productivity been an issue?
• What would a highly productive employing be doing?
• How do you recognize and measure productivity?

Category 2: To surface and challenge assumptions. In this category the HR professional asks questions like:

• What beliefs/values shaped your assumptions about the causes of low productivity?
• What assumptions contributed to the situation of low productivity arising in the first place?
• What do you assume encourages high productivity?

Category 3: To explore and imagine other possibilities. Here the HR professional might ask the line manager what are other ways of tackling low productivity beyond changing the performance evaluation process.

• What alternative ways can you think of that would encourage high productivity beyond a new performance evaluation system?
• What makes you think a new performance evaluation system will solve the problem of low productivity?

Category 4: To reflect on what's been discussed and to decide what to do as the next step. Sample questions here include:

• What aspects of this situation require the most careful attention?
• Having decided something is wrong/happening, what is the best response?
• Of the possible actions which are most reasonable? Why are the others not as reasonable?

These sorts of open questions may well lead to an effective solution to low productivity that does not require a new performance evaluation process. Think of all the possible reasons for low productivity and you'll understand why it is important not to agree immediately to one possible solution but instead to find out more and to thoughtfully challenge in order to get to a better solution.

Coming to a good understanding of the current situation is the first step in the consulting process. Subsequent steps are action planning, implementation, and reviewing. To work through the four steps with your client requires two sets of skills (additional to the technical HR skills):

• An operational skill set required to take the company forward as it develops its market reach, scope, and scale. This includes the skills of project management, facilitation, and evaluation.
• A personal skill set that includes critical thinking and questioning, probing and challenging assumptions (the HR practitioner's own and their clients'), influencing and negotiating, developing and presenting options, demonstrating business savvy, emotional intelligence, and taking accountability for acting.

Equipped with consulting skills and being confident in the consulting approach enables HR professionals to act as a proactive advisors providing critical input into the strategic initiatives of the organization and to become increasingly involved in the implementation of strategies. And this is what HR professionals should be doing – becoming strategic partners in the business – especially as many of the transactional and traditional areas of HR work can be outsourced.

If you want to develop in your HR career build up your consulting skills capability. There are several ways of doing this. You can:

• Take a consulting skills short course
• Train to be a Certified Management Consultant (see the UK's Chartered Management Institute qualification route
• Read books on the topic – two good ones are High-Performance Consulting Skills: The Internal Consultant's Guide to Value-Added Performance by Mark Thomas, and Flawless Consulting by Peter Block
• Join the Institute of Management Consultants which has global affiliates and a consultants competency framework that is worth looking at.
• Develop some of the competencies and skills that contribute to a consultant's toolkit – facilitation and project management are two of these.

Changing your focus from HR 'doer' to HR 'thinker' takes courage and skills development but it does open up opportunities for betterment to you and your organization.

So this week I sent off to the editor Chapter 5 of my forthcoming book on organizational health and started to plan out Chapter 6 which is on healthy technologies. (The book is coming out in December this year).

People ask me how I write. By this they seem to mean what is the process I go through to get words on a page. Do I plan things out? Do I just begin? How do I know what I want to say? The answer is that I have a rough idea of what I want to say – it feels rather like a lump of clay that I put on a potter's wheel with the idea that I will make a vase. Then as I begin turning the words something completely different emerges. I have the ability to knock it down and start again or shape it differently. And this is how I began Chapter 6. I know I want to write about healthy technologies – but what specifically?

Part of my writing process is that once I have roughed out the book contents I then open a folder for each chapter and put into the folder any articles I come across that I think will be relevant to that chapter. Additionally I boldly open a word document with the chapter number and title and just drop into it anything that could be useful when I come to writing that chapter. Thus in determining to begin actually writing Chapter 6 I looked through the articles I had for it, and at the random stuff in my Chapter 6 word document.

One of the random items was a piece that read "workers distracted by phone calls, emails, and text messages, suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana." This I'd got from the notes section of a book, Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar, that came free with The Observer, a UK Sunday newspaper on January 29 2012. and I thought it would be a good introduction to the chapter.

