The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook - David Edwards - #174

[00:00:02] You recently published the book, The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook. How has the reception been? What's happened since it launched and what did you learn from the process? Well, I think the reception has been pretty good. You yourself have said some nice things about it.

[00:00:25] And I know you're slightly embarrassed that I have quoted you extensively on my 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.

[00:00:49] How is the workforce? If the workforce isn't fit for purpose, exactly how is that purpose then frustrated? 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. Are you a person that has a lot of soul, David?

[00:01:19] I'm very passionate about this subject. You know, people say I should get out more, but I know there's a double edge to your question.

[00:01:34] 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.

[00:02:04] 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 datadrivenhracademy.com, purchase Cole's book, People Analytics, or check out everything else at colenabber.com.

[00:02:31] Before we get into it, a quick 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 Bench eliminates that entire phase.

[00:02:58] Your HRIS connects, your metrics calculate, your benchmarks populate. This is not novel. This is day one, not quarter two. That means skipping straight to prescriptive analysis, storytelling, and taking action for the business. Want to learn more? Book a demo at hrbench.com slash directionally correct. Find out more about the company powering this podcast and building the future of people intelligence.

[00:03:24] As always, all opinions are our own, and thanks for being a listener. Well, David, 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? Well, I think the reception has been pretty good.

[00:03:49] You know, 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. And I think you published through Kogan Page as well. Yeah.

[00:04:18] 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 said, yeah, you owe us 250 bucks still for the index writing. I've got really very little idea as to sort of how it's done.

[00:04:45] But I think, yeah, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that people are finding it useful. What I've learned from it, well, the first is that don't expect to buy a brooding mansion on the Cornish coast or something from writing a book, because that ain't going to happen.

[00:05:09] The second is that 80,000 words isn't so isn't so bad or so difficult if you break it into chunks and into sections that you feel pretty good about.

[00:05:29] 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.

[00:05:51] Conversations about, let's talk about something more than just skills, let's talk about tasks as well, 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.

[00:06:21] 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. Well, give yourself some grace because I think there's many people that are not as deep into this space as you are.

[00:06:41] And so having 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.

[00:07:11] 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 in books. So, yeah, that can be a little bit demoralizing. But, you know, lots of people are publishing books all the time.

[00:07:35] 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.

[00:08:00] You know, 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 other people had submitted to me with their strategic workforce plans. And I got torn to shreds for using AI.

[00:08:26] You know, 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. Well, and 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.

[00:08:57] Yeah, that's true. No turkey ever voted for Christmas or Thanksgiving, right? 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?

[00:09:27] Oh, yeah. Yeah. I remember we talked about strategic workforce planning when I was in the UK Banknet West. And that's where I cut my teeth in this stuff. And, you know, some of the lessons I learned there are still relevant, very much so. But, you know, I can now look back on that and say it was really nothing to do with strategic workforce planning at all.

[00:09:53] 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.

[00:10:18] 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. As a, you know, the phrase I use a lot, you know, is your workforce fit for its future business purpose? Well, if you don't know what the business strategy is, then, you know, you're not going anywhere on understanding that purpose. But.

[00:10:48] But. It was still locked into this annual cycle of we produce the 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 sort of 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.

[00:11:17] What I think is. Certainly emerged for me was. The importance of. 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.

[00:11:47] How is the work for you? If the workforce isn't fit for purpose, how exactly how is that purpose then frustrated? 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?

[00:12:14] 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? And what and how does that play a role in workforce planning? Can you do that? I think that would be super helpful.

[00:12:40] OK, I'll try to bundle all of 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.

[00:13:03] A organisation, let's just keep it very sort of broad brush, makes about $1.5 billion or so per year from its intellectual property and licences to use elements of its hardware in other people's devices. And these devices are every day. We've all got them. We've all got them.

[00:13:27] So it's not going anywhere as far as sort of its value to the organisation is concerned. And 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.

[00:13:56] So it is a communications company. So networks which are no longer reliant perhaps on radios, but instead of being satellite driven.

[00:14:09] The R&D is the generative engine of the organisation's future revenue and its future direction and ability to not only maintain customer share, but hopefully to improve upon it.

[00:14:28] 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 it, you know, more clever stuff. We can therefore sell more clever stuff and therefore our customers will continue to want us forever and a day.

[00:14:54] 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 not only able to sell, but are able to sell that stuff.

[00:15:26] 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 of business context. And it's not just a sort of a smart patter.

[00:15:48] 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.

