Advancing the Strategic Impact of Human Resources
The collective proprietary knowledge and know-how that an organization can leverage for repeated strategic impact has ascended to become the key source of sustainable competitive distinction. It’s a living/fast-evolving intangible asset that is duplication defiant, strategically liberating, and invites speculative enthusiasm. Like any valuable asset it requires good stewardship at a minimum, optimization to maximize, and positioning for potency. However, humans are the producers of knowledge and unlike PP&E, aren’t as amenable to formulaic driven deterministic outcomes. As a result, the approaches used tend to rely heavily on the art of cobbling together cultural elements and policies through a variety of behavioral research findings and then hoping for the best. In the meantime, competitive forces are nudging organization’s toward more adaptive operating models (flatter). Which, in turn, amplify the challenge of nurturing, harvesting, and diffusing knowledge across the organization.
Information tends to travel faster with more attention through informal channels like social networks. A functional organizational chart essentially conveys a desired control structure but rarely offers any material insight into how the large preponderance of information travels through the organization. What’s needed is a living network model that describes how people and information-flows/signals are connected. It’s a view of the organization that’s somewhat analogous to the human nervous system. This nervous system is the business “social” network. It’s a dynamic model that now, thanks to technology, can be derived, influenced and measured. As a result, it can provide a platform for continuous improvement. That is, it’s a step toward a systematic/evidence-driven means for managing the organizational knowledge asset in a way that challenges the term “intangible”.
The increased digitization of individuals and workplaces combined with the economics of cloud and advances in AI and IoT, now make it feasible to dynamically generate representations of the organization’s connection health. This includes indicators of frequency, medium intensity, and sentiment synthesized from a broad collection of sources. Patterns from which can be used to inform metrics that gauge engagement effectiveness to guide the way toward achieving a commitment-oriented culture.
From an HR function perspective, making this concept strategic is aided by the use of a mental-model that can be linked to strategy. However, HR doesn’t necessarily need to invent its own from scratch. For example, the same way the organization conceptually views its customer portfolio, HR can leverage similarly for employees. It can provide a distributed view that invites adoption of leadership best practices on a wider scale. The model in conjunction with the network map can be used in a wide variety of ways. For example:
· Facilitating cross functional collaboration
· Building high performance teams
· Onboarding progress
· Individual employee or manager development
· Knowledge sharing & change diffusion efficiency
· Change management initiatives
· Assessing termination/defection impact
· Bottleneck detection
· Influencer detection
As tools like the one described here become increasingly feasible, high performance teams and cultures become less mysterious or a product of happenstance. The same evidence driven disciplines used to engineer customer experiences or evolve minimum viable products (for example) can be used to more accurately navigate the way toward effective knowledge management and commitment.
*To see an example of how this concept fits into the larger context of an adaptive organization, see my paper entitled: Adaptive Customer Centric Innovation.
