Life comes at HR - FAST. Learning could be Insurance for it

I recently participated in a MOOC on Learning to Learn. I was told the instructor was not attractive, and her impressions would defeat my enthusiasm for the course. Wrong. I was not to be motivated by her looks as much as the habit of learning. My enthusiasm trumped my optimism for sure. Let me connect a few dots, as you will, so that concrete benefits are within our grasp. In the process, reconsolidation of chunks in my memory, help me reframe my learning.

Before I jot three dots as below, time to raise the principal questions of this post:

1. Does HR focus on image more than it should stay on overcoming its impostor syndromes?
2. Is adaptation a ruse in whose packaging, HR takes the easy way out of its purpose?
3. What does HR now need to ask of business to uphold its people champion role?

What is the cue on which you fall back into the rut of comfort? Is there a untested belief somewhere that needs your conscious attention? Now to the dots that I connect with of late.

1. Data driven HR , Big Data and Data Analytics in HR : Well, as you will recognize, these terms are not the same thing. Although they may hang together in a family of related constructs, these could stump many a professional who’ve no immersive experience in either Big Data modelling, data driven HR (read HRIS or Human Resource Information Systems) or Data Analytics. In terms of learning therefore, without deliberate practice in either, it would be major effort at mastering the context of the future. Remember – context is the place in which preparation and application of new learning meet! Rewarding oneself too early in advance of an outcome is a cop out. New learning chances on new habit formation and relates to consolidating between deliberate practice of new behavior and previous long-term memory. .
2. Requisite Organisation, Organization design and the average of transactions in HR : While the debate between which comes first – strategy or culture – has not abated, the role of dynamic design capability is contingent on organisation effectiveness. One of the consequences of digitization of HR data, has been the reliance on transaction sufficiency in HR deliverables. A related fallout has been the detachment from human interactions and the poverty of emotional and social intelligence to situate deliberate action. Plainly put, what use data, if the experience of using it results in organisation designsthat are not fulfilling, meaningful or sustainable?
3. Strategy , Feature and the language of Benefits : Recently a businessleader of IT services from India said “Once you build for speed, you have to lower head count and be quick in terms of response and the ability to integrate and understand the customer’s problems”. While that may aid his management’s decision to decrease the denominator and the per employee costs, it does not service a distinctly discriminant business strategy. It is easy for us to confuse a feature of business as business strategy per se. Speed is a feature, not the strategy. Speed may enable execution, but execution is not strategy per se. Speed is a benefit, if designed as such for value, but that’s only one reason why customers are willing to pay. There are enough stakeholders in business to see through information bytes which mediate your organisation’s image. And they may not need speed to know feature from strategy in a jiffy. It is probably subliminal!

Archana Arcot – thanks, for asking me useful questions yesterday. My intent here is to signify what HR leaders in large organisations and top teams of smaller organizations may collectively be numb to. To be in flow, is of course when challenge and acquired skill meet in one’s context. Is HR up to a challenge if it has not immersed itself in strategy, organization design and the method of science in data treatment? This is because in learning we cannot have focus in new learning and diffused interests at the same time.

Indeed, would organizations less attractive in visual talismans or artefacts hold immense promise in actualizing one’s professional aspirations? Let’s be on the lookout!

Phase transition - Learning and Development myths that may die soon

Don Tapscott, famed authority of the net era economy made some startling observations. The prospect of Facebook’s demise or Google’s fading out may seem remote today. However, when he treats industry data in longitudinal time analysis, he interprets it through institutional ecology, a paradigm that sociologists have used to explain industry behaviors.

When he alerts us to the crunch of talent required to make the next wave in technology, he is also implying a maxim that we have failed to recognise. CEOs and their executive teams have a larger than life influence on their corporations than they actually do.

Communities in organisations are the basic unit of sense making and action today. This is accentuated by the information that technology relays itself at break-neck speed. But our necks support more than information. We seem to miss that perception on the highways and lowlands of our neural pathways.

It is the myths of learning and development teams and their leaders that needs visit. Some myths that come to my mind include the following.

