← Directionally Correct, A People Intelligence Podcast
Directionally Correct, A People Intelligence Podcast
The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook - David Edwards - #174
01:06:01
Loading summary
Transcript101 lines
- [00:03]
Cole Napper
You recently published the book the Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook. How has the reception been? You know, what's happened since it launched, and what did you learn from the process?
- [00:18]
David Edwards
Well, I think the reception has been pretty good. You yourself have said some nice things about it, and I know you're slightly embarrassed that I have quoted you extensively on my email. Email signature now. But the things I was doing in Ericsson, I hadn't done that before and felt that that was a really palpable way of giving HR a voice at the strategy table. How is the work? Yeah, if the workforce isn't fit for purpose, how exactly how is that purpose then? Frustrated?
- [00:59]
Cole Napper
Well, let me. Let me ask you this, David. I think this is a really important question. I would say, like, we have one of the highest IQ audiences out there, but that doesn't mean that everybody that listens is familiar with workforce planning. Are you a person that has a lot of soul, David?
- [01:19]
David Edwards
I'm very. I'm very passionate about this subject. You know, people say I should get out more, but I. And I know there's a double. There's a double edge to your question.
- [01:50]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Welcome to Directionally Correct, a People analytics podcast with your host, Cole Knapper, and today's guest, David Edwards, the author of the Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook and chief workforce strategist at Dark Artistry. Hey, Directionally Correct fans. This podcast is dedicated to you to help democratize people intelligence for the world of work. If you're looking to support the podcast, please make sure to listen weekly. Subscribe to the Directionally Correct Substack newsletter. Sign up for the Data Driven HR Academy at data drivenhracademy.com Purchase Cole's Book People analytics, or check out everything else@colennapper.com
- [02:32]
Cole Napper
before we get into it, a quick
- [02:34]
Podcast Host / Narrator
word about HR bench the company powering this podcast. You know, when we all started in People analytics, we wanted to do strategic work building predictive models, workforce planning, advising the C suite, and most of all, quantifying the impact for the business. Instead, we spend months building dashboards and reports that should already exist. HR binge eliminates that entire phase. Your HRIS connects your metrics, calculate your benchmarks, populate.
- [03:03]
Cole Napper
This is not novel.
- [03:05]
Podcast Host / Narrator
This is day one, not quarter two. That means skipping straight to prescriptive analysis, storytelling, and taking action for the business.
- [03:14]
Cole Napper
Want to learn more?
- [03:15]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Book a demo@hrbench.com Directionals find out more about the company powering this podcast and building the future of people intelligence. As always, all opinions are our own, and thanks for being a listener.
- [03:29]
Cole Napper
Well, David, you recently published the book the Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook. How has the reception been? You know, what, what, what's, what's happened since it launched and what did you learn from the process?
- [03:45]
David Edwards
Well, I think the reception has been pretty good. You yourself have said some nice things about it, and I know you're slightly embarrassed that I have quoted you extensively on my email signature now, but, yeah, people have generally been extremely nice, extremely supportive. The strange thing is I've got no idea how well it's doing because. And I think you published through Kogan page as well. So you get sort of twice a year you get sort of a statement saying how you're doing. And I had one through at the end of March, which was up to the period about three days before the wretched thing was due to launch. So basically it said, yeah, you owe us 250 bucks still for the index writing. So I've got really very little idea as to sort of how it's done, but I think, yeah, I'm, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that people are finding it useful. What I, what I've learned from it. Well, the first is that don't expect to buy a brooding mansion on the, you know, the Cornish coast or something from writing a book, because that ain't gonna happen. The second is that 80,000 words isn't so bad or so difficult if you break it into chunks and into sections that you feel pretty good about. The other thing that struck me, though, is, I think, just a product of the times, and that is that things are changing so quickly, so substantively that parts of the book, to me at least, felt almost obsolete by the time they came out. Conversations about, let's talk about something more than just skills, let's talk about tasks as well. So seemed or felt very fresh back in sort of May, June of last year, and felt not remotely fresh by the time we got to the beginning of this one. The pace at which forms of AI have developed way outstrips anything I might have said in the book. Indeed, I might have been sort of quite. Not cynical, but just sort of, you know, oh, hey ho about it. I should have been a bit more prescient there.
- [06:33]
Cole Napper
Well, give yourself some grace, because I think there's many of people that are not as deep into this space as you are. And so having a, a mind like yours guide them through this process, even if it, you know, it feels like it's a little bit behind, it's actually eons ahead of where they are. And so it's still quite Helpful. The other little hack I found, and it's only helpful on Amazon, is they'll give you kind of like a little ranking of where your book stands. That's the only way I was able to find, like a proxy of how well it was selling in between. But that's just a little hack for you if you want to figure that out.
