Hacking HR to Build an Adaptability Advantage

It is my experience that everyone likes change, as long as it does not affect them. Managers want their employees or other departments to change. Even CEOs often expect others to change while they stay within the boundaries of their comfort zones. We need to develop and use effective assessment tools which lets each person see how much adaptability they have exhibited in the past and how much adaptability they are really willing to put into play in the near future.

So great to be in this 'conversation'! Neelesh - really thankful that you brought 'complexity' into the MiX of topics and focus areas. I noted it in my opening comment to the first post so was glad to see it resonates with others! My hope is that its concepts can be adapted into this discussion without alienating anyone by what can be overwhelming to understand. (maybe that was just my experience at first!) It is truly something we in change management have to get our arms around - of course it is not something anyone controls by nature - but the concepts of complexity are in line with the goals of this collaboration - adaptability, agility and needed openness for innovation and change.

Very interesting to read the early comments so far. As I read through a lot of valid and interesting points, it occurred to me that in the rush to be adaptable, we need to make sure we take people with us. As someone who has been in SMEs most of my working life, change is completely natural and pretty much a given. There is no status quo. What we did last week wno't necessarily work this week. But I have observed in others - and experienced myself - something I guess we could call "change fatigue". While change can obviously be energising, as humans we (or at least some of us!) value stability and predictability at least some of the time. We need to ensure that our adaptable organisations are providing the necessary support to the people who make them adaptable.

Some great comments here and shows a really strong start made for this exciting venture. So for my contribution on why I think adaptability matters now, I want to look into me, you, us as human beings who happen to be in professional sphere fulfilling some sense of destiny and purpose.

From the beauty and skill of art to the paint by numbers approach, we have an amazing ability to connect, share and proliferate learning. Learning that helps others with different psychological make up, intuitive drive and applied cognitive ability. Helping others to succeed is one of the more glorious aspects of human nature that appears to be lacking in the world of work, corporate being and professional pursuits. We seem to have become fixated on personal satisfaction through achievement only and not on shared, positive and generously-natured impacts we have on others. We need to adapt personally to the challenge that this personal-only success has become vacuous and seems inappropriate at a time when we need more collective effort.

This personal and then collective adaptability matters now more than ever as we head on in to both a richer bounty of opportunities yet a shadow of challenges, a drain on resources (natural and monetary) and a feeling we've peaked about this thing called work.

Adaptability is a key attribute in ever faster absorption of insight; an enhanced rate of deductive analysis and a splicing of intuition and experience.

We need to be personally adaptable in every day life. Complex societal problems - often appearing in cyclical and despairing circumstances - have impacted on how we view work.

Work has lost much of its feeling of being a craft, a purpose, a calling. It feels like work itself needs to go way beyond transactional existence to earn a living to pay for your way in life. We as individuals need more from work than a paycheck.

Work therefore needs more stimulus for us as we become ever more used to wealth and opportunity that has come with improved standards of living for many of us. Our striving to belong, make an impact and leave a mark manifests itself as much in our professional endeavours as it does our wider being.

So we - personally - and then - us professionally need adaptability to become our truest "norm". The pursuit of stability as a goal is surely no longer feasible (the "it'll be ok when all this change has settled down" mentality). So I guess we all need to refocus ourselves individually and collectively on the epitome of being adaptable.

I for one view this opportunity now as the chance to refocus. Be positively disruptive about the way we operate as ourselves at work and the impact that has on the place / entity we call work.

Finally, adaptability for me is about the firmest grasp let the loosest grip on ourselves and what we do as a calling. It's time to hack our thinking and influence our actions and be adaptable by nature not by exception.

Hi Simon,
I think you make a really important point - we definitely need to highlight and share some of the excellent practice happening in SME's. I am currently working on some CIPD research looking at entrepreneurial practices in different sized organisations but have some excellent examples from SME's. Once published, I'll share some of the insights here relating to agility and I have also asked some of the case studies to join our discussions here.

I'm excited by both the concept of the hackathon and the issue of adaptability. My only initial concern is that the focus seems to be very much on larger organisations, In very crude terms, the issue seems to be how do we get oil tankers to change direction faster - where as if you're involved with a smaller organisation (such as an SME) it's more like you're in a yacht or speed boat - being both operationally and strategically agile almost come as second nature. So I'm hoping that one of the things that comes from it is what we can learn from smaller organisations - many of which run on tiny amounts of HR support - and echo Mike's comments above about how we can be more commercially aware

The Mix looks great, and I certainly picked up on the urgency and excitement. My company, Atos, is leading in its goal to be Zero Email by 2014, this is spurring on the idea, to be more collaborative and savvy, and is challenging our thinking on leadership and people change in many ways. Great to see this happening

Great to be part of such an exciting network and glad to see the discussions have kicked off in earnest. Thanks Neelesh for your discussion of complexity theory and integral theory and the links provided –some reading for us all! It would be useful to think about how such theories can be applied in a practical way on the ground to help organisational change. Mike’s emphasis on the need for commercial awareness is sound– something the CIPD started to explore in our Business Savvy research in 2012. I also like the idea of coffee and business rather than tea and sympathy....

Hi Chris
Wow there has been such contribution and content generated already and I'm going to put my hand up here and say its a lot to take in! It would be great if the coaches/our support could take a look at what themes are emerging as we go so we can build and,where it works, connect our thinking and generate new insights. And also challenge what we've come up with to explore it further? We can then capitalise on the momentum and keep it going.
Thanks!