[00:16:13] Only 270 of that 100,000 are actually responsible for intellectual property rights and licensing. But most of them are copywriters, due diligence, drafters, all of this kind of thing.

[00:16:28] 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 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.

[00:16:56] 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?

[00:17:26] That's what I call workforce risk. Does that do it? 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?

[00:17:56] 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.

[00:18:19] Certainly from a people analytics standpoint, I wouldn't have been able 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,

[00:18:41] 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.

[00:18:59] 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 product. And I'm sure that that association exists, but it's simply not visible within the data.

[00:19:27] 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, you know, typically succession plans are not based on a group of people, are based on individuals.

[00:19:56] Being able to pinpoint key person risk is arguably something which would be a value add to the business in understanding the risks to its strategy. Yeah. Do you like promoting your book? No. No. It's very painful, isn't it? It's properly painful. It really, really is.

[00:20:24] Yeah, despite appearances, I'm actually sort of quite shy and retiring. And, you know, it's sort of the kind of the old tears of a clown kind of thing that people are not necessarily the sort of the show people that you think they are just because they stand up and they speak.

[00:20:50] You just have a particular sort of immunity to, you know, to 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 sit well with me, but it's a necessary evil. Yeah. What's the relationship in your mind then between strategic workforce planning and analytics?

[00:21:19] And why do they need each other? 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.

[00:21:48] Now, analytics is the only thing which is going to tell you that. Oh, OK. 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 at 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.

[00:22:16] I would contend with all the greatest respect to Amit Mahindra that 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.

[00:22:36] 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. But that's my view. Is it always going to be that way? Heaven only knows. And Amit, obviously, a friend of the podcast. What is his perspective?

[00:23:02] He thinks if it's a toss up between people analytics and SWP, people analytics wins every time. I subscribe to the more collaborative view. Well, what role? I would say kind of my, you know, I love workforce planning and I've done both the strategic and operational side of things.

[00:23:30] 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, it's 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?

[00:23:55] I think that's definitely a pragmatic, 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.

[00:24:21] There's nothing like as great as the imperative of making sure you get sort of, you know, you show progress quarter by quarter, year on year. Therefore, the ability to forecast with reasonable accuracy the workforce needs for the next year or so.

[00:24:46] Yeah, it's 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 of love with SWP.

[00:25:10] 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?

[00:25:31] And and I think the purpose of SWP may 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 of the next year going to be.

[00:25:58] I mean, 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 a 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? Right. Yes, I agree.

[00:26:24] People are looking to folks like you to help them decode this because, you know, big wig David Edwards, author of the Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook should have all the answers. Right.

[00:26:54] People are looking to come along by the pace 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. um you know credit where credit is due is a guy called phil robinson who was the original cmo for

[00:27:20] salesforce so uh you know i suppose he had a feather in his cap but he said there's a there's a recursive elegance to ai now being used to define how ai is going to change the workforce um and all of a sudden i see it being used in a very different or see strategic plan workforce

[00:27:48] planning taking a a much more um granular approach to uh to to workforce change to future workforce change um 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 to build and without telling them

[00:28:13] necessarily exactly how long the bigger boat needed 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 that none of that will will come across as remotely new to anyone but i think that the involvement of strategic workforce planners in

[00:28:42] 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 it's you know this is something that should be done by an organizational effectiveness team instead are you a person that has a lot of soul

[00:29:06] david i'm very i'm very passionate um about this subject um 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 um i i started in this trade

[00:29:37] skill craft whatever you want to call it um 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 um 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

[00:30:07] could do what the people coming in uh were doing and so i cut my teeth um helping to redeploy 500 people lots of other great people involved in that as well so you know credit to uh to them as well but the the visceral sense of delight that you got from seeing people and hearing people say thank you

[00:30:36] for what you just did for me um you know to me that made that saving that one person probably made all of the other heartache uh completely worthwhile so yes i have soul about this um i also have soul because yes it is true i used to sing in a 17 piece soul band um of course you did of course i did

[00:31:07] um which i wrote which i absolutely loved i did it for about 20 years i only started doing it when i was uh in my early 40s um 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 that's fantastic

[00:31:36] and you you spent a little bit of time as a teacher in kenya if i'm not mistaken right you're right when i left um uh high school yeah uh uh so i was ages 18 i saw um 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 um

[00:32:04] living in one of the other row of houses just up from me and i said yeah that sounds like fun um so um um 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 um

[00:32:35] for five minutes or so uh and you'd have to take a bus to sort of get there and sort of you know do all this kind of stuff um so you really were on your own um but 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 uh because there were so many new things that i sort of experienced yeah yeah

