Digital Disruption and Agile HR

Humans are highly adaptive. The evolution of the brain is the most obvious example of how we evolve to adapt, which gives us the ability to solve complex problems and make rapid change.  You only have to look at how we have transformed the world we live in, for better or worse, to see what we are capable of.

Authors John Baillie and Cheryl Tansey frequently work with organisations who are planning large-scale change mostly driven by digital transformation.  When we talk to CIO's and CEO's one of the first things they usually say is that people fear change or are resistant to change. They are able to point to numerous examples of projects that have not delivered their expected value because of 'change resistance', and  particular individuals who have actively resisted that change.

So this asks the question, are all people highly adaptive to change?

'Traditional' change theory came from Psychology - change was this thing that you created an intervention for.  You looked at current behavior, you looked at the new behavior, and you implemented a 'change' (OK, overly simple but you get the idea).  Something that would encourage new behavior. This model was adopted by organisational change specialists. Change was an intervention something that disrupts the current equilibrium.

When we look at most 'managed' organisational change, it follows the same model: it occurs in large disruptive bursts.  Technology change has particularly followed this path. We spent years and millions of dollars developing our new systems.  These systems codified the way we work and the way our customers interacted with us. We then invested even more in implementation and training and development, and about every six-twelve months we released an update.  This process carried on until the system was so embedded and difficult to change that we needed a radical rewrite. We then started the process all over again. It is a type of punctuated equilibrium. No wonder change was hard we made it hard.

The advent of cloud technologies through vendors such as Amazon Web Services has fundamentally altered the change equation.  Digital transformation will no longer be punctuated equilibrium. These new tools allow us to develop and release new solutions for our business and customers almost weekly.  The digital / cloud revolution allows organisations to adapt at an astonishing pace. But how will HR deal with this?

HR, in many organisations, is the antithesis of agile. In HR we lock organisations down with job descriptions, remuneration bands, annual formal performance reviews, formal restructuring, and the ultimate evil of competencies. We even call leave, health insurance etc. benefits rather than things necessary to keep a healthy, engaged employee! We measure turnover and sickness as though these are real measures of organisational performance (they are measures of disfunction). Rather than supporting continuous adaptation - we wait until something is so dysfunctional, we then need to have 'change management'.

hen you look at this (and we are slightly overstating the case) how on earth is HR helping our organisations become agile when most of our systems, policies and processes see managers and people as a source of error that need to be controlled?

There is a great story about Sir John Harvey-Jones - then the Chair and CE of ICI (one of the largest companies in the world at the time).  His first act when taking up the role was to have all the HR manuals put in the entranceway of ICI HQ in London and set them on fire. The message wasn't to HR (although indirectly it was) it was to his managers, that he expected them to lead; that ICI wasn't going to change and become adaptive if they followed a manual.

Just in case you are rolling your eyes about agile HR let us assure you - is not a fad.  Agile aims to build shared value between customers, business and people. Agile HR is not a new set of processes (although those do need to change), or just hiring a scrum master or agile coach - it is fundamentally changing the  way we think about how our organisation works, and the way we support the people within it.

Traditionally managed organisations will fail in the oncoming digital onslaught.  Our CEO's, Boards, owners and customers are demanding that we become agile. This has to be a way of thinking for the whole organisation.  As an HR practitioner it may be time to ask, 'How is HR helping build shared value between our customers, business and people?' and 'How am I supporting the agility of people in our organisation?'

This is the first in a series of articles from John and Cheryl about how we can transform our organisations through Agile HR.  We will look at things like performance management, lean change management, remuneration, training and development etc. We also know that there are other barriers to organisational transformation (we are looking at you finance) however for this series we will discuss how HR can adapt to this change.

We also hope that this series will be a conversation you, the reader, are in some ways our customers.  What are your experiences? How have you overcome the peril of punctuated equilibrium? What are some of your success stories, and equally, what are some of your frustrations?  If you think we have it wrong tell us. If it resonates for you, let us know. We look forward to hearing from you.