Adaptability is an interesting construct, in that it assumes that as individuals we need to adapt. many of us have done that, but I also wonder if it is wider than adapting, but about approaching the challenges we face from a very different perspective.

HR have had a great history of changing name and label, with minimal changes "under the hood" - its not a change of name that bis required to "adapt" but a fundamental shift to be more commercially aware.
Its about educating our managers to take more ownership for traditional HR functions,

If HR wants to change - then our paymasters need to demand change. CEOs need to be clear to us and other functions of their vision, and requirement for structural and cultural change.
for as a function we can only "tinker around the edges" without CEO commitment. Now of course we can lead that change - but how many HR managers have weekly meetings with the CEO on a one to one basis? In one role I had as head of training, at 5pm on a Friday I would take coffee to the CEO office and we would talk about business. Due to this approach I was listened to, and the CEO adopted many of my suggestions.
Change and adaptation starts at the top
I would like to hear how others engage their CEO in an informal but regular way - for this is sowing the seeds of successful change.

To answer the question 'Why adaptability matters now', which is the first step in the Hackathon Project timeline, I would summarize as follows:

It seems to me that a richer and more nuanced exploration of adaptability would need the implements of two new fields of study – complexity theory and integral theory. Both these fields have ‘hit the scene’ in the last 3-4 decades and hence it is not surprising that they are not regularly ‘used’ in the mainstream. They defy the usual classifications of academia and sit somewhere between the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and philosophy, and yet they cover diverse terrain and uncover deeper and richer mysteries of the human condition without being tyrannized by any specific ‘school of thought’ or paradigm. In that sense, they are perhaps both cross-paradigmatic and trans-paradigmatic.

Most of us know about the Newtonian approach – it pioneered the human endeavour to understand reality and has been the bedrock of scientific understanding till the beginning of the 20th century. The Newtonian approach has three main characteristics which has become entrenched in human thinking not just in matters of science, but in matters of life as well. These three characteristics are being transcended (though not entirely excluded or rejected) by the domain of complexity sciences:

1. Determinism - the notion that things can be predicted by a simple set of equations. First quantum mechanics and then non-linear chaos theory have proven this is not necessarily the case with reality.

2. Reductionism - the notion that the whole can be understood by analysing the parts only. General Systems Theory has debunked this with its deeper understanding of holism and emergence.

3. Objectivity - the notion that reality is something objective and independent of the observer. Both quantum mechanics and cybernetics contend that all knowledge is subjective, and that there is no reality independent of the observer.

The three things above merge into the emerging field of complexity (both as a science and a philosophy) which deals with multi-agent systems that subjectively interpret reality, interact locally, but contribute to the emergence of global order (or disorder). Unlike in the Newtonian paradigm, uncertainty and subjectively are not negative problems to be resolved, but positive assets that directly produce creativity, adaptation and evolution. For a deeper dive into the 'philosophy' of complexity as it applies to the real world, please see: http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0604/0604072.pdf

Just as Complexity Science is a vast subject, unfolding every day with new insights and breakthroughs, so is the field of Integral Theory. Integral theory is a philosophy promoted by Ken Wilber that seeks a synthesis of the best of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern reality. It is portrayed as a "theory of everything," and offers an approach "to draw together an already existing number of separate paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually enriching." It has been applied by scholar-practitioners in 35 distinct academic and professional domains as varied as organizational management, art, and feminism. For the purposes of this Hack though, I would like to draw our attention to two key concepts: the Four Quadrants, and Spiral Dynamics Integral.

Let’s begin with the most fundamental element of Integral Theory: quadrants. To understand quadrants, one must first consider the obvious fact that every situation can be considered from the perspective of the individual (the employee, leader, manager etc) or from the perspective of the collective (the unit, division, organization). Next, we must consider that every phenomenon can be considered from an objective or a subjective point of view (also referred to as exterior and interior). Now, by simply bringing together the individual and collective on one axis and subjective and objective on another axis, we have four quadrants. These quadrants represent primordial, universal perspectives. They are irreducible, meaning that one cannot collapse one into the other. For a deeper dive into Integral Theory in general, and quadrants in particular please see: http://www.kon.org/hswp/archive/mcgregor_2.htm

Clare W Graves, the original proponent of Spiral Dynamics, which has later been amalgamated by some into Integral Theory, said “Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiralling process, marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behaviour systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.” Please see http://www.spiraldynamics.net/about-spiral-dynamics-integral.html

Coming back to the Hack after these thought sojourns, I see the need to re-think, re-organize and recast complex adaptive systems thinking and formulations for organizational culture, systems, individual behaviour and leadership traits. I would finally like to point Hack participants to this paper which brings it together in some sense:

http://www.levevei.no/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Brown_2012_Essentials-o...

If the above resonate with Hack participants may be the next step would be to gather together on a skype call or web-conference to share our reflections and agree how to proceed to Stage 2 of the Hackathon. I am happy to organize such a web-conference.

If we have to have coaches (and I'm not sure that we do - I'd have preferred the opportunity to role model a more adaptive approach, which I think is necessarily more flat and democratic too) I'd have gone for John Kotter. I've had concerns about his 10 step process for some time but I think his recent HBR article, Accelerate, brings this right up to speed.