[00:33:03] i heard this the other day on a podcast and i don't know if it's scientific or not 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

[00:33:32] is because of all the new things that you learn yeah 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 oh it does it no it completely resonates um you know i when i came back from uh from kenya you know i'd taught in front of uh people i'd learned at least partially a a new language

[00:34:02] um 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 which never happened before or since um and i came back to university and i couldn't sort of kind of bottle it all up again um i've as as a student i was an extremely good dj that's all i'm prepared to say uh and pre-soul band

[00:34:30] pre-soul band and then dropped out of university and spent a year working in a hospital laundry um you know literally operating just sort of mechanical washers and tumble dryers and stuff like that uh but you know every every story has a happy ending and in my last week uh before i started down the journey to being an accountant deep joy um i bet my wife

[00:34:55] uh she was doing holiday relief work and with literally our paths crossed by about four or five days otherwise i'd never have better and we uh we celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary in june well the poor unlucky lady i'm so sorry for her came across you well all all i'm prepared to say is that uh she's worn the years a damn sight better than i have

[00:35:25] well david do you want to join me in cole's corner oh absolutely yes i've been dreading this but hey yeah here we go welcome to cole's corner well uh 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

[00:35:49] given the choice oh theater theater absolutely would have loved to have been in the theater in any kind of capacity that's fantastic i love it what's the place you've never been to that you'd most like to go and why um as a child i always wanted to go to moscow because i thought it was so sort of foreboding and

[00:36:13] threatening um i really should go to it but i probably not do that now um australia or new zealand because i've never been and new zealand looks fantastic yeah i think those are very achievable especially in the workforce planning space absolutely yeah yeah yeah hi i'm stacy nordwall host of toot or boot the show that boots burnout

[00:36:40] culture and calls out corporate nonsense each week i talk with bold leaders and good troublemakers who are rewriting the rules of work we dig into what's broken what's working and how to build something better with a mix of practical advice and humor if you're ready for a healthier more human workplace this is your show if you were a character in any book tv show or movie who would you be and why

[00:37:11] uh almost anything that bill murray's played or uh or anything or or anything played by peter sellers um i i love the comic timing and gifts of those two people um and their ability to act out of their socks transversing comedy into you know absolute sort of deep and dark pathos and drama

[00:37:42] definitely a big groundhog day fan that's a good movie absolutely but uh but i also love lost in translation um for you know for different reasons and if you're a peter sellers fan then being there is a uh a fantastic movie as is uh dr strangelove it's a nice story actually by the way of dr strangelove because he was originally due to uh to uh play five characters um but for whatever reason he ended up

[00:38:12] only playing three and stanley kubrick the uh the director said uh after the filming he said oh peter sellers he was fantastic so we got three actors for the price of six yeah well and uh how i learned to quit worrying and start to love the bomb there you go probably a relevant message lately um unfortunately oh yeah yeah yeah well you know all the best films sort of uh resonate through the ages don't they

[00:38:40] absolutely we got one big question for you um 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

[00:39:04] into the future as many workforce plans do what does the impact of ai have on the workforce playing discipline itself more than i think people expect it to um i'd already started experimenting with

[00:39:25] the use of agents um to identify workforce risk uh for individual hr heads uh 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 you know were corroborated by other people um so i think actually it is going to do

[00:39:53] an awful lot of the grunt work an awful lot of the um 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 um synchronization and

[00:40:19] orchestration of the appropriate supply side mix uh for any given circumstance um because that's you know optimizing that mix um is the way in which companies can remain competitive but it's also also the way in which people can continue careers and continue to develop within organizations without having to go through the churn

[00:40:49] absolutely well let's uh 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 subsec 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

[00:41:15] um 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 uh 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 with the whole what's old is new because all of a sudden all the things that we knew from you know post uh

[00:41:41] 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 uh we put this article into kind of six different themes uh strategy is hard but that doesn't make workforce planning impossible workforce planning can both help uh fight and respond to wall street earnings cycle pressure process is necessary but don't overdo it

[00:42:07] 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 it um it resonated an awful lot with me i must confess because um i certainly learned the hard way that i mustn't

[00:42:32] fall in love with my own ideas um because it is as a feast it is moving far too quickly um the other one which really resonated with me is don't turn this too much into a process i think you have to use um available governance as much as possible to enable some of these things i mean i you know at its

[00:42:57] at its heart swp is a mindset it's not a process at all it is a you know what do we need to be thinking about in the future what how would we respond if it all changed tomorrow and by the way if you're the a director of the saudi oil company aramco that's probably become a much more visceral sort

