By Jason McRobbie

Can complexity truly be made simple? Does a theory of everything actually exist – or at least insofar as it applies to HR?

For the organizers of BC HRMA’s 49th Annual Conference, led by conference chair Adam Cotterall, CHRP, the challenge was to create a roster of plenary speakers that might possibly capture and ground the zeitgeist of the moment.

Up Close and All Business

Finance titan Kevin O’Leary was the first of four headlining speakers at the “Complexity Made Simple” conference in Vancouver on April 14-15, 2011. He summed the solution in a single word – money.

The night before his opening address, O’Leary joined business expert Michael Campbell onstage for “Up Close and All Business” where he laid financial matters bare. “The DNA of a business is to make money. After that you can save a baby whale, but you have to make the money first.”

“I don’t care who you are or who you work for. You might not like the message. Too bad. The key to success is return of equity to shareholders,” explained O’Leary during his twin engagements with BC HRMA.  “We’re not trying to make friends, we’re making money. More efficiency is demanded by shareholders in the global context.”

Beginning with a $10,000 dollar loan from his mother, O’Leary founded a children’s educational software company in the family basement and set his goals on nothing less than dominating the emerging field. Fueled by an appetite for acquisition and grounded by an MBA from Western University, he attracted the attention of Mattel and was granted his own personal freedom – to the tune of $3.7 billion. The rest has played out in prime time on Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank, as well the Lang & O’Leary Report.

With a popularity ranging from 9 nine year old girls to 90 year old men, and access to the brightest minds of business in some of the busiest green rooms in television, O’Leary knows nothing if not his business and his audience. “People are watching the pursuit of freedom. I’m never giving up this job.”

Every ounce his onscreen presence, O’Leary is unabashed in his view of business as war, but silences would-be critics with a simple truth. “Wealth is freedom. The whole idea is to get rich and be free.”

Dragon HR Into the Business of Money

For those familiar with the difference between O’Leary’s personas, “Up Close and All Business” was purely Shark. The morning after, the Dragon warmed to his audience, and put the ‘People, Passion, Profit’ paradigm of the conference into perspective.

Green is fine. People and passion are great. Hiring people with a passion for profiting your company is the key. Profit is not the fuel of business; it is the engine. Great hires provide the profit – and that puts the keys in the hands of HR.

“I can’t believe how HR has come out of nowhere in the past decade to have an enormous role,” said O’Leary to the nearly 1,000 attendees of BC HRMA’s two-day conference. “The first question I ask is, ‘Who is doing your HR?’ The efficiency of every single hire has to better.”

“The people are part of the profit equation as never before and the metrics of HR have changed from 10 years ago. This is no longer about how many people went to the picnic and how happy everyone is,” said O’Leary, indisputably Canada’s most prolific financial expert and proponent of profitability. “HR needs to be tied to the same performance metric as everyone else: profit. If you want to be coveted by the CEO, you have to get on board with metrics.”

That the numbers come top of mind to a man whose ‘real’ job is president of the O’Leary Investment Fund is no surprise. Knowing your numbers is imperative when you handle over $9 billion of other’s people money.

Tweet This (Google That)

More surprising than O’Leary’s call for HR to brush up on its metrics was what he considered the true hot button issue: getting social media policy in place pronto.  O’Leary views the networks of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as paramount to being understood and capitalized upon.

“I do it every day,” revealed O’Leary of his own tweeting. “Social networking. Every single company needs to figure out how to manage it and that is getting pushed on HR. This social media is part of communicating your brand – especially for HR. This is how you attract more of the right people into your business.”

And while HR should hone their metrics to win CEO favour, the onus O’Leary places upon the CEOs is no less. The very fabric of organizations will have to change in order for businesses to attract and reward people who embrace and share their vision.

At Google, things were different from the start, and a driving force behind its success was Douglas Merrill, Google’s former chief information officer and VP of engineering. He knows his Tweets from his Twitters and would never speak of The Facebook. He’s also helped bring some of the most useful online tools in the world into being.

