Hello lovely people,

Got myself a new mouse for the Mac this week. Genuinely the most excited I've been in a long time. I've also been doing a series of discovery calls with senior P&C leaders, asking them directly what's keeping them up at night so what I'm building solves the right problems. If you want to be part of the discovery calls, get in touch at [email protected]

Also reading through early feedback on the SPIES principles, link at the bottom if you haven't seen them yet.

Today's piece is the sequence I use when designing a people strategy from scratch, built from a real engagement where three strategies had already failed before I walked in.

Today’s Focus:

TL;DR: Most P&C strategies are written by people who assumed being in the room meant being worth paying for. Here's the sequence that finds out whether they were right, and what to do when they weren't.

Strategy doesn't have to be complicated. It's a sequence, and if you follow it in order, most of the hard part takes care of itself.

Here's the sequence I use, and where it came from.

A few years back I was brought into a business where three strategies in a row had gone exactly the same way. Each one brought in, tweaked, presented, and quietly buried. By the time the CEO called me in, they'd stopped asking what was wrong with the strategy and started asking what was wrong with the team.

Here’s my approach to it and the order in which I do it, the order matters more than any single piece of it. Each step had more inside it than I've covered here, discovery, workshops, canvases, activities etc but none of that's the point, the order is

1.Leave the god damn building

We left it properly, not for an offsite or into the training room next door. But to a completely different space, with different chairs and no laptops open to email. Remember that building had three strategy launches' worth of history baked into the walls, same seats, same arguments, same person who sits near the door to leave early. You can't think differently about a problem in the room where you've already failed three times.

2.Become an external company

I made the P&C function pretend to be an external separate business operating entirely inside this organisation, whose only client was the business and employees themselves. Suddenly "we've always done it this way" stops being an answer, because an outside company doesn't have a "we've always." People who'd spent years inside the org chart started talking about it like someone else's problem, which for the next two days, it was.

3.Work out what game you're playing

Every function thinks it's playing one of three games, efficiency, partnership, or experience, yet most haven't actually chosen it, they've just drifted into whichever one felt closest at the time.

For example

Recruitment and Ops thought they were playing efficiency, time to hire, cost per hire, the usual. Reward thought they were playing partnership, trusted advisor to the leadership team on pay decisions. L&D thought they were playing experience, engagement scores, culture surveys, the lot.

Three functions, same building, three different games, and nobody had ever agreed which one HR was actually meant to be collectively playing and winning.

So we went back to the outside company from step two, and asked one question of each: if this was a separate business, selling what you do back to this company:

Reward's case for "trusted advisor" was a calendar of extra meetings. Would the business pay an invoice for that, on its own, with nothing else attached? It wouldn't get past the front door.

L&D's case for "engagement" was a happy sheet survey nobody outside HR had ever seen or cared for, which wouldn't get an invoice past finance and honestly wouldn't get repeat subscription from the employees.

Recruitment at least had a number, time to hire had gone down, but quality of hire, which nobody was tracking, had quietly gone the other way, so even that invoice came with a catch nobody had checked.

Every previous strategy here was written by people who'd correctly noticed they were in the room, and assumed that meant they were worth paying for.

4.Map your value chains and portfolios

Create your value chains and apply your portfolio over them, a portfolio is a mix of Services, Products, Interactions and Experiences (SPIES), all contributed by whichever parts of the function happen to touch it.

Take Slick Start, the chain covering how someone joins and gets up to speed. Recruitment has a slice of that portfolio. So does IT, facilities, payroll, and the new starter's manager. Five parts of the function, all contributing to the same portfolio, with no idea what anyone else had put in.

We got each part of the function to plot out its own contribution to Slick Start. Each one, on its own, looked fine.

Then we laid them all on top of each other, and that's when it stopped being a workshop and started being an intervention.

Two separate welcome emails landed in new starters' inboxes on day one, one from HR with the handbook attached, one from IT with login details, both written as if they were the only one, neither mentioning the other.

Someone in the room laughed, then stopped laughing, because everyone realised they'd been sending both for two years.