[00:43:21] of issue to think about over the last uh couple of months yeah yeah is something as extreme as that likely to come along well i don't think we should ever rule rule out the possibility uh so yeah don't make it a process make it a maybe make it a conversation that becomes part of your natural uh way of approaching business um there's a guy called nick kemsley who

[00:43:47] uh is a professor at the henley business school and he suggested to me that um the perfect swp implementation ends up with there being no swp practitioners at all but one simply where they the change agents have introduced a new way of thinking um into the existing processes that are there

[00:44:13] um yeah that's that's pretty provocative i like that the one that always i always come back to and it comes up even came up earlier this week occasionally i'll have like um 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 what have you and they'll 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

[00:44:43] 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 we'll continue to be king in workforce planning and i just don't understand where again that mindset comes from um i well i i was going to say i have to agree it makes it sound as though i'm forced to far from it i think um

[00:45:10] and particularly if you take the 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 you know or are you just going to fly by the seat of your pants um i think that an evidence base is fundamental to the credibility of uh of somebody in workforce planning now how they then weave the story by synthesizing that evidence with all of

[00:45:38] 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 uh you know that's still i think for the time being a a very much human in the loop um uh aspect but yeah 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

[00:46:08] we're up creek without a paddle um or yeah you can't just sort of say well i think you know i think you might be right you know 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 more longer to hire the people that you think you're going

[00:46:33] to need then you've got time to actually execute on the project that's evidence you know go figure yeah 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 you know other disciplines

[00:47:00] 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 uh derek lust made a linkedin post about this and they from the 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

[00:47:25] 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 um 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

[00:47:51] 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 dollars per year which is a 25 percent lift over those who uh you know were worse managers

[00:48:18] and so management plays uh good management plays a definite role in in you know company effectiveness what did you think about this one and and what is its relationship to your work having been done in workforce planning related to manager staffing well some of this is um um some of this is sort of david edward's heuristics but um i think for far too long we have promoted

[00:48:47] people to management positions on the basis of their technical prowess in whatever field they happen to find themselves um and i genuinely shudder at the thought that yeah a brilliant software engineer can therefore make a brilliant software engineering manager not to say that it's yeah it's out of the question

[00:49:15] but um a manager's job is to lead to orchestrate to steward um uh a less spoken of uh characteristic uh in this day and age um but also as you say to decide i believe that

[00:49:39] a good manager um is not defined by the technicality in which they may have originated or from which they may have originated um and that we spend more time actually developing people as managers and not just as sort of if like technical lead extensions yeah when this article talks that there's really three m's

[00:50:06] that are related to good management it's monitoring effectively um allocating tasks or matching to people's strengths and motivating the teams even without financial incentives those seem to be the differentiators yeah managers so monitoring matching and um and motivating well there's a very you know there's a a well-used phrase but i think it still uh holds good that um people join great companies and

[00:50:34] they leave bad managers um you won't often see people leaving voluntarily because you know the company's gone to pot it will be because the circumstances uh yeah of their leader uh have caused them to want to sort of look elsewhere absolutely let's hit the last one and i'm i'm very curious to get your oh i'm dreading this one

[00:51:01] i bet you are so previous guest of the podcast somebody we talked about a lot uh mark efron and his group the talent strategy group uh wrote another very very provocative piece in 2023 called what should we do about how and so how is a loyal friendly and well-liked guy he's been with your company for more than 20 years he and he's in a big important role and essentially what they're saying but consistently how has either average

[00:51:31] or below average performance ratings what should you do about how and essentially they go through a lot of uh reasons here you know that the that you should essentially get rid of how and the performance benefits will be immediate um and it's because how blocks other people's advancement uh you you as a leader are judged by how's mediocre results and so you're be you're showing that you're tolerating poor

[00:51:58] results team engagement will increase and it talks about how to find the house 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 um what what do you think about how and what do you think about this perspective um i think i'd like to know how he knew so much about me to write the article

[00:52:29] uh um i recognize how i uh in some respects i empathize with him but i also endorse the argument that is made in the uh in the paper um we especially in europe i don't know if it's the case in the us but we are seeing our workforce's age

[00:52:59] at a slightly scary rate that the you know the median age of companies um is increasing at a faster rate uh than i think i've certainly seen it over the last 10 15 years um why is that uh it is because a we're healthier i speak as an old person so i'm allowed to be sort of you know sound slightly provocative

