HR needs to be at the Heart of Regenerative business

Earlier this week I was invited to speak to Sussex CIPD about ways in which organisational design needs to change to become fit for our 21st century conditions. Borrowing a phrase from Margaret Wheatley, my challenge to the room was for HR professionals to become Warriors for the Human Spirit and put themselves at the heart of a regenerative approach to business — for people and planet. Why?

During my 4 year information PhD, there were two moments that stood out for me which relate deeply to the work of HR. The first was reading a book Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Dr Chris Johnstone is which they outlined 3 key ways in which we could ‘act’ positively for a regenerative future. I’ve probably shared this several times but it’s worth saying again:-

Protect & Preserve — taking care of what we have left and the people we have hurt; this shows up in the strategies of charities and social enterprise, but also in traditional CSR programmes within organisations

Life Sustaining Systems — choosing to tackle the really big global challenges of energy, water, waste, food, forestry, oceans, climate change, education — all well framed within the UN Sustainable Development Goals

The Shift in Consciousness — the need to continually pull human levels of consciousness towards higher and more complete levels, which develops and supports a stronger commitment to social and environmental purpose and public good.

Shortly after that I was invited to speak at Green Growth Conference, Brighton where I spoke before Mike Barry the architect of Plan A at M&S. I remember clearly him saying that in the future business leaders would come from the Sustainability and HR function because these two functions had the best and clearest understanding of what was needed to transform business into business for good for people and planet. I remember thinking ‘unlikely’ given most CEOs I have worked for have come from finance, operations and general management.

But if I join these two thoughts together, the importance of being the stewards of consciousness development inside businesses so that everyone inside a business can be encouraged to contribute to the notion ‘better business = brighter future’ can only really rest with what today we can HR or Learning & Development in larger organisations.

How can HR professionals equip themselves for this role?

I think of this stage as ‘Preparing The Soil’. It’s a learning journey in itself, exploring the knowledge and skills that might be useful. We looked at several:

• Committing to a personal development journey: finding learning programmes, groups and conscious coaches who can support you with your own development
• Deepening human understanding — committing to developing knowledge on organisational psychology, developmental psychology and moving beyond usual understanding of team development around character and personality traits to include cultural history and consciousness levels
• Creating new narratives — developing skills to help create new narratives which support the shift to transformative business. Learning to lead new stories around why it is important to move from incremental change to transformative change, why it is important to move from competition to collaboration. New Narratives are vitally important as a source of grounding new values into the organisation
• New practice-oriented tools and techniques — which are emerging all the time to support business transformation through people. Creative interventions like our own Activation 90; people centred dialogue from organisations like The Art of Hosting; different theories of change such as Theory U; better ways to encourage values-led assessment such as from Barrett Values Centre; — HR professionals need a new support structure of practices to support them which gradually move away from the notion of performance.
• Activating empathetic communications — digging into one of the key barriers to growth, success and change which is organisational silence. Helping people have open, transparent, courageous conversations without fear of career risk
• Designing interventions — finding ways to either design new practices internally or work with experienced partners who can support them to introduce new experimental approaches and mindsets. Creating time bound, collaborative and inclusive ‘experiments’ or ‘projects’ in which people can explore and share new ideas and bring together their collective intelligence.
• Designing containers — Learning how to design ‘containers’ for change is one of the most essential skills. It combines both a deep understanding of organisational design and human psychology and strongly supports an experimental approach to change. It helps to deliver psychological security, and yet allows for a culture of courage, greater comfort with risk and creativity, to emerge. Containers must never threaten the security of the business so an understanding of compliance, risk, business design — especially in regulated environments — is important. But they should also allow for the opportunity to challenge the status quo. This is perhaps the ‘newest’ skill for HR professionals to look at.

Sewing the Seeds of Change

Once the ‘soil’ has been prepared, it’s time to start Sowing The Seeds of what you have learned. It’s time to put in place leadership communications which disseminate new thinking inside your organisation, and start one or two ‘experiments’ which allow people what it might be like to experience a different way of working. It’s a good time to build a network of advocates throughout the organisation.

In our meeting this week using a couple of the stages of our Activation90 workshop, the Sussex CIPD group came up with a brilliant list of 30 different ways in which HR could start to sow seeds and experiment, from which we worked on 6 that were democratically selected as the best. They included:-

1. New Geographies
   To initiate a series of work experiences by cross-collaborating between departments, different company locations, and partner with other companies — where we would leverage the psychological benefit of being in different locations to go on a learning journey to develop emotional intelligence as individuals.
2. Bubble Hubs
   A series of creative think-a-thons along the lines of the one we were participating in to explore what company employees would like to do differently in their work experience
3. Improv Days
   A programme to shift culture
   — to encourage employees to have the confidence to act without always planning;
   — to help people understand and recognise that plans have limits
   — to encourage people to experiment
   — to help them learn to fail quickly and learn faster
   — to help them focus on long term goals instead of detail
4. The Semco System
   A programme to expose the organisation to self-management by educating people about Ricardo Semler’s organisation Semco and exploring with them how some of the principles of self-management might be applied in their organisation
5. Thought Leadership in Disruptive HR Practices
   A programme to encourage an experimental and less risk-averse mindset and introduce a series of disruptive practices throughout the organisation
6. The UN Powerment Programme
   A programme designed to shift the sense of power from the top of the hierarchy to all employees in order to develop individual sense of courageous leadership

We drilled down into some further detail too. Not bad for 20 minutes and shows what can be achieved if you commit to putting collaborative intelligence to work!

And finally you can move into ‘Activating The Field’ — putting your collectively designed interventions into play.

If you would like to experiment with an Activation 90 workshop to explore how your HR department could develop ideas to start ‘sowing seeds of change’, you can find me at any of the places below:
Email: jenny@weactivatethefuture.com
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