Black Holes and White Spaces: Reimagining the Future of Work and HR with the CHREATE Project

By John Boudreau, Carolyn Lavelle Rearick and Ian Ziskin

Black Holes and White Spaces describes tools and frameworks that leaders inside and outside the HR profession can use to transform the HR profession and their organizational success. It summarizes the collective wisdom and hard work of over 70 exemplary chief HR officers and other leaders. Their mission: Disruptively accelerate the progress of the HR profession to meet the unprecedented challenges and opportunities of the new world of work. Black Holes are things that have been talked about for years in HR, but remain stubbornly unresolved. White Spaces are things that get far too little attention from HR, but that must be addressed to have a pivotal impact on the future workplace and the success of HR and organizations.These leaders committed to a three-year collective effort dubbed CHREATE -- The Global Consortium to Reimagine HR, Employment Alternatives, Talent, and the Enterprise. They recruited their colleagues and led volunteer teams that tackled the tough challenges, demonstrated how to address them, and built open-source tools and frameworks for leaders like you to use in your own organization. The project was guided by these common beliefs: open source, voluntary, inclusive, messy, and agile. CHREATE focused on four key pillars of change, that organize this book: 1. Align HR with Value Creation for Organizations that Win; 2. Shape Expectations of HR's Key Constituents; 3. Rewire the Work and Tools of HR; and 4. Enhance the HR Talent Pipeline.In this eBook, you'll find 26 essays from a wide range of CHREATE Project volunteers, people who have contributed their expertise, time, and passion to raising the bar for the HR profession. The essays not only describe the frameworks and tools to disruptively accelerate HR's progress, they often provide links to prototypes, guides and tools. Please join the movement! Use this book as your platform to disruptively accelerate HR and work in your organization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Society For Human Resource Management
• Release date: Jan 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781586444624

Book preview

Appendix

Introduction

By John Boudreau, Ian Ziskin, and Carolyn Rearick

It was the spring of 2010 in Los Angeles, and two of us—John Boudreau and Ian Ziskin—were having lunch. We were talking about the economic downturn that had been gripping the world for the previous two years, and speculating about the impact of the turbulent business environment on the changing nature of work, the workforce, and the workplace. This discussion, which was a lot heavier than what we were eating, also led us to wonder, What will be the impact of all these changes and challenges on HR people and the profession, and are we ready?

By the time lunch was over, we concluded that as much as we loved and admired the human resources profession and the people in it, and as proud as we were to be part of it, we were not ready. But we could be.

However, things needed to change. We needed to bring the future forward fast.

That day, we committed to work together on what we then referred to as The Future of HR. It didn’t take us long to discover that there were a number of colleagues, friends, and kindred spirits out there who were having similar conversations and wanted to collaborate. So we began to meet with dozens of HR and operating leaders to listen, debate, and decide what to do next during the 2011–2013 time frame.

We did some research, identified some emerging themes, wrote some articles and white papers, and ran some Future of HR development programs. New ideas and new collaborators kept emerging.

Somewhere along the line, we coined the phrase Black Holes and White Spaces to reflect what we were hearing. Black Holes symbolized things we had been talking about for years in HR but had yet to resolve. White Spaces referred to things we had yet to pay attention to in HR, but that would make a big difference to organizational and HR success if we did.

As our good friend Eva Sage-Gavin also reminded us, We are all doing great work around our individual campfires. Now it’s time to build a bonfire. And so a bunch of us did, forming what became the original Core Team, with HR leaders Debra Engel and Scott Pitasky; the National Academy of Human Resources (NAHR), represented by then president Dick Antoine; and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), represented by its chief human resources officer, Jeff Pon. In later phases the Core Team included Jill Smart, the new NAHR president; Lisa Connell, the executive director of HR People & Strategy (HRPS); and Jodi Starkman, executive director of Innovation Resource Center for Human Resources (IRC4HR).

We went from a couple of guys having lunch, to a handful of colleagues having great discussions, to a half-dozen leaders on the Core Team building a real plan, to 25 CHROs coming together for a first summit, to 80 HR leaders working together on multiple projects, to more than 100 volunteers working to build a movement—and the CHREATE Project was born.

CHREATE (which stands for the Global Consortium to Reimagine HR, Employment Alternatives, Talent, and the Enterprise) is a painfully long and complicated acronym for an incredibly exciting and simple idea: build a volunteer-driven, open-source movement to disruptively accelerate the evolution of HR. Since its inception, the CHREATE Project has been guided by a set of common beliefs—open source, voluntary, inclusive, messy, and agile. It has become all of these things and more.