1.       Development will occur in steps of a learning ladder. Producing leaders at each step of the ladder is vital to an organisation’s longevity. Leader development and leadership development are the same.

2.       The environment inside the company can be tamed through propaganda as like in pasteurized learning, with every power constituency represented on the pulpit.

3.       The business environment outside the company influences employee behaviors less than leadership calls for action within.

4.       Ambiguity and complexity can be simulated in structured experiences at off-sites in ways that will visit the learner, even if remotely. A best practice is wisdom in motion. Like a list of 10 learning formulae.

5.       Volatility and uncertainty have a shape and form that learning and development teams have figured out in advance for leaders to aim at in break-out groups. A next practice is the product of reduced anxiety. 

6.       Training for skills and knowledge will ensure behaviors of value year on year.

7.       Perspective and Insight have no value in facilitation, especially because the solution that emerges is not with the facilitator.

8.       Mind-set is the employee’s problem, and a developmental lab the corporation’s solution.

9.       Expertise and example are with the technologically savvy.

10.   Behavior is not caused by organisational structure, process or design.

The above ten on my mind, for now. Where should I introspect the most to keep learning for effectiveness?

My 10 points of learning in 48 hours

I caught up with old friends, made new connections and renewed a few relationships over the last 48 hours. Here's a distilled memory from those interactions.

Some quick lessons over 48 hours.

1. Leaders with impact are what they know when they do this : Create conditions in which the world can live more amply.
2. Human Resources Development is the most noble errand since teaching.
3. To matter and to make our learning matter : Begin to make new endings.
4. Hope in the future is Power in the present. What can leaders do to deal in Hope?
5. Mark Twain : Kindness is the language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
6. Real leaders find their purposes when they are at the very end of themselves.
7. Let us not focus so much on our problems that we become blind to our possibilities.
8. Demanding and insisting on feedback in a culture that has not overcome its power distance is an overbearing insensitivity to our own selves.
9. When designing organisations, scale is to be met with structure. Structure is to be met with commitment and self-discipline. This process cannot be completed on paper and can only begin there.
10. When the CEO is held accountable, all but him or her escape scrutiny in the ravenous scrounge of electronic media. We've externalized our feudal mind-set unwittingly and unconsciously to the self-absorbed journalist and editor.

Management Reset – Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness – by Ed Lawler and Christopher Worley

Management Reset – Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness – by Ed Lawler and Christopher Worley, (2011) Jossey-Bass, CA

Book Review

In their earlier book, Built to Change, a title that read more like a ‘me too’ product, Lawler and Worley had already challenged conventional thinking around organizational agility and response to change. Designs for organizational excellence in the past meant that a goal for change was constant relative to the time in which change could be accomplished. Efforts in adaptation would be around such goals that fostered relatively newer forms of stability. The root for change effectiveness was identified as the need for stability. That structure, strategy and organizational design had to simultaneously change as the environment changed was called out in Built to Change.

Evenas they discovered the effects management practices were having on institutions at large, they realized that some of man’s irreversible choices were depleting finite resources. Sustainability of organizations now became inextricably intertwined with leadership as a team sport and shared goals and values were significant part of that journey. Management Reset is about embracing the complexity required to be a sustainable organization. “It is now clear that financial sustainability is a necessary but insufficient organization objective”, write the authors, thus opening up the possibility of reading through some refreshingly fundamental aspects of designing organizations for economic, social and environmental sustainability. Written for consultants who advise organizations on strategy and change, the authors want it to be read by academics who are concerned with organization design, organization development and change. They consider it as the third major management reset since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Command and Control (CCO) organizations responded to volume needs of capitalistic markets with bureaucratic controls. High Involvement organizations (HIO) showed the advantages of tapping into human beings latent potential in the second management reset. CCOs and HIOs are designed to be stable. Few have appreciated thus far, how sharply we will have to deviate from management approaches of the past in order to be sustainable. Fewer have explored its impact for strategy, structure, decision-making practices, human resource management and leadership. A Sustainably Managed Organisation (SMO) requires an integrated approach, far different from the fashion equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. The mindset for the CCO and the HIO is normally one of compliance, and the tension of interests between shareholders and larger stakeholders like society and natural resources remains. Hence the case in this book is made for the integration between agility of the HIO and responsibility of the SMO. 