Then, for everything inside that portfolio, every product, service, interaction and experience, we asked three questions:

The recognition scheme nobody in the building could actually name failed all three. Technically live, in that emails still went out. Nobody chose it, new starters just received it. And when someone asked what would happen if it quietly stopped, the honest answer was nobody would notice for months.

5.Check what should be flowing between value chains

We looked at the value chains again for example Slick Start, but from the other side this time, what should have been flowing into its portfolio from somewhere else, and wasn't.

Each value chain and its portfolio is built to compound value to the business and employees, each is supposed to generate value the next one can use, not just do its own job and stop.

Take Fond Farewell and Slick Start. When someone leaves, a good exit conversation tells you things, whether they'd come back, who else they know who'd be brilliant in this place, what they think the team actually needs next. Here, that conversation happened, got typed up, and sat in a folder nobody opened again.

Meanwhile recruitment was out advertising the same role, paying an agency several thousand pounds, for a person the leaver could have referred for nothing, or in a couple of cases, for the leaver themselves eighteen months later.

Same value, recreated from scratch, paid for twice, and nobody did anything wrong, the system was just never built to pass it on. Onboarding had an owner. The development chain had an owner. Neither job description mentioned the other.

Onboarding does the same thing in reverse. Everything someone tells you in their first week, what they're good at, what worries them, what they want next, usually gets written down once, in an induction form, and never looked at again.

Three months later the development conversation starts from a blank page, asking the same questions, as if day one never happened.

6. Build the measurement engine

Everything up to here had been diagnosis, useful, occasionally uncomfortable, but diagnosis. At some point you have to say it in numbers, something a CFO will sit still for, what this is costing and what fixing it is worth.

We tracked two different kinds of signal side by side.

The first is tracking behaviour of the people using our SPIES and asking how people said things felt, would they choose this again, not just put up with it. That's what I call the Subscription Score.

The second is what all of this was actually costing. The two welcome emails. The recognition scheme nobody could name. The agency fees for roles a leaver could've filled. Add it, chain by chain, and there's your number.

That's the Experience Leak score, and it's the one that gets you back in the room with the CFO, because it's an invoice for everything we've just walked through.

That invoice is also the justification. Nobody signs off a new strategy because the old one felt wrong, it gets signed off because the leak now has a number on it, attached to the value it can add if resolved.

7. Match the op model to what can be held

This business had been built entirely around centres of expertise, one team for recruitment, one for reward, one for L&D and so on. Each deep in its specialism and nothing else. You can't turn that into squads, ie cross-functional teams owning a value chain end to end, overnight.

The skills aren't there yet, and more importantly, the business doesn't stop running while everyone finds that out. Payroll still has to run and people still need paying at 2am, regardless of what the operating model slide says.

So we ran two gears at once. One gear kept the centres of expertise doing what they'd always done, the lights stayed on, still thinking the way HR always had, programmes, policies, initiatives.

The other gear was small, a handful of people pulled out to run Slick Start as an actual squad, with a backlog and real ownership end to end, and the first real chance to learn how to craft interactions and rituals, and design products and services, instead of running programmes.

That second gear wasn't the destination, it was how the rest of the function learned what a squad felt like, by watching one work, before being asked to become one.

Every time you propose this kind of change, the same objections turn up. This'll cause chaos, someone says, when the chaos is already there, just currently invisible.

We don't have the capacity, someone else says, when they're already spending that capacity firefighting the thing you're proposing to fix.

What if it doesn't work, is the last one, and with two gears running, you'll know within weeks, on one chain, without betting the whole function on it.

This business had spent three strategies and the best part of three years finding solutions to problems nobody had ever properly named.

The actual work, the bit that finally landed, took twelve weeks, and most of those twelve weeks were spent on steps one to five. Finding the right problem, working out whose problem it actually was, what SPIES were and how the value they produce either compounds or leaks.

Every time I've run this sequence, the ratio's roughly the same. Seventy percent of the time goes on finding the right problem, thirty on solving it. Most P&C functions run that backwards.

Every one of those seven steps has more inside it than I've written here, workshops, discovery, canvases and specific activities, most of them never coming from traditional HR and more from strategy and innovation.

But none of that's the bit that matters. Get the order right, and the rest looks after itself.