There are many great quotes abut plans and planning.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy” is attributed to the German field marshal, known as Moltke the Elder. MtE believed in developing a series of options for battle, rather than a single plan. Or “Plans are nothing; planning is everything” from former US President Dwight D Eisenhower.
Plans are inherently problematic. And that’s before you throw in the disruption and human turmoil of a pandemic. So how can we possibly have a plan for having the right people in the right place at the right time, when we’ve no idea what things will look like next week, let alone a year down the line. That was one of the questions we tackled with workforce planning expert Adam Gibson on The Reset Show last week.
But first, what even is workforce planning?
Adam describes it as an approach of aligning people to the objectives that an organisation has. “It comes down to this idea of creating the right workforce,” he explains. For Adam, the right workforce is a much deeper concept than suggested in older approaches. He explains that because competencies are only theoretical things people could do, it is the many enabling or disenabling factors that connect them to the capabilities of a workforce that are important. That’s why Adam also looks at the environment and mindset, among other things. “Competencies are the things we can theoretically do, but bad tech, an awful workspace, a toxic work environment, or a horrendous boss can all get in the way. An environment where we can excel allows us to do so much more.” So all those things together are part of Adam’s concept of capability.
Adam’s reimagining of these older concepts means this conversation about workforce planning was far broader than we’d expected – it was a conversation about human systems, relationships and even meaning.
So where’s the agile bit?
“Planning is just a stepping stone to creating the workforce,” Adam explains. “What makes it agile is how you think about it – this isn’t simply about filling out this spreadsheet, or that document. This is about a foundation and mindset of thinking about people and systems and how those things come together. The mindset and thinking is more important than a fixed process around a set of data points. It’s about continuously adapting and flexing because, as we know, things constantly change.”
So how does it work in a pandemic? Adam suggests starting small and focusing on the knowns. Of course, there are many things we cannot know about what will happen in the future and what it means for how we connect people to work, but there are also things we do know. Learn from that, and then iterate, he says. “Start small, something that’s more comfortable, or the areas of the organisation that can really make the biggest impact. If you can plan it, you can then iterate. Uncertainty doesn’t mean you don’t plan. It means recognising the things you are less certain about and being prepared to be flexible about them.”
So it’s hard, and it moves, but it matters. One of the biggest frictions in business sits between what the business wants to achieve and what its’s able to achieve. And it’s people that get hurt in the midst of that tension – disengaged at best, broken at worst. But get it right – which Adam explains means not just thinking about it in advance, but thinking about it constantly – and agile workforce planning becomes the engine room of everything. That’s good for people and the organisation.
This wide-ranging conversation also covered:
- Who owns workforce planning (answer, those people with the tools to create the desired outcomes)
- How workforce planning is different to process re-engineering (some of the same tools, but applied in a different way)
- Lessons for life from workforce planning (from co-parenting to charging kids for their lunch)
- How to move house in a pandemic
Listen now or watch on Youtube.
And if you like all things agile, join us on 24th February when we talk to Natal Dank, a pioneer in agile in HR.