- [07:11]
David Edwards
Yeah, I have tried that on Amazon.com you get that sort of kind of number. On Amazon.co.uk, you just get lumped in as number 458,962, you know, in books. So. Yeah, but that can be a little bit demoralizing. But, you know, lots of people are publishing books all the time. I think this is still a very. A very fecund, fertile sort of space for people who are looking to sort of write about it. Because it's also changing so fast. The actual practice itself is moving at such a ridiculous pace. I wouldn't have. I'll give you a really practical example. So less than two years ago, I used AI to summarize templates that the people had submitted to me with their strategic workforce plans. And I got torn to shreds for using AI. Why should I pay any attention to an AI generated summary? Now, if you're not using AI to actually develop some of the insights, people might think there's something wrong with you. That's quite a sea change.
- [08:45]
Cole Napper
Well, I think there's a part of it too, which is I don't necessarily trust people's opinions or arguments against me if they're not in my best interest.
- [08:57]
David Edwards
Yeah, that's true. No turkey ever voted for Christmas or Thanksgiving. Right?
- [09:03]
Cole Napper
Exactly, exactly. Well, and you got into this space. Well, I mean, you've been in this space quite some time, but recently you were leading workforce planning at Ericsson before what you're doing at Dark Artistry now. Can you tell, like, how did more recent experiences that you've had in the workforce planning space inform what you wrote in the book and how you think about the evolution of workforce planning over the years as well?
- [09:27]
David Edwards
Oh, yeah. I remember we talked about strategic workforce planning when I was in the UK bank NatWest, and that's where I cut my teeth at this stuff. And some of the lessons I learned there are still relevant. Very much so. But I can now look back on that and say it was really nothing to do with strategic workforce planning at all. It was just taking a slightly more strategic view of operational workforce planning. The one thing probably that was strategic was that we were asking people to Set plans which were driving towards more strategic objectives, but what we weren't doing. So it was a pull rather than a push. What Ericsson taught me first was you've got to get in with strategy and you've got to believe that strategy is what is driving the workforce plan. The phrase I use a lot. Is your workforce fit for its future business purpose? Well, if you don't know what the business strategy is, then you're not going anywhere on understanding that purpose. But it was still locked into this annual cycle of we produce this strategy, we stick it in front of the board, we then get the business areas to put this together, and then they come up with their plans, finance and go, put a knife and fork through it, and then we give it to hr, and then on we go. And the. And so the long day wears on. What I think is certainly emerged for me was the importance of emphasizing risk, workforce risk, in the things I was doing in Ericsson. I hadn't done that before and felt that that was a really palpable way of giving HR a voice at the strategy table. How is the work? Yeah. If the workforce isn't fit for purpose. Exactly. How is that purpose then? Frustrated.
- [11:57]
Cole Napper
Well, let me ask you this, David. I think this is a really important question. I would say, like, we have one of the highest IQ audiences out there, but that doesn't mean that everybody that listens is familiar with workforce planning. Can you talk about three things here really quickly and what you mean by them? One is the word strategy, because I feel like that's one of the most overused words in businesses. And what does that actually reflect for a business? How does that lead to this word demand? The demand that goes into a strategic workforce plan? And then what relationship does that have to workforce risk that you just mentioned?
- [12:35]
Podcast Host / Narrator
And what.
- [12:36]
Cole Napper
And how does that play a role in workforce planning? Can you do that? Because I think that would be super helpful.
- [12:41]
David Edwards
Okay, I'll try to bundle all of the those three things up in one example, if I may. And it's an example that I've used a few times before in different contexts. But I make no apologies for making it a organization. Let's just keep it very sort of broad. Brush makes about $1.5 billion or so per year from its intellectual property and licenses to use elements of its hardware in other people's devices. And these devices are every day we've all got them. So it's not going anywhere as far as sort of its value to the organization is concerned. It is developing new versions of that Technology, it's research and development teams are coming out with new bits of hardware. But also of course, now we are seeing more extraterrestrial forms of communication. So it is a communications company. So networks which are no longer reliant, perhaps on radios, but instead of being satellite driven, the R and D is the generative engine of the organization's future revenue and its future direction and ability to not only maintain customer share, but hopefully to improve upon it. So the strategy is to make these elements much more necessary to the businesses that they're selling it to. It is a pure sales thing. So the strategy is we build more of the more clever stuff. We can therefore sell more clever stuff and therefore our customers will continue to want us forever in a day. How that drives the demand then within the demand side of the plan is in a number of different ways. Firstly, it is going to hopefully mean that our R&D department continues to be necessary because it's going to be successful. It's only going to be successful if we have people who are able, not only able to sell, but are able to sell that stuff. And being able to sell that stuff is different to being able to just sell. The generic skill of being able to sell something is not the same as the generic capability to sell that particular piece of equipment, because the capability requires product knowledge, it requires understanding a business context. And it's not just a sort of a smart patter. Where the workforce risk comes in is with the people who are licensing and defending the intellectual property of these new bits of hardware. And in this particular context, let's say this is a 100,000 company. Only 270 of that hundred thousand are actually responsible for intellectual property rights and licensing. But most of them are copywriters, due diligence, drafters, all of this kind of thing. There's only 40 people in that small function who actually identify the IP, write the licenses, negotiate them with the relevant companies, and then defend that intellectual property if they feel it's going to, if it's being breached, they're the ones who go to court and they know all of the history. And half of those people, half of that 40 are 55 and over. So by the time the next license renegotiation comes around, in five years time, they're going to be even older because they're not going anywhere. Their attrition rate is zero, retirement rate is next to zero. We've got people who are over 65 there, but one of these days they're going to leave either voluntarily or let's Put this delicately, involuntarily. What are we going to do then? That's what I call workforce risk.