Forces of Agility

Technology – Virtual presence technology is proliferating, closing the distance between people and challenging the concept of time. The amount of research and knowledge produced is also increasing, pushing the boundaries of change and innovation.

Globalization –The disappearance of host and parent status in manufacturing and research centers have forced organizations to continuously to modify services and products they offer as also where and how to produce them to enable access for their customers.

Workforce – Gender, national origin, race, age and language have come to acquire more central place for attribution to success. Life-span of employment varies not merely by economic development of the host economy, but also with sector of employment, age discrimination laws and financial wherewithal to retire.

Talent, intellectual property, brand image are more perishable and requires a different mind-set to manage as these feed off each other. Knowledge work is harder to direct, measure and perform. Designing for outcomes that may ensure Organizational agility required to evolve from CCOs and HIOs into SCOs are the basic tenets of this book.

The authors quote potential for being SMOs from among their researched organizations. Patagonia, PepsiCo and Unilever are featured for example. The book points towards

a) the way Value is created which includes strategies for sustainable effectiveness as against sustainable competitive advantages

b) the way work is organized, including Governance at the Board, Structures for Operations and sustainable work systems, as against conventional control through job designs; the focus being on organizational designs that dynamically adapt to business environments

c) the way People are treated which includes new notions on Performance, reward systems and management of Talent for SMOs and

d) the way Behavior is guided which entails orchestrating performance through leadership as teamwork, and the transformation to sustainable management where followership is imperative to leadership as well.

Contrary to popular perception, and much against conventional intuition, research on leadership development is quite clear that experience is the best developer of managers and leaders. The development of ‘crucible’ jobs that could provide learning experiences may seem outright first choices for learning designs, but one may fail to realize that moving people from one job to the next rapidly will rob people of requisite learning to overcome quick-fix mentalities - the kind that gloss over long-term impact of actions. What brought us here in terms of short-term thinking that focused selectively on the customer and shareholder will in this sense prevent us from reaching the SMO prototype.

Change Acceleration towards SMO transformations is facilitated by models, language, frameworks and practices that help people talk about and discuss the relevance of change to their work. Formal processes that facilitate learning from experience will be the key to both crucible experiences and the realization of the emerging identity of the organization. The interconnectedness of different social systems in a global world is brought about clearly in this book. It may take an evolved leadership team to embrace the message in this book though.

For another view try this link http://www.cnbc.com/id/43341328/ 

Relevant Design of Organisations

Some stories remain in my head for its symbols. I have the silhouette remembered far greater than the image in the center. I know that some of my classmates from my alumni institution brought back shawls from Tilonia, in Rajasthan. The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) had its spin-offs in learning no matter what you learnt. I don’t quite recall how the following pieces stumbled into the storyline. I remember it for sure because of its delightful meaningfulness. So I present the silhouette with some definition, characters and a little imagination.

Once not very long ago; it so happened that a Scandinavian donor wished his development funding for a model village in the north Indian state of Rajasthan be scrutinized. There was to be an audit, presumably to learn of how the funds were spent. So the Head of the audit team, Ingvar Wunderbar arrived from Delhi on a rustic 5 hour drive from the airport.

