Postlude
Dan L. Ward
BILL MAKI AND I met at an annual HRPS conference in 1980. While the conference had many great speakers, a dozen “hard-core” modeling and forecasting enthusiasts slipped away to meet in a suite one afternoon for a few hours to share comments on their approaches to what was then still called “manpower” planning. This original “data dozen” included Dick Niehaus, Jim Sheridan, Walt Garrett, and Tom Bechet, as well as Bill and me. Jim Walker made a brief appearance, but as the founder of HRPS, he had other obligations during the conference.
As the youngest and least experienced participant in the room that day, I was awed by the other attendees. I had been invited because of my proficiency with Bell Lab’s Interactive Flow Simulator (IFS). A few of the attendees thought the kid might possibly have some potential for the future. IFS was a “comprehensive” manpower-modeling tool, originally developed in response to EEO class action litigation. It was used by several dozen Bell System planners to create workforce forecasts for individual companies. IFS generated detailed forecasts by individual positions (as required by the class action settlement) for the million-plus employees of AT&T. It killed a lot of trees with 100-page printouts, but many thought it was the future for all workforce forecasting and modeling.
We talked about current practices and future directions, but no one in the room predicted a migration away from the grandiose mainframe FORTRAN computer models like IFS to the more discrete special focus applications we see today. It was beyond the realm of our awareness.
ADVANCED PRACTITIONERS UNITE!
Tom Bechet, Bill Maki, and I were featured as speakers at HRPS workshops and conferences. We evangelized for our computer models and used emerging tools like IBM-PCs and Compaq and Apple computers to teach others how to build their own models and forecasts. Rob Tripp attended one of our workshops and was immediately drafted into the group for the work he was doing at General Motors and later at Ford. The four of us regularly shared thoughts about ways to advance our field until Tom passed away.
During the 1990s, we held annual advanced practitioner colloquia to advance the state of the art. HRPS hosted the initial two sessions, but HRPS needed to expand attendance to a broader audience so hosting costs could be recovered. The core group rebelled because we wanted to retain the “advanced practitioner” nature of the event. The group began holding private meetings, hosted by various employers such as CitiCorp, AT&T, Texaco, and General Mills. The host provided a meeting room and basic refreshments, and the attendees covered their own expenses. The only additional “cost” to attend was a requirement for a thirty-minute presentation on your current work and active participation in the group discussion. It was an invitation-only event, but participants could invite anyone they perceived as a “worthy” participant.
Unfortunately, by the late 1990s, we found it increasingly difficult to get sponsorship for these meetings. I am actually the last of the original dozen from the 1980 event who is still working in the field. Without a sustained, strong advocacy core, the number of forecasting and modeling papers also declined by the year 2000, and the practice of SWP slipped into a relatively quiet period.
SWP’S REAWAKENING
In autumn 2010, Bill, Rob, and I had a conversation about the resurgence of interest in the field. We were pleased to see recent work, led by a variety of groups such as the Human Capital Institute, Infohrm, SuccessFactors, the Institute for Corporate Productivity, the Institute for Human Resources, the Society for Workforce Planning Professionals, and a variety of LinkedIn and Facebook groups. The field did not die; it had only entered a temporarily quiet period and is now exploding into a wide variety of general and special interest groups.
We were enthusiastic to see the revival of interest in SWP. Better and more user-friendly tools were coming online. We believed the next generation of SWP would have very exciting prospects. We also, however, shared a concern that many of the recent advocates seemed unaware of the historical practices and progress.
Some very talented people were starting from scratch and consequently reinventing the wheel. We saw others making mistakes we had encountered and mostly solved, twenty years earlier. Lessons learned were not being shared. The field seemed largely stuck in covering old ground and generally unaware it was doing so. We hoped we could pass along some of our accumulated knowledge from our combined 100-plus years of SWP. This might save the current generation weeks, months, or even years of effort if these people could leverage the past experience and not repeat some of the hard-knocks lessons we endured.
THIS BOOK
Bill, Rob, and I quickly realized this was beyond the scope of an article, and this book began to take shape. We wanted it to be a book that we would enjoy reading—not just an academic treatise, but also not just a benchmarking compilation. The concept matured into a collective work, drawing on some of the best minds in and around the field, with four major subcollections of chapters.
The first section would briefly provide an overview of the evolution of the field to put things in context. The second would have practical experience chapters by people who are successfully practicing various aspects of the field within major organizations. The third section would focus specifically on analytics that form the central core of the field. The fourth section would have chapters from a few thought leaders on where the field will be going next.
We invited more than forty others who had established reputations for their impactful results within or on the edges of SWP to contribute to the four sections of the book. Most were happy to participate, and you are reading the result of these collective efforts.
CONTINUING DIALOGUE
Bill, Rob, and I also hoped this book could spark a continuing dialogue. The field is evolving quickly today. Tools are becoming more flexible, more sophisticated, and sometimes even simpler to use. We want the book to encourage more contemporary sharing events—not necessarily commercial conferences primarily focused on revenue generation, but more in line with the advanced practitioners’ colloquia of twenty years ago. We believe social media and virtual meeting venues provide incredible opportunities for more real-time dialogue. Information when you need it, not stockpiled for a once-a-year event.
The LinkedIn discussion group, Strategic Workforce Planning, has invited readers of the book to share comments about ideas discussed in the book and to participate in discussions about future directions.
The LinkedIn SWP group is not associated with any vendor, but is a loose collection of people with shared passion for SWP topics. There are other groups with similar passion for SWP, but Rob and I wanted to stay with a grass roots approach that was not formally hosted by a specific association or vendor. We wanted a noncommercial venue where interested parties could share or test non-proprietary tools and techniques. We also welcome participation by emerging discussion groups who may not as of yet have achieved critical mass with their own efforts. We encourage you to drop in and connect with us.
