Balancing Risk and Agility in HR
If you haven’t read any global Chief Executive Officer (CEO) studies, then I encourage you to do so…quickly. As you take a gander, you will quickly see that there is a lot of agreement between what these studies are saying even if each study is trying to be unique in the terminology they use. So the most recent Duke Corporate Education 2013 CEO study came to my attention in the last couple of weeks. In it the researchers sought to understand that within the unpredictable business environment that has become the “new normal,” what are the challenges that CEOs face in dealing with this environment.
The big highlights of the study were captured in this one paragraph for me to explain the CEO's perspectives…
“The leaders with whom we spoke described today’s leadership context as one where it is increasingly challenging to foresee problems, where the problems they do identify are more multi-dimensional in nature and the solutions required to address them are more complex and where the power required to address these problems must increasingly come through influence as opposed to formal authority. Additionally, these CEOs emphasized how difficult it is to lead effectively in a context where the shelf-life of information is unstable, the interconnection of information resources is non-linear, access to information is uncontrollable and the source of true differentiation lies in figuring things out as opposed to finding things out.”
Of seven “Leadership Sense-Abilities” as Duke CE named them, one in particular struck me as really relevant to HR and its ability to become more agile and adaptable to help business grow. The piece read…
“Leaders must form a process of sense-making that enables them to more quickly identify leverage for action. The key question leaders must contemplate to develop this Sense-Ability is ‘How long can I hold on to multiple conflicting hypotheses about which course of action to take until I can see a way forward that gives me the most leverage?’”
For me this particular skill for HR is really important. One way for HR to balance the risk and need to be agile within this context is making small bets and testing hypotheses. This is an approach pioneered within the ‘lean start-up” domain to get a minimum viable product out in order to test hypotheses about what customers want to see in the product. A similar approach in HR would mean running a series of small experiments by putting out the 80%, 70% or even 60% solution and making adjustments as more hypotheses are tested. This type of activity builds agility, creativity and innovation management skills in our teams.
The pace of business today is moving too fast for the 100% solution. Build agility in your HR team by taking a lean start-up approach…
J. Keith Dunbar has defined, designed and led implementation of many human capital development initiatives during the past 8 years. As a human capital development leader he has a wide range of business experience: from strategic learning plan development and execution to senior leadership trusted advisor. He creates collaborative opportunities to innovate and build business cases focused on the development of human capital with the end goal of ensuring that organizations achieve their mission. Mr. Dunbar has been a frequent keynote speaker and presenter at professional conferences and workshops in the areas of strategic planning/execution, change management, and human capital development.