I’m hosting, you’re posting…

So it’s Carnival of HR time again and yours truly gets to host it – an honour indeed! Rather than make it too easy and leave the subject matter wide open I thought I’d give a theme to work with and that is the Challenging the future of the organisation. This subject is close to my heart and anyone who follows this blog or my twitter stream will know that as a curious, early adopter and high intuitive, I’m passionate, about the need for change in the way we run and manage organisations.

I’m obviously on the side of change, and I have been championing the more open, flatter hierarchy, collaborative and self directed strategies since I first came across Ricardo  Semler and Semco back in the mid 90’s. At the time he was considered bonkers by most people in Europe and the US, particularly by us HR folk. But 25 years on and we are starting to see an increase in the number of organisations adopting these approaches. But they are, still, the minority and in recent weeks there has been a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing amongst the HR bloggers and tweeters about how relevant this approach is and the evidence that it works. Certainly, people like Rob Jones have forced me to challenge my own thinking and there are a couple of posts of his that are highly relevant – here and here.

With all of that in mind I would like to invite you all to jump in with your views. Hopefully we can get a nice wide perspective that will hopefully challenge thinking all round. To get you on your way, a few questions:

• Is good actually good enough? Jim Collins believes its the enemy of being great and by accepting good – the status quo – we become complacent. Joe Gerstandt also touches on this in one of his recent posts: “Most organisations are in the process of dying, they just cant see it because they generated a profit yesterday”
• Does taking an open and more collaborative approach actually make a difference to organisational performance? If so, how?
• How important is the social dynamic in shaping organisations? Or will it have little impact over time? Is there really a deeper human desire to ‘shape things differently’ going on here?
• Are the social tools a key influencing factor here or are they a red herring? Would we be looking to challenge the command and control model if we were still living in a web 1.0 world?
• If the future is collaborative, open, de restricted, self directed and un regulated, what are the implications for HR? What role will/should HR be playing here?
• What are the implications for leadership? Is a lack of skills at the leadership level getting in the way of organisational change?
• Is there anything relevant at all in this alternative view or is it really just a load of liberal, tree hugging bollox?!
• Why are so few organisations embracing these strategies?  Why are more organisations at least not a little more curious? What is getting in the way of experimentation? Please don’t say “lack of evidence”! Im looking for deeper perspectives than that.

I know what my current thinking is around these questions but I’m really interested in yours. Feel free to play with the subject matter – dont feel constrained by my questions as they are simply a way of stimulating thinking.

What to do next:

1. Send me a blog post – garethmjones (at) hotmail (dot) com – that you have written within the last 2 weeks that touches on the subject outlined above. I will collate all posts, wrap my own commentary around them and publish the overall Carnival with your post included sometime on the 18th July.
2. When the carnival goes live please please please help to promote it via twitter, your own blog, LinkedIn, facebook or any other way you see fit
3. Take a look at the Carnival of HR site – its a great round up of previous carnivals and a great resource for stimulating thinking!

Don’t forget the go live date is the 18th July so get posting folks!

NEW HR BLOGGERS ALERT! The number of folk blogging around the subject of people is steadily increasing and personally I think its great to see so many HR pro’s jumping in. It would be great to think that we could use the HR Carnival as a kick starter for new bloggers so if you have been thinking about starting to blog and people is your passion then why not use this HR Carnival as the launch pad for your new blog? Just let me know its your first time and I promise to be gentle 🙂