While Moore’s Law establishes an exponential growth curve for technology’s evolution, it fails to provide an instruction manual for factoring its manifold impacts upon the traditional realities of the work place. Whether one prefers to view the big picture from Google Earth or simply Google the finest of details, the point seems to be proven. In many ways, our ‘toys’ and ‘tools’ have become confused. Merrill’s authority on such things is verboten. Go ahead, Google him.

Changing Tools, Time and Thinking

“It took 200 years to fill the current Library of Congress. In the last 10 years, enough information has been added to fill 40,000 Libraries of Congress,” he explained. “The trouble with living in this incredible waterfall of information is that mostly you’re just blown over by it,” said Merrill. “Mostly, you don’t have the ability to remember the things you care about and not remember the things you don’t care about.”

Merrill is also fundamentally certain of one thing in particular. The rules that guide the working world are fundamentally wrong: out of sync with more modern definitions of ‘machines’ and ‘labour’. As tools and times have changed, so too have the possibilities to redefine the way the working world works.

“What if we worked when we needed to and did not when we didn’t have to?” asked Merrill. “After all, this work/life balance talk is really code for work less. It’s also a relatively modern phenomenon.”

“The world has always been changing, but this time creation of the information itself has changed. The democratization of information has had an enormous impact and that massive overflow of information has stressed the three pound roasting chicken between our ears,” explained Merrill. “We need to seek organization in our tools and thinking to manage the stress.”

Only a decade ago, employees came to the workplace to perform the roles required with the tools provided. Nowadays, the youngest employees might come to the workplace with better tools in their jacket pocket or left at home than those supplied.

“HR is both part of the problem and part of the solution. HR’s responsibility is to create talent, develop talent and help them succeed.  One of that reasons the talent struggles today is because they have too much work to do and your organizations are asking them to do that work in the wrong way,” Merrill explained.

“The way we have learned over time to handle information and to deal with work is maladaptive for the world in which we find ourselves today. HR has to help to help an organization understand that work/life balance is the wrong metaphor and work/life integration is the right metaphor. The key is to get it out of your head and to filter what you are given.”

Forget the Future (As You Know It)

As for where Moore’s Law might next lead or what the future holds for HR, Canada’s leading futurist Richard Worzel explained the conundrum on the second day of Conference 2011: we lack imagination in our scenario-planning.

“For the most part, we have a lack of imagination regarding the future,” said Worzel. “Futurists do not predict the future. The only thing of which we can be certain is that the future will take us by surprise.”

As a member of the World Future Society, Worzel eschews crystal balls for finite filters and big picture thinking and helps organizations plan intelligently for the future. As to how that might be best best done, Worzel offered the words of American computer scientist Alan Kay: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

The future Worzel depicts is the one with which HR is already contending on front lines: increased automation, the growth of foreign economies, the growth of diversity and the continued impacts and opportunities of our four generation workforce – for now.

“A better reason than ever to find and keep the best people,” Worzel added.

Filtering and factoring global issues into a North American context for the likes of Ford, IBM, Bell Canada, his “Dark Clouds, Silver Linings” presentation in Vancouver cast the importance of HR in stark relief. With foreign competition and increasing automation putting stress on the labour market, Worzel’s emphasis on the importance of soft skills was not missed. In a world in which routine work is replaced by automation, sourcing the essential creative players is essential.

Why HR Matters (Today AND Tomorrows)

“How to get C-level executives to pay attention to HR issues? Provide them new information that compels them to regard HR issues,” said Worzel. “The future will be very different from the present. The biggest generation in history is about retire and put the biggest financial crunch on the future of health care. With widespread and persistent shortages of skilled people, organizations need to beef up on their recruitment and retention.”

Which brings us back to the C-suite. Like O’Leary, Worzel is a firm believer in HR’s imperative. He believes strongly in the value of the CHRP both in terms of raising the calibre and profile of human resources.