[00:53:27] as well um yeah we're healthier and we actually quite enjoy working b um the the financial crash basically screwed up our pensions so we've we're finding ourselves having to work longer to get to the sort of the place that we promised our uh our spouses that we would get to um c um governments have

[00:53:54] 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 um have to wait that much longer for them uh so we don't want to go anywhere which means we are creating a sort of a a a magna plug um that is causing a lot of angst at the levels below us

[00:54:21] how needs to make way for others who are going to take greater advantage of um advances not just in technology but in technique what how can do and what i think we need to be doing much more about is passing information on passing knowledge on

[00:54:47] passing understanding and experience not as a oh you'll find this out my boy don't you worry um but these are the things i've found have helped you know things which are universal truths uh i i think my future lies in doing exactly that kind of thing i call myself a consulticator

[00:55:12] uh 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 um but my job is to sort of both advise and also to educate and i think that that there's no reason why you can't create a class of master practitioners uh within an organization as well incentivize them over a short term to impart their knowledge of how to network how to how to get things done and say look

[00:55:41] you know your reward for doing this is a slightly raised golden goodbye and i you know i i don't think we should stick around forever 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

[00:56:05] 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 um that that is something that they strongly advocate for and so i i appreciate it at least that they're coming out and saying it publicly yes um the honesty there's something you touched on there that i think is related to the aging populations is

[00:56:33] the whole concept of being a blocker implies that there's people like younger that are being blocked and as populations start to age i think the problem of what you do about how has to change because you're going to be more reliant on how because how might be the only person that exists and so you it

[00:56:59] becomes almost more of a re-skilling argument over time then well how's in the way of this larger boom of younger folks that's behind how when there's no boom behind but how should still you know my my opinion others are available how should still be a mentor for people uh who have the

[00:57:25] potential to step up i mean i worry about this you know you take take the sort of the law firms um you know their their typical uh shape is a pyramid yeah and it's it's a it's it's probably quite a tall pyramid as well because you've got a small cadre of uh uh partners at the top and then you've got all these sort of kind of junior oics who are doing sort of lots of uh stuff well ai is about to decimate

[00:57:54] that and it's going to turn that pyramid into a diamond um because that's the perceived wisdom um 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 and we're not talking about next generation we're talking about the generation after that yeah they're sure as heck not going to come from the

[00:58:19] junior ranks because they won't exist to the same extent anymore but also um it's like a self-extinction for the organization yeah but who's who is who is thinking this is wise well i 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

[00:58:46] those senior people um at least to a an acceptable degree who's to say that sort of you know we should keep how in order to um let juniors go when perhaps ultimately they will be able to do his job or most of his job every bit as well um i i i think there's a danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water

[00:59:14] 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 um um i think we are in a i think the world feels extremely messy at the moment and

[00:59:37] even some of the established norms um 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 no i think um i think you're right to feel that i one of the things that keeps me grounded is i i think about um i don't think i've ever talked about this on direction incorrect but i

[01:00:06] think i have talked about on some other people's podcasts where i've been a guest um 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

[01:00:35] of that level of quick transformation yes yes 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

[01:01:02] an s 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 well 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 and so the there's

[01:01:32] a part of me that that i just i keep coming back to is 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

[01:01:57] 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 i like that i i if i call myself anything outside of a strategic workforce planner and a one-time soul singer i call myself an historian

[01:02:23] 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 a well written read but also a highly highly highly amusing one um but she wrote in a separate book that people entered the 19th century and very much the same way as they'd entered the 17th the 12th or even the third yeah

[01:02:51] horse horsepower was still the main thing um you know we didn't have much by way of plumbing outside of sort 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 um so it does speak to human

[01:03:15] resilience and it also does speak to um humans finding ways to um to reassert themselves uh in in whatever new situation they find themselves in 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

[01:03:44] 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 you know 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 well i'm afraid to say again as an historian that um people are notoriously bad at

[01:04:13] learning the lessons from the past sure so who knows maybe this time we will maybe ai maybe our ai god will help us who knows oh 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 well they'll uh they will find me um at david.edwards at darkartistry.net

[01:04:42] um that's the name of my company they can look me up on david edwards swp.com um and if they fancy the book then they just have to go to koganpage.com slash swph and just type in the code koganpage25 and you'll get 25 off look at that just search the strategic workforce planning handbook i know how much

[01:05:07] you love promoting it david thank you for joining the podcast and you've been listening to directionally correct a people in the podcast with your host cole knapper and to david today's guest david edwards thanks for joining me david thank you cole it's been lovely