- [17:31]
Cole Napper
Yeah, no, that's perfect. No, I really appreciate that explanation, David. I think that is super clarifying for the role that, you know, the strategy, demand and workforce risk play for businesses. What role does data play in what you just described in terms of doing strategic workforce planning?
- [17:57]
David Edwards
I'll preface this by saying that no one should ever spend their lives waiting for the data to get to be perfect. It's never going to be perfect. But the data plays a critical part in this. Indeed, I wish it played more of a part in this than it currently does. Certainly from a people analytics standpoint, I wouldn't have been able to, to identify those kind of risks had I not had access to an extensive ability to drill down into not only what people are, what they do, how old they are, frankly, what their attrition rates are, all of the relatively straightforward things. But all I was doing was sort of layering different sort of bits of the sieve one atop the other, so that we could sort of get down to sort of the brass tacks. Now, what would have been even better would have been if I'd been able to associate, say, the revenue generated by each of those critical individuals because of their association with one or more of the other licensors of the, of the product. And I'm sure that that association exists, but it's simply not visible within the data. What would be better still, perhaps in future, would be to synthesize that with estimates of future license revenues or future growth in particular markets, so that we could then calibrate that risk to more specific individuals. Because typically, succession plans are not based on a group of people, they're based on individuals. Being able to pinpoint key person risk is arguably something which would be a value add to the business in understanding the other risks to its strategy.
- [20:09]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Yeah.
- [20:10]
Cole Napper
Do you like promoting your book?
- [20:12]
David Edwards
No.
- [20:16]
Cole Napper
It's very painful, isn't it?
- [20:19]
David Edwards
It's properly painful. It really, really is. Despite appearances, I'm actually sort of quite shy and retiring and, you know, it's the sort of, the kind of, the old tears of a clown kind of thing that people are, not necessarily the sort of the, you know, the show people that you, you think they are just because they stand up and they speak, you just have a particular sort of immunity to, you know, doing that. So, yeah, I don't like the whole business of feeding the LinkedIn beast and saying, hey, look how good I am, and all of this kind of stuff. It doesn't, it doesn't sit well with me, but it's a necessary evil.
- [21:11]
Cole Napper
Yeah. What's the relationship in your mind then between strategic workforce planning and analytics and why do they need each other?
- [21:22]
David Edwards
Oh, well, I'm glad you said why do they need each other? Because they absolutely do. Strategic workforce planning can't simply exist in a vacuum. It has to be informed by evidence. And I'm increasingly of the view that you shouldn't plan strategically for the whole workforce so much as plan for those parts of the workforce that are themselves strategic. Now, analytics is the only thing which is going to tell you that. Oh, okay. So yes, you might have a gut instinct about those kind of things. You know, at this stage of the cycle, anyone who's good@Agentic AI is presumably strategically important to a business, but there are other things as well that you can use for that. But having the evidence base is fundamental. I would contend with all the greatest respect to Amit Mahindra, that it's. Yeah, it's not a case of one or the other. I think people analytics needs a vehicle for the resolution of the things that they call out. And I think also strategic workforce planning, because it is necessarily looking at business strategy, is able to apply context to the analytics that are coming through. That's my view. Is it always going to be that way? Heaven only knows.
- [22:59]
Cole Napper
Ahmed, obviously a friend of the podcast. What is his perspective?
- [23:02]
David Edwards
He thinks if it's a toss up between people analytics and SWP people analytics wins every time. I subscribe to a more collaborative view.
- [23:20]
Cole Napper
What role? I would say kind of my, you know, I love workforce planning and I've done both the strategic and the operational side of things. I have always had a bias which has put me at odds with the field at times that the operational work is the most important because it's. It is what business leaders value, frankly the most. It's the easiest to show the tangible impact and frankly is the least likely to sit on a shelf and not be acted upon. What is your perspective on the operational side of things versus the strategic?
- [23:56]
David Edwards
I think that's definitely the right pragmatic view to have because businesses are, for good or ill, driven by the quarterly cycle, the annual cycle, the imperative to look further into the future and prepare for it is not as great, is nothing like as great as the imperative of making sure you get sort of, you know, you show progress quarter on quarter by quarter, year on year, therefore the ability to forecast with reasonable accuracy the workforce needs for the next year or so. Yeah, are self evidently vital to the business as it stands. What I think. And yet strategic workforce planning at the moment seems to be going through a little bit of a. I was going to say renaissance. I'm not quite sure if it was ever quite as sort of, you know, whether there was a first wave of love with swp. But there is a recognition now that things are changing significantly and whether we like it or not, big change is coming down the pike. It's just that we're not quite sure exactly what that change is going to be, how do we prepare for it? And I think the purpose of SWP may change to being something more about how do we respond to change, to sudden flips of direction as opposed to what are our workforce or capability needs of the next year going to be.