Conscientious and dutiful, sleep did not come easy for Ingvar and the first night seemed like the protracted Scandinavian hours of evening for Ingvar. At 0430 or so Indian Standard Time, a singing male in the new settlement not far from the original village rent the air potential energy, long before the first rays of the sun could invigorate the forlorn cactus shrubs fencing his abode. A turban on the head, and the loin cloth wrapped around the legs, in the joothi footwear of a fifteen thousand suns, the lone voice agreed with the caressed sands as they lapped the morning dew that was in harmony with the pristine dawn. Ingvar knew that life had to be different here. Curiosity had him step out of the visitor’s room in the Guest House. He caught a glimpse of the villager for his orange turban color shone in the solar powered streetlight as he kicked the more unkempt fine dust to its freshest destinations. The mystery for Ingvar was in the large pail of water that Bharat, the villager, was carrying in what promised to be a model village. Drainage and sewage lines were installed. Bio-gas from the village dairy piped to houses for cooking purposes, reducing wood based cooking fires.
As the day’s audit schedule unfolded, luck brought Ingvar to the very settlement from which the orange turban departed into the morning fields with water that could hardly irrigate the fierce land. Ingvar politely summoned the social worker to pose his mystery question. ‘Why did this gentleman with the morning voice go to the fields with water dripping from a vessel?’ “Oh, he wished to commence the ‘lota parade’”; giggled the perky social work graduate who did her best to save the turban its expected honor. A friend in the crowd who gathered around the visiting auditors, was Arun, a sustainability architect from Delhi. Arun whispered “Ingvar, she’s not making fun of you, but trying to defend morning constitutionals of the locals here. You better check if toilets are getting sufficient water”. Little did anyone realize, that Ingvar’s curiosity was not an ordinary one. Beyond culture, Ingvar represented the best traditions of audit. So Ingvar insisted that he examine Bharat’s toilets.

However, little did the Lonely Planet guides on India, or the niche Inside-Outside magazines published from India prepare Ingvar for what he was to see in those toilets.


Firstly the stench of manure greeted the curious senses approaching the toilet. The next sense was visually challenging and novel beyond measure. A young calf sat peacefully across the sanitary ware of the Indian toilet, chewing hay and fresh grass placed specially for it. Ingvar’s disbelief had him place his hand across his forehead with tissues soaked in sweat of the mid-day sun. “So what is cattle doing in here?” queried the exasperated Ingvar. Arun explained the situation in a maturity that left the delegation of auditors stunned. “Bharat is no ordinary soul”, Arun ventured, with a realization that he too had a sight that explained the paradoxical constraints that Bharat had managed. Ingvar noted in the corner of his eye that Bharat’s face was a picture of prayerful submission, that sought understanding for his creative utilization of space and shelter. Arun continued, “Bharat decided that one feature he would not compromise on is the concept of his extended family. He is willing to retain his old habit of visiting the fields for his morning constitutionals, for the sake of his cattle. You see, in his previous settlement, cattle were more proximate to the living quarters, than is the case with the model village design. Bharat wished that this calf be given special shelter so that he could release it to its mother only during scheduled feeding hours. The cow’s milk is precious to him too. So he decided to house the calf in his own toilet, as it is Bharat’s extended family..” Ingvar began to see the bigger picture and saw the beauty of the uncovered situation as more than a story to tell back home. Architectural designers and settlement planning designers least expected to encounter such a need as they went about their blueprinting for the model village. Cattle as extended family was only a matter of precept and not a concept in architectural design. Again, it became clearer to Ingvar as to why India could not innovate the model village for itself, but how Bharat, an Indian innovated within his set of conceived resources. Only lately did I Vijay Kumar (IVK), the Chief Technology Officer of WIPRO’s IT business comment at an Innovation Summit in Bangalore that “India does not innovate, but Indians do”.


Considerations of Vision, Context, Structural material, and collateral technologies are what architects use to realize their designs. In the Tilonia story, the Vision for modern hygienic sustainable living was strong, but , the social context was uniquely differentiated. The structural material, of local stone and brick; and collateral technologies used like street lighting powered by solar cells, and piped cooking gas notwithstanding, the user’s perspective of a tenable design is as important to consider. An inhabitant uses the design to finally make the concept village come alive.

When we design we fantasize a future. Nothing wrong with that. What did we learn from our past designs that got implemented? So the next time you notice a Green building or an off-beat design, would you also check for how the user’s needs have been met? When your organization is designed, does the designer’s expertise override the employee's practical organisational needs? What criteria do you consider when designing your organization? What can you do to ensure it is effective? How will you know it? Whose responsibility is it anyway, when online collaborative technologies pervade our senses? Does Organisation Design ever get audited? Like Bharat, do you have innovative coworkers who don’t wish to be in the limelight and can unwittingly challenge the expert model of organization design?