We began in 2014 by focusing on four top priorities:

Align HR with value creation for organizations that win

Shape expectations of HR’s key constituents

Rewire the work and tools of HR

Enhance the HR talent pipeline

Over the course of two years, 2015 and 2016, teams of volunteers from multiple companies and industries worked on each of the above priorities to better understand and address:

The external business environment and forces of change affecting work and HR

Raising the level of key constituent expectations for HR

New capabilities required not only of HR leaders, but of all leaders

Different operating models and ways of delivering HR work, and even newer ways of thinking about work and who does the work

Throughout the CHREATE journey, we have been very focused on a core set of steps and deliverables, including to:

Inspire a collective effort among HR leaders to advance the profession

Assert a point of view about what it takes for HR to be ready for and relevant to the world of work over a 10-year time frame

Focus on a handful of key priorities that are practical so that action can be taken now

Choose projects that spark discussion, get people thinking, and cause them to do things differently

Socialize and publicize our work so that leaders, boards, investors, and regulators will take notice and action

Create tangible impact on employees, freelancers, families, communities, and governments

Shape the way people work, live, and play

Create tools, frameworks, discussion guides, assessments, development programs, articles, blogs, books, and platforms that HR and operating leaders can use to learn, grow, and change

This eBook reflects the CHREATE Project’s commitment to deliver tangible resources that leaders can use. It contains 26 essays from a wide range of CHREATE Project volunteers, people who have contributed their expertise, time, and passion to raising the bar—not only for the CHREATE Project but also for the entire HR profession. They represent what is best and brightest about HR.

We cannot thank them, or the more than 100 volunteers and 14 sponsors, enough for their tireless support and enthusiastic contributions to the CHREATE Project. The appendix to this eBook lists all of the volunteers, sponsors, and Core Team members.

This eBook represents an important inflection point in the CHREATE Project. It codifies perspectives and solutions to help HR and non-HR leaders confidently face the future of work. But it is so much more than that. Think of it as an invitation to an open-source collaborative network of like-minded leaders.

John Boudreau, Ian Ziskin, and Carolyn Rearick, CHREATE co-founders, on Behalf of the CHREATE Project

John Boudreau is professor and research director at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Center for Effective Organizations, and author of the book Lead the Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment, with Ravin Jesuthasan and David Creelman, and the forthcoming book, Global Trends in Human Resource Management: A Twenty-Year Analysis, with Edward E. Lawler III.

Ian Ziskin is president and founder of EXec EXcel Group and a former CHRO at Northrop Grumman and Qwest Communications. He is also a member of the board of directors of Humantelligence and chairs the Allegis Partners advisory group. Ian delivers services to clients as a board advisor, coach, consultant, teacher, speaker, and author. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Carolyn Lavelle Rearick joined the CHREATE Project in December 2014. While with CHREATE, she provided project management support to the volunteer project teams, organized the annual summits, and oversaw communication to the CHREATE community. Carolyn holds an MBA from the USC Marshall School of Business and BA in communication studies from UCLA.

PART ONE:

THE TRANSFORMATION OF ORGANIZATIONS, BUSINESS, AND WORK

Introduction

By John Boudreau

The future is not uniformly distributed. The disruptive acceleration of the HR profession and organizational capability that the CHREATE Project describes will vary in different situations, industries, regions, cultures, and other instances. How can leaders navigate the topography of this evolution to identify the pivotal changes and priorities that will most affect their organization? The essays in Part One strive to answer that question. They provide the context that underpins the later essays, and offer readers an opportunity to start by considering their own future context and how that will shape their decisions about their strategy, organization, and work.

HR’s impact is both inside out (how the HR profession evolves and delivers its work to create impact) and outside in (how the organizational and wider environment shape and determine how HR will create its pivotal impact). The essays in Part One reflect the outside-in perspective. They describe the future of organizations, business, and work, and the trends and forces that will shape it. Organization and HR leaders will find tools to diagnose their particular future environment to identify the most pivotal elements of these changes. Policymakers, investors, boards, workers, and other constituents will find tools and ideas to fashion a more nuanced approach to mapping the emerging future context, beyond platitudes or hyperbole that tends to suggest that one size fits all or offers choices between extremes.

John Boudreau begins by describing in the essay Mapping Work in the Digital Economy: Democratic, Technological, and Deconstructed the five fundamental forces that the CHREATE teams identified as driving future change: (1) Social and Organizational Reconfiguration, (2) All-Inclusive Global Talent Market, (3) A Truly Connected World, (4) Exponential Technology Change, and (5) Human–Automation Collaboration. He describes how the CHREATE teams depicted the effects of these trends on the future work ecosystem, to producing a 2 x 2 ‘work evolution’ matrix that leaders can use to map the evolution of their organization and the work ecosystem that will support it. The idea is to get beyond hyperbole such as The Gig Economy is the future of work, or Robots will replace workers, and instead take a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to connecting the future trends that will most affect your organization to the work implications that are most vital for you to address.