- [25:59]
Cole Napper
It seems like, and I've said this quite a few times and written about it a few times as well, that it's like evolving into AI workforce transformation. Like a lot of roads are leading there, not all roads are leading to Rome, but many roads in the workforce planning space are leading to how do we plan for human beings, but also how do we plan for the supply and demand impacts that AI has on the workforce.
- [26:23]
David Edwards
All right, yes, I agree.
- [26:25]
Cole Napper
People are looking to folks like you to help them decode this because, you know, big wig David Edwards, author of the Strategic Workforce Playing Handbook, should have all the answers, right? So what are all the answers, David?
- [26:39]
David Edwards
Okay, let me, let me break this to you gently, Cole. I don't have all the answers. In fact, I'm quite sort of swept along by the pace of, of change. I wrote a slightly sort of angsty article on LinkedIn about, I called it AI ate my brain earlier on this week. And there was a phrase in there which was not mine. You know, credit where credit's due is a guy called Phil Robinson who was the original CMO for Salesforce. So, you know, I suppose that's a feather in his cap. But he said there's a recursive elegance to AI now being used to define how AI is going to change the workforce. And all of a sudden I see it being used in a very different, see strategic workforce planning taking a, a much more granular approach to workforce change, to future workforce change. I don't think. I never thought it was about headcount anyway. I always thought it was about telling organizations what kind of bigger boat they needed to build without telling them necessarily exactly how long the bigger boat needs it to be. But now it's an awful lot more about how is the work going to be affected by AI? And what capabilities does that mean we might no longer need? And which ones do we need to start to develop? Now, none of that will come across as remotely new to anyone, but I think that the involvement of strategic workforce planners in trying to define how that work changes is a new development. And it poses questions as to whether or not that is actually SWP's responsibility at all, or whether this is something that should be done by an organizational effectiveness team instead.
- [29:04]
Cole Napper
Are you a person that has a lot of soul, David?
- [29:12]
David Edwards
I'm very, I'm very passionate about this subject. You know, people say I should get out more, but I, and I know there's a double, there's a double edge to your question. And I'll come to the second part in a minute. I, I started in this trade, skill, craft, whatever you want to call it, helping people who were at risk of losing their jobs find another role within the same organization. Because I could see with my own eyes, and the data helped to reinforce it, that people leaving through one door were being replaced in a different door by people doing pretty much the same role. It's just that we didn't realize that the people leaving could do what the people coming in were doing. And so I cut my teeth helping to redeploy 500 people. Lots of other great people involved in that as well. So credit to them as well. But the, the visceral sense of delight that you got from seeing people and hearing people say thank you for what you just did for me. You know, to me, that made that, saving that one person probably made all of the other heartache completely worthwhile. So, yes, I have soul about this. I also have soul because, yes, it is true, I used to sing in a 17 piece soul band.
- [31:03]
Cole Napper
Of course you did.
- [31:04]
David Edwards
Of course I did. Which I wrote, which I absolutely loved. I did it for about 20 years. I only started doing it when I was in my early 40s. And yeah, we just used to sort of get up on stage once a year or so and we'd lash out. About 45 tunes, five singers, lots of brass, and we'd have an absolute ball.
- [31:35]
Cole Napper
That's fantastic. And you, you spent a little bit of time as a teacher in Kenya, if I'm not mistaken, Right?
- [31:42]
David Edwards
You're right. When I left high school. Yeah. So I was age. Yes. 18. I saw on the school notice board a. Do you, you know, do you fancy doing something different? You know, come and be a volunteer overseas? It was a little bit like the Peace Corps. In fact, there was a Peace Corps volunteer living in one of the. The row of houses just up from me. And I said, yeah, that sounds like fun. So, aged 18, knowing nothing really about anything, I found myself out in kenya. This is 1978, by the way. So the form of. Yeah, the only kind of electronic communication was possible by booking a telephone call in Mombasa post office, which was about 30 miles away, for five minutes or so. And you'd have to take a bus to sort of get there and sort of, you know, do all this kind of stuff. So you really were on your own. I loved it. I mean, you know, I probably, you know, don't. Don't mention this too loudly, but I probably remember more about that year than any other because there were so many new things that I sort of experienced.
- [33:03]
Cole Napper
Yeah. I heard this the other day on a podcast, and I don't know if it's scientific or not, but. But someone said in terms of experiential life, you experience half of your life by the time that you're 20, and the other half in the rest of, you know, I don't know, you're 60 or 80 years after that. And it's. It's sort of interesting because, like. And they say the reason why your experiential life is so much shorter, it is so prolonged in your youth is because of all the new things that you learn.
- [33:35]
David Edwards
Yeah.
- [33:36]
Cole Napper
And it's the lack of learning that happens and the new experiences that happen later in life that makes it feel so short. I don't know if that resonates at all.
