Strategy 4: The Starting Point
(November 05, 2008) Every good strategy begins with an operational assessment or inventory. The idea is to clearly define the baseline from which you intend to depart. It’s one of those exercises that tests the mettle of those involved.
Retail businesses run inventories every year. You see the windows shuttered and a “closed for inventory” sign on the door. The objective of these annual exercises is to verify and validate the precise quantity and quality of physical assets. It’s normal for a variation between “what should be there” and “what is there” to open up. The annual inventory gives managers the opportunity to reconcile the two while reviewing the viability of the overall inventory.
The same principle applies to the workforce. Regular evaluations of the depth, utility and effectiveness of the constituent parts of the workforce is a critical component of maintaining a vibrant organization. Great strategy is rooted in “what is”. In order to understand “what is”, you have to measure and evaluate it regularly.
(This is a really good place to remember that human beings are not capital. While some of the techniques used to manage capital work well with people, it’s important not to confuse the two. People make money, people use money, people are not money.
At the same time, it is important to understand that “the organization” is not a personal thing. Like a corporation, the “organization” or “workforce” is a conceptual construct. It can be managed in a depersonalized way that is not like the way you’d manage individuals or constituent groups. The “organization” or “workforce” is an entity with personality, traits, culture, intelligence.
This apparent contradiction, that the aggregate of individuals is non-personal, is essential to good workforce planning. What makes sense at an organizational level may not translate instantly into personal terms. And vice-versa.)
The object of the baseline inventory is to quantify the organization.
The life bleeds out of repeated organizational procedures very quickly. It’s critical that the results of the baseline inventory tell a story and act as a source of insight into the characteristics of the organization. It’s challenging to make this a lively process.
At the end of this article is a set of links to a recent set of pieces on population distribution diagrams. Every organization, community and country can be defined by the aggregate of data describing it. Population Distribution Diagrams show the relationship of two variables (education and gender, age and tenure, and so on) in a population or subset of the population.
One way to approach the baseline inventory project is to prepare Population Distribution diagrams for each department, division and organization under your roof. Get creative. The object of the baseline inventory is to shed light on the organization you already have.
Search for similarities, differences, trends, anomalies. Compare these factors with performance measurements, customer satisfaction indices. Try to ferret out the things that make your organization strong and worthwhile.
Knowing what you have is the most importantpart of developing a strategy.
Read the Population Distribution Series