“HR should continue to move away from the personnel ghetto and move towards more of a strategic function within their organization,” said Worzel. “For HR to position itself better for the future, one of things they have to do is get over a feeling of inferiority. HR people somehow don’t think they belong at the C-level. HR is probably the key strategic pivotal issue in the future.

Indeed, it is scenario planning, albeit perhaps on a quantum level in Worzel’s case, that best equips all organizations for contending with the future before it arrives. Risk-management and scenario planning are the key to intelligent response; equipped with the right metrics, HR plays a key role, both at the heart of an organization, as well as at its head.

“Know the difference between reacting and responding,” Worzel said. “Keep learning faster than your competition. This will let you exploit previously prepared plans if the need does arise. Even with automation, with fewer people, the people skills become more important because if you use tools poorly you get worse results. So HR should be devoted to getting the right people in the right places in the right way and turning the pivot of the future for their organization.”

HR: Brave or Crazy?

The question came as a compliment from the closing plenary speaker of BC HRMA’s 2011 Conference, Dr. Brene Brown. As a social worker turned vulnerability researcher turned author and T.E.D. Talk top-watched presenter, she admitted connecting with an HR audience was easy.

“I usually talk to mental health, so HR is not that different. It is emotionally laborious work,” said Dr. Brown, leaving behind talk money, metrics and nifty machines to focus on the anatomy of inspiration. “If we want to inspire innovation we have to humanize work. That requires not bumping up against employees, but against management and that is not always easy. No leaning, no learning though. It is hard to take criticism, but learning should never be easy.”

While researching the meaning of connection, Dr. Brown discovered the reason for this and the blame does not lie on the doorstep of management alone. Instead, it resides within the DNA of ours cells, selves and global culture: a propensity for shame in a culture of “never good/safe/certain/perfect/extraordinary enough”.

Firm in her findings, but at odds with much else, she turned the tables on shame, and redirected her research back towards connection.

Bringing Joy to a Complex World

“We live in a culture that tells us that what makes us imperfect makes us inadequate and not good enough and I don’t believe that’s true. I think that what makes us imperfect connects to each other and connects us to our humanity,” said Dr. Brown. “I think that the bottom line is that without humanity there really is no success and business really is about humanity. Our vulnerabilities are not weaknesses. I think they are reminders that we are all in this together.”

The Anatomy of Inspiration emerged. Upon those pages, upon the stage and in person, Dr. Brown personifies what she shares. It is the kryptonite of shame and the truest currency of connection: joy.

“This is important to HR because you have the most impact,” Brown explained. “Shame is not a management tool. It blocks out vulnerability and all the strength it provides. We have to allow ourselves joy though, to soften into goodness.”

As Dr. Brown revealed, joy is both hard card to trump, but a harder one to turn in a culture geared for competitiveness. For that according to Dr. Brown, we should all be grateful. “It is not joy that makes us grateful, but gratitude that brings us joy. Tragedy survivors know it best, it is the ordinary that brings us joy.”

Complexity Made Simple (People, Passion Profit)

As HR best appreciates, ordinary people do not exist. Complex systems do. Extraordinary evolutions in technology, metrics, demographics, economies and events are ongoing and will only continue.

One thing remains certain. Business needs to make money: for its shareholders, employees and survival. It’s not a wisdom. It’s a fact that everyone in business, especially HR, needs not just accept, but embrace. However, so too must HR capitalize upon its progress and its facility to humanize business.

These are not ordinary times. Whether they ever were is a moot point. Innovation is required. Might this be considered ‘Complexity Made Simple’ – at least for now?

Or consider the words underlying the theme of the 49th Annual BC HRMA Conference: People, Passion, Profit. It has proven an enduring paradigm, yielding simple truths in a complex world.

Founding the Future in 2012

Next year’s BC HRMA Conference turns its attention towards ‘Founding the Future’ – a theme befitting the 50th Anniversary BC HRMA Conference on April 26-27, 2012.

Mark it on the proverbial calendar and stay tuned for more information within PeopleTalk and online at HRVoice.org.

Better yet, tweet a friend: #BCHRMA2012

PeopleTalk: Summer 2011