- [33:44]
David Edwards
Oh, it does. It? No, it completely resonates. You know, I. When I came back from. From Kenya, you know, I'd taught in front of people. I learned at least partially, a new language. I'd discovered what it felt like to be a racial minority. You know, there were all manner of. And I climbed a mountain as well, which never happened before or since. And I came back to university. I couldn't sort of, kind of bottle it all up again. As a student. I was an extremely good dj. That's all I'm prepared to say. And pre soul band, free soul band. And then dropped out of university and spent a year working in a hospital laundry. You know, literally operating just sort of mechanical washers and tumble dryers and stuff like that. But, you know, every. Every story has a happy ending. And in my last week before I started down the journey to being an accountant, deep joy. I bet my wife, she was doing holiday relief work. And literally our paths crossed by about four or Five days. Otherwise I'd never have met her. And we celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary in June.
- [35:11]
Cole Napper
Oh, the poor unlucky lady. I'm so sorry for her that came across you.
- [35:16]
David Edwards
Well, all I'm prepared to say is that she's worn the years of damsite better than I have.
- [35:26]
Cole Napper
Well, David, do you want to join me in Cole's Corner?
- [35:28]
David Edwards
Oh, absolutely, yes. I've been dreading this, but hey, yeah, here we go.
- [35:35]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Welcome to Cole's Corner.
- [35:40]
Cole Napper
Well, let's start out with some rapid fire questions. The first one I have for you is, if you weren't in the field of workforce planning, what would you have done with your career,
- [35:50]
David Edwards
given the choice? Oh, theatre. Theatre. Absolutely. Would have loved to have been in the theatre in any kind of capacity.
- [35:59]
Cole Napper
That's fantastic. I love it. What's the place you've never been to that you'd most like to go and why?
- [36:08]
David Edwards
As a child, I always wanted to go to Moscow because I thought it was so sort of foreboding and threatening. I really should go to it, but I probably not do that now. Australia or New Zealand, because I've never been. And New Zealand looks fantastic.
- [36:29]
Cole Napper
Yeah, I think those are very achievable, especially in the workforce planning space.
- [36:33]
David Edwards
Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [36:36]
Cole Napper
If you were a character in any book, TV show or movie, who would you be and why?
- [36:48]
David Edwards
Almost anything that Bill Murray's played or. Or anything. Or anything played by Peter Sellers. I. I love the comic timing and gift of those two people and their ability to act out of their socks, transversing comedy into absolute sort of deep and dark pathos and drama.
- [37:19]
Cole Napper
I'm definitely a big Groundhog Day fan. That's a good movie.
- [37:22]
David Edwards
Absolutely. But I also love Lost in Translation for different reasons. And if you're a Peter Sellers fan, then being there is a fantastic movie, as is Dr. Strangelove. It's a nice story, actually, by the way, of Dr. Strangelove, because he was originally due to play five characters, but for whatever reason, he ended up only playing three. And Stanley Kubrick, the director, said after the filming, he said, oh, Peter Sellers. He was fantastic. So we got three actors for the price of six.
- [38:01]
Cole Napper
Yeah, well. And how I learned to quit worrying and start to love the bomb. Probably. Relevant message lately, unfortunately.
- [38:09]
David Edwards
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, all the best films sort of resonate through the ages, don't they?
- [38:16]
Cole Napper
Absolutely. I got one big question for you and we've touched on it somewhat, but I'm curious, you know, we. You mentioned that the world of AI is transforming before our eyes. And you mentioned like that there was like, you know, two years ago people would be mad at you for summarizing what you were doing with AI, and now it would be expected of you to do that. If you look three years into the future, as many workforce plans do, what does the impact of AI have on the workforce playing discipline itself
- [38:53]
David Edwards
more than I think people expect it to? I'd already started experimenting with the use of agents to identify workforce risk for individual HR heads back in, well, about this time last year. And it was rudimentary, but it was still coming up with answers that I couldn't really disagree with and were corroborated by other people. So I think actually it is going to do an awful lot of the grunt work, an awful lot of the synthesis, which at the moment is not easily done. I also think it will bring to life the, the piece which is absolutely critical to recognizing the potential for SWP to actually make a difference. And that is in the synchronization and orchestration of the appropriate supply side mix for any given circumstance, because that's optimizing. That mix is the way in which companies can remain competitive, but it's also the way in which people can continue careers and continue to develop within organizations without having to go through the churn.