If you are not already a LinkedIn member, you will need to register for access. Basic access is free and you can sign up at:
Once you are a registered LinkedIn user, you will need to apply to join the Strategic Workforce Planning members group. At the time this was written, the group had 2,400 members from around the world. Ms. Lacey All is the group manager and has agreed to approve membership for the readers of this book. There is no charge associated with membership, we only ask that you participate in the group discussion.
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=77062
SEEDING SOME DIALOGUE: FLASH MOB SWP
Per the preceding comments about initiating a continuing dialogue, we hope to seed speculation about an initial scenario for the longer-term prospects of our field: a flash mob approach to SWP. Scenarios are valuable for stretching our thinking. These ruminations are not constructed as a classical scenario design but rather are along the lines of thinking out loud about what may be, with the hopes you will join in the fun.
Where We Are Today
In the future, we may not need a new version of this book. Strategic Workforce Planning may not exist in a form we would recognize today. It is not just that the definition will continue to evolve as it has in the past. Our current SWP tools were mostly designed and optimized for twentieth-century organizational constructs. Most of the SWP enhancements we have witnessed over the past forty years have been in the nature of faster, better, and cheaper ways of doing the same old things. Indeed, we truly can measure better, understand more, and make more improved and accurate forecasts. The concept has evolved to adopt a broader concept of “workforce” to include people who are not just company-badged “employees,” but also temporary, contractual, or jointly aligned workers from multiple organizations. Despite these evolutions in organization scope, tools, techniques and jargon; the definition of the right person at the right place and time—where “right” refers to alignment with the organization’s strategic interests—is still accurately used for SWP for most organizations. To quote Peter Howes, “it’s all about the gap” between supply and demand for talent. Yet this definition may not fit in the future.
In The Ghost in the Machine, philosopher Arthur Koestler suggested that traditional human organizational structures are always doomed to failure as a result of the core nature of people.1 He observed that people inevitably try to sustain organizations beyond their appropriate life span. Organizations are rigid and based on architectural concepts. He predicted that more adaptive biological models were needed. He envisioned semiautonomous groups that had no fixed structure, but rather would constantly align and realign on a temporary basis to engage in activities of mutual benefit or interest. He called these holonic organizations.
Where Will We Be Tomorrow?
While Koestler’s holonic organizational metaphor did not evolve as he predicted, social media has spawned the incredibly fast growth of a phenomenon that resembles his concept, known as flash mobs.
Could these flash mobs be the early signs of a future when all manner of human activity may be accomplished as a function of a real-time labor market for the identification, capability confirmation, and deployment of resources?
Was the open source software concept that created products such as Linux a sign of things to come?
Are traditional approaches to organization, structure, and planning about to be overwhelmed by a just-in-time approach to work?
The Arab Spring protests evolved from the real-time connectivity of people using social media on a scale never before witnessed. The revolutions occurred too quickly to be controlled by local governments using traditional approaches to maintaining the status quo. The next cycle may be even faster in some countries. Boycotts and social protests are conceived and executed literally overnight. More benign flash mob-like events have occurred for a variety of community service and charity events.
Disaster relief has already entered a new era where “unofficial” groups respond to emergencies long before traditional emergency services arrive. Team Rubicon is one example. (See http://teamrubiconusa.org/.) This informal network of military veterans began in the aftermath of events like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan. Rubicon volunteers connecting via social media have mobilized their chainsaws to clear roads of storm damage before the first of the official first responders have even loaded their trucks.
Some traditional emergency groups have warned that these “uncoordinated” efforts will result in the wrong supplies being collected and compounding the disaster instead of helping. However, advocates say these efforts use real-time supply chain management concepts. They suggest that these new groups are more adept at quickly responding to specific, actual needs than are the traditional organizations. Does this sound like a competitive turf war with the old school trying to snuff out the new, nontraditional competitors? Progress is inevitable, and those who resist it will eventually change or die. Change is hard but inevitable.
SWP exists because throughout human history, we have learned that it takes time to develop or identify special talents needed to preserve, maintain, or improve activities beneficial to a way of life. It takes time to develop the needed expertise. SWP improves our ability to anticipate demand and ensure an effective supply. As Dave Ulrich suggested in the last chapter of the book, the next challenge may be how to acquire abilities and capabilities, and the SWP challenge may be in how to strategize for this resource planning, not using “employees” but rather by effectively mobilizing temporarily aligned resources, organized under a yet to be defined concept of new “leadership.” The next-gen SWP may involve time frames and recruiting processes that are hard for a twentieth-century thinker to imagine—not unlike the limited ability of nineteenth-century buggy whip manufacturers to conceive of the impact of new transportation breakthroughs.
How Do We Get There?
It is hard for this traditionally trained human capital economist to visualize exactly how the path might evolve from a flash mob to the real-time creation of a next-generation tablet alternative to iPads. I must, however, recognize that this failure of my imagination does not mean it will not happen. Not only is it possible; it may even be inevitable in a world where customer evaluations of performance could easily replace traditional certificates and degrees as primary credentials. If we could review the actual customer ratings of someone’s work over the past five years, would we really care what degree or certificate he or she had from a twenty-year-old training program?
Frankly, I cannot yet visualize the go-forward path for next-generation SWP. I am asking for your help. The community of people who read this book is greater than just the sum of the individual readers. Share insights. It is better to be on the front end of the curve, thinking about what will happen, than to be dragged along at the back end, wondering what happened.
How about an SWP flash mob? Embrace the possibilities! Stay tuned for dates and times. . . . See you at:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=77062
Reference
1. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: Penguin Books, 1967, 1990).