Greg Pryor in the essay Future States describes the 2 x 2 ‘work evolution’ matrix and delves deeply into one quadrant: the ‘Uber’-empowered workplace, where both a highly democratized work ecosystem and highly evolved technology combine. He describes how organizations and work in this future scenario must reflect new approaches to technology-driven innovation, the worker experience, network-based organizations, data and analytics, and global connectedness. He provides a call to action for leaders, workers, and their constituents to develop their own future scenarios. The goal is not so much to predict the future as to prepare for multiple future states.

Next, in The Disruptive Changes in the World of Work That Are Driving Cultural Changes, Deborah Barber describes how cultural changes will be driven by the evolution of the future world of work. She says that the evolving strategic and work environment will require organizations to win on new dimensions such as speed, agility, social mandates, worker fulfillment, optimized talent sourcing, and boundaryless global collaboration, all riding on a wave of enhanced analytics and data. She shows how this requires thinking differently about many fundamental elements of the employment and work relationship, redefining things like employment brand, performance, collaboration, authority, power, and engagement. In the end, she suggests that the dimensions of seismic shifts in organization and work culture that leaders can use to consider how their own organization culture must evolve.

A Vision of the Workplace in 2025: Doom or Boom?—the wide-ranging essay by Michael Grove, Chris Hood, Chiara Bersano, Eric Johnson, and Susan Stucky—offers a historical perspective on prior fundamental forces of change such as lean, agile, design thinking, and robotics, suggesting the importance of offering value, not just low cost. They describe a future Work Marketplace characterized by a more transparent and fair exchange relationship between workers and those who engage them that breaks free from traditional notions of head count and jobs. Most fundamentally, the authors suggest an evolution from today’s cost-driven approach to work and workers toward a more value-driven approach, which must be powered by more precise insights into the value of work to organizational value creation, not just the costs of work. They show how this value-versus-cost approach to the Work Marketplace can transform traditional approaches to create greater organizational flexibility, transparency, IT management, creativity, diversity, and workforce quality. They suggest this will require a fundamental mind shift by both workers and those who engage them, seeing workers as individual and independent service providers, service to multiple customers rather than one job, and a premium placed on adaptability.

In CHREATE Forces of Change, Maria Forbes and Jodi Starkman conclude this section of the book by integrating the Five Forces of Change and future trends into a set of specific tools leaders can use to engage their employees, colleagues, and key constituents to map their future position in this evolving new topography, and the most pivotal requirements to evolve successfully. They reflect a theme embodied throughout these essays: Take the ideas of CHREATE and make them tangible and practical. They distill the Five Forces of Change into a powerful Learning Map and use the proven change-facilitation techniques of Root, Incorporated, to offer leaders a step-by-step approach to engaging teams and constituents, and precisely identifying the impact of those forces on their organization, what success will look like, the pivotal strategic gaps, and the means to close those gaps. The future is not evenly distributed, and this tool kit demonstrates how you and your team can identify its unique effects on your organization and what to do about it.

Mapping Work in the Digital Economy: Democratic, Technological, and Deconstructed

By John Boudreau

Organizations are becoming more boundaryless, agile, global, and transparent than ever before—and will be even more so in the future. Work and workers (yes, humans) will always be essential to organizations, but organizations themselves will be more diverse, and work will be organized, structured, and done in new ways, increasingly through arrangements outside of regular full-time employment. How can leaders navigate this new digital work ecosystem? How should your organization plan for the changes ahead?

Important clues are emerging from a unique consortium of human resource executives and other leaders. They have gathered together through CHREATE (The Global Consortium to Reimagine HR, Employment Alternatives, Talent, and the Enterprise) to map out how organizations must evolve to meet future challenges, to identify pivotal initiatives to accelerate that evolution, and to design the actions needed to make the future a reality.

To help frame where the world of work is going, CHREATE leaders identified Five Fundamental Forces driving change:

Social and Organizational Reconfiguration: Organizations will be increasingly transparent to stakeholders and more flexible, shifting toward more power-balanced forms and more project-based relationships. Talent will engage on aligned purpose, not just economics. Beyond traditional hierarchies and contracts, networks and social and external collaborations will make leadership more horizontal, shared, and collective.

An All-Inclusive Global Talent Market: Women and nonwhite ethnicities are becoming talent majorities, and greater longevity is increasing multigenerational workforces. Social policies support boundaryless work beyond traditional full-time employment. Work and worker segmentation enable increasingly differentiated policies, practices, work designs, pay, and benefits, and workers choose organizations based on the opinions of socially connected peers and opinion leaders.

A Truly Connected World: Work is increasingly virtual and occurs anywhere and anytime, through mobile personal devices with global real-time communications. Boundaryless work partnerships and networks augment capabilities and redefine careers, learning, and workplace fairness and attractiveness.

Exponential Technology Change: Robots, autonomous vehicles, commoditized sensors, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things are reshaping the work ecosystem, so that flexible, distributed,