- [40:25]
Cole Napper
Absolutely. Well, let me pull something up for you. Let's do some. What am I reading? So the first one I've got for you is an article from the Directionally Correct Substack newsletter From November of 2023 called what's Old Is New, the Quest for Excellence in Workforce Planning. And this was by the venerable Bob Motion himself, also a giant in the field as well as myself, trying to get Bob to come on the podcast. Maybe eventually he'll come. And what we talk about is it seemed like, and you mentioned this earlier a little bit, that although workforce planning has had its ups and downs, it seemed to really skyrocket back into relevance in that 2023 time frame. And so that's what the whole what's old is new because all of a sudden all the things that we knew from, you know, post the Great Recession were all of a sudden being, you know, being dug up out of the grave and brought back into the forefront. And so we, we put this article into kind of six different themes. Strategy is hard, but that doesn't make workforce planning impossible. Workforce planning can both help fight and respond to Wall street earnings cycle pressure. Process is necessary, but don't overdo it. Analytics is and will continue to be king winning the war for talent requires talent, intelligence, and we can't fall in love with our own ideas. Did you get a chance to read this one? And if so, how did you react to.
- [42:00]
David Edwards
Resonated an awful lot with me, I must confess, because I've certainly learned the hard way that I mustn't fall in love with my own ideas because it is as a feast, it is moving far too quickly. The other one which really resonated with me is don't turn this too much into a process. I think you have to use available governance as much as possible to enable some of these things. I mean, at its heart, SWP is a mindset. It's not a process at all. It is a what do we need to be thinking about in the future? How would we respond if it all changed tomorrow? And by the way, if you're a director of the Saudi oil company Aramco, that's probably become a much more visceral sort of issue to think about over the last couple of months. Is something as extreme as that likely to come along? Well, I don't think we should ever rule out the possibility. So, yeah, don't make it a process. Make it a. Make it a conversation that becomes part of your natural way of approaching business. There's a guy called Nick Kemsley who is a professor at the Henley Business School, and he suggested to me that the perfect SWP implementation ends up with there being no SWP practitioners at all, but one simply where the change agents have introduced a new way of thinking into the existing processes that are there.
- [43:50]
Cole Napper
Yeah, that's. That's pretty provocative. I like that. The one that always. I always come back to and it comes up. It even came up earlier this week. Occasionally I'll have like, you know, people that are workforce planning practitioners of a long time in the field reach out to me and, you know, just want to trade notes or what have you, and they'll say, you know, I just never really got on board with using data for workforce planning. And I do agree that workforce planning is a mindset, but I'm always so thrown off by this. It's like, how could you have a whole career in this space and not bring data into the equation? And so we said, you know, analytics is. And we're will continue to be king in workforce planning. And I just don't understand where, again, that mindset comes from.
- [44:39]
David Edwards
I was going to say, I have to agree. It makes it sound as though I'm forced to. Far from it, I think. And particularly if you take the view that you've got to focus on what's critical to the business. How on earth do you do that without data? Or are you just going to fly by the seat of your pants? I think that an evidence base is fundamental to the credibility of somebody in workforce planning. Now, how they then weave the story by synthesizing that evidence with all of the other signals that they can see coming in. Because I do think this is very much an act of synthesis and an act of storytelling to articulate risk and feasibility. Still, I think for the time being, a very much human in the loop aspect. But you've got to start with something that says, you know, we're, you know, we're, I don't know if you can edit this out, but you know, we're, we're, we're up creek without a paddle. Or, you know, you can't just sort of say, well I think, you know, I think you might be right. Well, here's the evidence that says either you're right or you're wrong. Here's the evidence that says that actually this project you've just negotiated the funding for isn't going to fly. Because guess what? It takes longer to hire the people that you think you're going to need than you've got time to actually execute on the project. That's evidence. Go figure.
- [46:19]
Cole Napper
Well, let's do the, let's do the next article I've got here, which is a workforce planning problem that I feel like isn't always classified as this, but this is from the National Bureau of Economic Research that they published a study which I always find it interesting when other disciplines that you don't necessarily associate with a particular field do some research on that field. And so this study was called how do you find a good manager? And you've got a bunch of economists looking at it. And so Derek lust made a LinkedIn post about this and they from the summarizing article and it says the main findings is that managers matter as much as workforce's productive skill. There's a one standard deviation boost in manager quality or a one standard deviation boost in manager quality raised the team's performance by 0.22 standard deviations. After accounting for individual skill sets, self selected managers underperform. So basically if you're a person who pushes to be a manager, you're likely to be 0.1 standard deviations lower in performance than those who were just randomly assigned to be managers. And what predicts good management for lottery chosen managers? The assignment game decision making skill is among the Strongest predictors of good leadership. So basically your skills and decision making is what separates you from the pack. And in retail, better managers increase store sales by roughly $4.1 million per year, which is a 25% lift over those who, you know, were worse managers. And so management plays, good management plays a definite role in, in, you know, company effectiveness. What did you think about this one and what is its relationship to your work having been done in workforce planning related to manager staffing?
- [48:12]
David Edwards
Well, some of this is, some of this is sort of David Edwards heuristics, but I think for far too long we have promoted people to management positions on the basis of their technical prowess in whatever field they happen to find themselves. And I genuinely shudder at the thought that a brilliant software engineer can therefore make a brilliant software engineering manager. It's not to say that it's out of the question, but a manager's job is to lead, to orchestrate, to steward a less spoken of characteristic in this day and age, but also, as you say, to decide. I believe that a good manager is not defined by the technicality in which they may have originated or from which they may have originated, and that we spend more time actually developing people as managers and not just as sort of if like technical lead extensions.