It had a website link attached to the quote, and because I invariably look for the source of the quotes I looked up the link. In this I found reference to Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, who had apparently done the research so I looked him up to see if I could find the original work. What I found was a nice piece by him saying "This study was widely misrepresented in the media", and giving the reasons why. The upshot of this digging around – which took a good 30 minutes was that I had to start again with my chapter opening since I don't want to give credence to something that isn't the case.

Thus I turned to the articles in my Chapter 6 folder and found one by Lucy Kellaway, a Financial Times columnist, You've got mail but you need to get your life back . This looked promising and I started down the road of investigating the source of her article. She mentioned TED Conferences, Chris Anderson so I looked him up. Yes, indeed he has created an email charter, "in response to widespread acknowledgement that email is getting out of hand for many people". It started out as a blog post which then metamorphosed in a three part thing: The problem, the solution and the charter itself which is actually on the home page so you read the charter before the problem and the solution. However, the charter makes some sense and readers are asked to sign it and share it – though I'm not totally clear what happens after that. Maybe a flood of emails from the charter originators? Click on their link "Join our Mailing List".

Right – so now I have the possibility of working up something about email health so I read more of the Chris Anderson stuff and find out:

"If you're not careful, it [email] can gobble up most of your working week. Then you've become a reactive robot responding to other people's requests, instead of a proactive agent addressing your own true priorities. This is not good.

This phenomenon can be thought of as a potent modern tragedy of the commons. The commons in question here is the world's pool of attention. Email makes it just a little too easy to grab a piece of that attention."

At this point, instead of starting to write the chapter my attention is grabbed by the hyperlink to 'tragedy of the commons' and I can't resist going to that to find out more. Within seconds I find myself reading the "influential article titled "The Tragedy of the Commons", written by ecologist Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968." This is not good either. I am supposed to be writing a chapter.

I pause to reflect on what I'm doing, or in this case not doing. I've found that one of the characteristics of my scheduled writing time is that much of it is spent on a) locating the primary source of stuff that looks interesting and b) then getting sidetracked by all the bits and bobs that this first activity puts in my path. But I rationalize in this instance by thinking that maybe the Garrett Hardin article (now in my articles folder) will come in handy someday if only I can remember it is there.

I haul myself back to reflect on healthy use of email. What's helpful to me in thinking about the chapter is that Anderson and his co-creators of the charter make the point that email overload is stressful, and they don't mean the healthy stress but the unhealthy " how am I supposed to deal with this?" kind of stress. And to relieve my own stress at the thought of tackling the work emails that have built up while I've been traveling the last few days I go back and read the comments on the Email Charter which made me laugh a lot. (Laugher is a stress reliever, as you may know).

To spend less time on email (thus reducing stress) was the suggestion that you can/should be terse in your responses – which is my style anyway, so now I can justify it. There's even the idea that people put a link in their signature block with one of two tag-lines: Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org or Too brief? Here's why! http://emailcharter.org.

So now I've done enough background research on email stress to give me some ideas and I'm going to start writing the chapter. But, oh, I've just remembered a good quote for the next time someone asks me about how I write: "Writing Is Easy; You Just Open a Vein and Bleed" I wonder where that came from? Maybe I'll look it up. It won't take a minute.

This week I got this question: "I wondered if you know, or have seen on your travels any great examples of specific organization structures for Innovation Labs?" The writer goes on, "In our view this is a specific environment where people are brought in to innovate the way in which we produce and sell our products and services. This will be separate to the business and will involve some new hires and some employees rotated out of the business. Have you seen any principles on structures to facilitate innovation?"

What's interesting about this is that current thinking appears to converge around the notion that innovation is best developed through business ecosystems. That is a form of intentional development of communities of economic co-ordination where multiple parties join forces to "coordinate innovation across complementary contributions arising within multiple markets and hierarchies," from this, if things go well, the business ecosystems co-evolve and adapt to continuously changing contexts. You can read more about this aspect in James F. Moore's paper Business ecosystems and the view from the firm.

