The Art and Science of Workplace Planning: Lessons from Superforcasting

David Doe, VP, Talent Strategy and Excellence, Shell

“In one of history’s great ironies, scientists today know more than their colleagues a century ago, and possess vastly more data-crunching power, but are much less confident in the prospects for perfect predictability.”

The above quote is taken from Tetlock and Gardner’s “Superforecasting: the art of science and prediction”. It is a reminder of why, despite the potential benefits, so many organisations struggle to extract value from strategic workforce planning (SWP). 

We live in a fast-paced world with change accelerating across economical, geopolitical, technological, and societal fronts. Yet the lessons of prior industrial revolutions would indicate that we will continue to be in a tight talent market for some time as the digital revolution and energy transition create more new and different jobs than they destroy.

If done well, SWP allows businesses to identify risks and opportunities in transforming their workforce to meet their strategy and an ability to lean into change. So, how can you best get value from SWP in a fast-paced world?

Scope

In the context of employment models and an increasing need to use “swing” resources to manage peak workload periods, it is important to manage the total workforce (staff and contingent) deliberately and well. There are several implications. 

“In a fast-paced world adopting a continuous planning mindset allows you to revisit and adjust plans mid-cycle, making decisions informed by both data and the risk and opportunity analysis from your SWP is the key to success”

• The importance of capturing contingent workers in a single Vendor Management System and the need to leverage a single (preferably AI-enabled) skills taxonomy that integrates with the core Human Capital Management system.

• Value and cost should be leading indicators above FTE and headcount. 

• A close partnership between Finance, HR, and Contracting and Procurement functions is desirable, building capability across all three.

Developing a Strategic Plan

The strategic element of a workforce plan should align with the business strategy (typically on a 3-to-5-year horizon). Whilst organisations are understandably bringing more data into discussions, the strategic element should be more qualitative than quantitative. It is impossible to predict or forecast the future. How markets evolve is a function of countless variables — geopolitics, economics, technology, and societal expectations— each with its inherent uncertainty.

The purpose of strategic planning is to analyse the delta between the current and future workforce composition, based on business requirements. The aim is to identify and mitigate risks and maximise opportunities associated with your workforce composition and talent pipeline, with focus on:

• Location: Which markets are likely to grow, remain core, or might decline? Where does work need to be performed “in the country” and co-located versus where can it be truly virtual or global?

• Skills: How will skills need to evolve based on business models and technological change? Where are the biggest deltas, where are there potential skill adjacencies, and how best to close any gaps?

• Build, borrow, buy, or bot: Who performs the work - what can be built in-house (or recruited on the market), borrowed (via contingent workers, alliances), bought (via M&A), or automated?

• Value and optimisation: How can you drive efficiency in the underlying organisation whilst growing the top line? What is the expected return on investment?’.

Moving from Strategy to Operation

Operational planning adds the next level of quantitative detail and precision to the strategic plan but on a much shorter, typically one-year, horizon. It translates strategy into an action plan, setting budgets, FTE targets, and aids talent acquisition. 

It is important to avoid line-by-line or bottom-up approaches and focus target setting at the level that drives behaviour and influences business outcomes. Start with your existing organisation and focus efforts on identifying efficiency or growth initiatives. Experience shows line by line approaches give a false sense of discipline and quickly diverge from reality.

Execution and Continuous Planning

The value of any plan lies not in the thinking, but in the execution. Transparently tracking real-time delivery (via an analytics visualisation tool) helps drive discipline and accountability. It also helps to provide indicators on when to pivot. No plan survives the first action with the enemy. In a fast-paced world adopting a continuous planning mindset allows you to revisit and adjust plans mid-cycle, making decisions informed by both data and the risk and opportunity analysis from your SWP is the key to success.

Some Parting Advice:

Since I started with a quote from Tetlock and Gardner, I will close with one which gives some practical advice for your journey:

“Focus on questions where your hard work is likely to pay off. Don’t waste time either on easy ‘clocklike’ questions (where simple rules of thumb can get you close to the right answer) or on impenetrable ‘cloud-like’ questions (where even fancy statistical models can’t beat the dart-throwing chimp). Concentrate on questions in the Goldilocks zone of difficulty, where effort pays off the most.”