- [49:39]
Cole Napper
Yeah. When this article talks that there's really three M's that are related to good management, it's monitoring, effectively allocating tasks or matching to people's strengths and motivating the teams even without financial incentives. Those seem to be the differentiators.
- [49:57]
David Edwards
Yeah.
- [49:58]
Cole Napper
In good managers. So monitoring, matching and motivating.
- [50:02]
David Edwards
Well, there's a very, you know, there's a well used phrase, but I think it still holds good that people join great companies and they leave bad managers. You won't often see people leaving voluntarily because you know the company's gone to pot. It will be because the circumstances, you know, of their leader have caused them to want to sort of look elsewhere.
- [50:32]
Cole Napper
Absolutely. Let's hit the last one. And I'm, I'm very curious to get your.
- [50:36]
David Edwards
Oh, I'm dreading this one.
- [50:38]
Cole Napper
I bet you are. So, previous guest of the podcast, somebody we talked about a lot, Mark Efron and his group, the Talent Strategy Group, wrote another very, very provocative piece in 2023 called what should we Do about how. And so Hal is a loyal, friendly and well liked guy. He's been with your company for more than 20 years and he's in a big important role. And essentially what they're saying, but consistently Hal has either average or below average performance Ratings. What should you do about hal? And essentially they go through a lot of reasons here. You know, that the, that you should essentially get rid of hal and the performance benefits will be immediate. And it's because HAL blocks other people's advancement. You, you as a leader are judged by hal's mediocre results. And so you're be, you're showing that you're tolerating poor results. Team engagement will increase. And it talks about how to find the hals in your organization and kind of what to do about it and their whole talent philosophy behind it. I found this one to be quite provocative. What, what do you think about HAL and what do you think about this perspective?
- [51:58]
David Edwards
I think I'd like to know how he knew so much about me to write the article. I recognize HAL in some respects, I empathize with him. But I also endorse the argument that is made in the paper. We especially in Europe. I don't know if it's the case in the US but we are seeing our workforces age at a slightly scary rate that the median age of companies is increasing at a faster rate than I think. I've certainly seen it over the last 10, 15 years. Why is that? It is because A we're healthier and I speak as an old person so I'm allowed to be sort of, you know, sound slightly provocative as well. We're healthier and we actually quite enjoy working. B the financial crash basically screwed up our pensions so we're finding ourselves having to work longer to get to the sort of the place that we promised our spouses that we would get to. Circumstances. Governments have also been hit by that same crash and they're raising the retirement age so that those of us lucky enough to get pensions, as I have finally become, have to wait that much longer for them. So we don't want to go anywhere. Which means we are creating a sort of a magna plug that is causing a lot of angst at the levels below us. HAL needs to make way for others who are going to take greater advantage of advances not just in technology, but in technique. What HAL can do and what I think we need to be doing much more about is passing information on passing knowledge on passing understanding and experience. Not as a, oh, you'll find this out, my boy, don't you worry. But these are the things I found have helped you know, things which are universal truths. I think my future lies in doing exactly that kind of thing. I call myself a consultucator. I'm beginning to think I should register the Trademark. But I'm not quite sure what I'd do with it if I did. But my job is to sort of both advise and also to educate. And I think that there's no reason why you can't create a class of master practitioners within an organization as well, incentivize them over a short term to impart their knowledge of how to network, how to get things done, and say, look, your reward for doing this is a slightly raised golden goodbye. And I, you know, I, I, I don't think we should stick around forever.
- [55:32]
Cole Napper
You, you touched on something and it was interesting. So I kind of. Two different directions I wanted to go with this one is just this concept of a person being a blocker. I find that people are quite quietly passionate about and, but they don't, it's not necessarily something they want to shout from the rooftops that that is something that they strongly advocate for. And so I appreciate at least that they're coming out and saying it publicly. Yes, the honesty there, there's something you touched on, though, that I think is related to the aging populations is the whole concept of being a blocker implies that there's people behind, like younger, that are being blocked. And as populations start to age, I think the problem of what you do about HAL has to change because you're going to be more reliant on Hal, because HAL might be the only person that exists. And so you, it, it becomes almost more of a reskilling argument over time then. Well, hal's in the way of this larger boom of younger folks that's behind Hal when there's no boom behind hal.
- [56:48]
David Edwards
But HAL should still, my opinion, others are available. HAL should still be a mentor for people who have the potential to step up. I mean, I worry about this. You take, take the sort of, the law firms, you know, their typical shape is a pyramid. Yeah. And it's probably quite a tall pyramid as well, because you've got a small cadre of partners at the top and then you've got all these sort of kind of junior oiks who are doing sort of lots of stuff. Well, AI is about to decimate that and it's going to turn that pyramid into a diamond, because that's the perceived wisdom. And so I think you have two things here to think about. The first is where are the partners of the future going to come from? Because they're sure as heck. And we're not talking about next generation, we're talking about the generation after that. They're sure as heck not going to come from the junior ranks because they won't exist to the same extent anymore. But also
- [58:02]
Cole Napper
it's like a self extinction for the organization.