One company that is clear about the value of innovation through collaboration is P & G which has established a program 'Connect + Develop' to foster innovation:

In 2001, P&G was in a period of declining growth. A company where the solution is always innovation, P&G knew it needed to accelerate its innovation development and increase its rate of innovation success. And leadership predicted, with the world continually getting smaller and moving faster, sustaining solutions would be found in collaboration, not in isolation. P&G launched Connect+Develop, a systemic, company-wide open innovation program charged with bringing the outside in, and taking the inside out.

There is a lot of information on the value of the business ecosystem for driving innovation, and there is some information on ecosystem business models, but further exploration yields very little in the way of how you structure them for success. This example is fairly typical of the findings in the field.

In fact, inclusive business ecosystems have been critical enablers in some, if not all, of the inclusive business models that have reached scale. One of the most famous cases is Aravind Eye Care in southern India. Aravind treats 2.5 million patients and performs 300,000 eye operations every year. Even though many of its patients are unable to pay, the hospital has a solid profit margin. That margin could only be achieved by strengthening the ecosystem around the core business to enable extreme efficiency and overcome barriers to scale. That ecosystem includes a lens manufacturing joint venture, research and training institutes, and civil society groups that organize patient screening events in rural areas.

So far, most practical guidance for companies has focused on inclusive business models. Relatively little is known so far about the concrete strategies and structures companies can use to build better-performing inclusive business ecosystems. Each member of the ecosystem has its own perspective, capabilities, goals, and incentives. How can they be encouraged and enabled to act in ways that pave the way for inclusive business models to succeed?

The downloadable report Tackling Barriers to Scale: From Inclusive Business Models to Inclusive Business Ecosystems from the Harvard Kennedy Business School develops the ideas in this extract, and has an excellent listing of relevant articles to follow up on.

What can we take from the business ecosystems discussions that might be relevant to structuring for R & D lab innovation? Well clues and possibilities that center around four aspects of the organization: space, people, process, and technology.

Space: design maximum room for collaboration – small meeting spaces, coffee areas, casual contact possibilities, and ability to reconfigure the space on an as needed basis allowing for what the urban theorist Jane Jacobs calls 'knowledge spillovers'.

People: whilst designing space for collaboration simultaneously recognize that much innovation is drawn from individuals thinking in isolation about a problem and solving it themselves. (Think Archimedes and 'Eureka'). Two recent popular articles Groupthink the brainstorming myth, by Jonah Lehrer and The rise of the new groupthink by Susan Cain, have come out strongly critical of putting team innovation interventions like brainstorming, and open plan offices above an individual's ability to innovate.

But as Reckitt Benckiser, developer of household products, has found structuring around teams and networks with diverse member enables strong innovation:

'We work in groups all the time, so team spirit is also very much part of our culture. We firmly believe that by having people from different backgrounds we get new ideas on the table much quicker than other companies. We have a very strong multi-national team and what we have accomplished is a team effort. If I have ten people with different backgrounds in a room they're not going to agree. As long as I have constructive conflict, by the end of the discussion they're going to come up with a perspective which is very different. That's what I want.'

Process: Structuring around work processes makes sense in an R & D setting (and most other settings).
See the work by Henry Chesbrough who argues that open innovation in products and services is the way forward. In Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era he explaings that by open innovation he means moving outside an organization's boundaries to innovate – for example by involving customers in innovation requires processes that support this kind of initiative, with the surrounding structures acting as support. See too the writings of Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School including The Innovator's Dilemma.

Technology: Keeping up to date with evolving technology is both an innovation enabler and an innovation requirement. Netflix, with known as a great innovator, (albeit with a recent mis-step on their business model) continues to evolve their business model by staying on top of the technology wave and using new technologies to enable their future success. In the past they successfully embarked on an experiment to show streaming movies via electronic devices, like their Roku digital player. Now they are experimenting with Webkit in your living room. See their tech blog if you are technically minded. Their organizational structures allow for the ongoing adoption of technology advances.

So while there may not be much specific information on structures for R & D labs there is a lot to draw on from the fields of innovation, collaboration, and business ecosystems. If you know of anything more specific please let me know.