- [58:05]
David Edwards
Yeah, but who's.
- [58:07]
Cole Napper
Who is thinking this is wise?
- [58:09]
David Edwards
Well, I couldn't agree more. But also, who's to say that a junior working with their digital twin couldn't, as a hybrid, do the work of those senior people, at least to an acceptable degree? Who's to say that sort of, you know, we should keep Hal in order to let juniors go when perhaps ultimately they will be able to do his job, or most of his job, every bit as well? I think there's a danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
- [58:50]
Cole Napper
Yeah, definitely A lot of different provocative directions we could go with this one. But I was wondering, David, do you have any questions for me before we wrap up?
- [59:02]
David Edwards
I think we are in a. I think the world feels extremely messy at the moment, and even some of the established norms and guidelines that people like me might have laid down in the past feel as though they are built on sand. Is that something you feel as well, or am I just getting old and cantankerous?
- [59:31]
Cole Napper
No, I think, I think you're right to feel that one of the things that keeps me grounded is I think about. I don't think I've ever talked about this on Directionally Correct, but I think I have talked about on some other people's podcasts where I've been a guest is like our grandparents, our great grandparents and the amount of change that they saw in their lifetime, going from like a horse and buggy to seeing people land on the moon in like a single lifetime, and how transformative that change must have felt. And we are just experiencing like for a lot of times, even maybe in your lifetime and definitely in my lifetime, the first kind of bout of that level of quick transformation.
- [60:15]
David Edwards
Yes, yes.
- [60:17]
Cole Napper
And so my first reaction is we can handle it because our, our ancestors have handled it. Second is like, perhaps that, like, we have been going at such a slow pace of transformation for so long that maybe having a quicker pace is probably warranted. But then there's the part of me is like, can it go on like this forever? Like, are we on an exponential or are we on an S curve? Curve. Right. And. And we have. There's wildly different outcomes depending on the answer to that question. And if we're on an S curve, then this is temporary. If we're on an exponential, I guess what everybody's saying about the singularity and all those things is actually correct. And so maybe a lot of these things that we're pontificating about don't really matter all that much because we're all going to be uploaded to a digital God or something like that. Right. And so there's a part of me that I keep coming back to which is human beings matter, the relationships that human beings have amongst each other matter. Ultimately an economy works off not only producers, but consumers. And those consumers are not going to be AIs, they're going to be people. And so ultimately the economy has to serve people. And that means that people play a role in the economy. And if that's always the case, which it may not always be, but if that's always the case, then we need to always be kind of focusing on the things that we're focusing on. And so, yeah, it does feel like the ground is shifting beneath our feet, but maybe it's for a good reason.
- [61:48]
David Edwards
I like that. If I call myself anything outside of a strategic workforce planner and a one time soul singer, I'd call myself an historian. And the great Barbara Tuchman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a book, Guns of August, about the beginnings of the First World War, which I highly recommend to anybody who wants not just a well written read, but also a highly amusing one. But she wrote in a separate book that people entered the 19th century in very much the same way as they'd entered the 17th. The 12th or even the third. Horsepower was still the main thing. We didn't have much by way of plumbing outside of royalty. By the time we got to the end of the 19th century, everything had changed. And that was before the period that you're now talking that you just referred to. So it does speak to human resilience and it also does speak to humans finding ways to, to reassert themselves in, in whatever new situation they find themselves in.
- [63:10]
Cole Napper
When to be clear, during that period of time of like the Industrial revolution, all that, there were also two world wars. There was a lot of the labor movement was formed, There was child labor laws that had to be put into place. There was a lot of like, oh, we figured out that chemical weapons can be used and there's a lot of negative externalities, as the economists say, that came out during that period as well. And so if we're not wise about how we approach this, we will probably see some similar conclusions which we live in a tumultuous time as it is right now as well.
- [63:44]
David Edwards
Well, I'm afraid to say again, as an historian that people are notoriously bad at earning the lessons from the past.
- [63:52]
Cole Napper
Sure, so who knows? Maybe this time we will. Maybe AI Maybe our AI God will help us. Who knows? Oh, I hope so. Yeah. But David, this has been a fantastic episode. I really appreciate having you on today. If people want to find your book or they want to reach out to you, where, where would be the best ways to do that?
- [64:10]
David Edwards
Well, they would. They will find me at david.edwardsarkartistry.net that's the name of my company. They can look me up on David Edwards SWP.com and if they fancy the book, then they just have to go to koganpage.comswph and just type in the code KoganPage25 and you'll get 25% off.
- [64:39]
Cole Napper
Look at that. Just search the Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook. I know how much you love promoting it. David, thank you for joining the podcast. And and you've been listening to Directionally Correct, a People In Podcast with your host, Cole Napper and today's guest, David Edwards. Thanks for joining me, David.
- [64:56]
David Edwards
Thank you, Cole. It's been lovely.