Resource Management Innovations

This week in the news: We're drowning in data and starving for wisdom.

  I came across this lament in an article in the news this week that I thought was topical, relevant and could have been written by any one of my colleagues. In part it reads:

  “We are all suffering from a new global plague of apocalyptic anxiety and overwhelm. We have to manage unprecedented complexity with unprecedented penalties for getting it wrong. We are drowning in data but we are starving for wisdom. We are desperately looking for people who will help us navigate our way through the storm, not hide behind a wall of policy and procedure.”

   Change has always been an integral element of our world, that isn’t new. It’s just happening faster than it ever has before. When I began strategic and tactical planning at the beginning of my career it wasn’t uncommon to cast a vision 25 years out. Then planning & forecasting shrunk to about 10 years, then 5 then 3. I now have clients in Information Technology where a web year is something less than 3 months. Yes, the rate of change has the potential to wind us all a little tight. (Like the guy who puts the shrink wrap on CD covers).

   I do love the above quote … “we are drowning in data and starving for wisdom.” Let’s consider for a moment some of the multifaceted elements that are driving change:

  While technology does enable the rate of change to accelerate … it is also enabling smaller organizations to out maneuver the larger more traditional models (Queen Mary’s I call them) … where internal processes and procedures once a mainstay of stability and sober second thought, now represent a leviathan that can no longer lumber at the speed of change.

  Our competition is coming from the other side of the world … while the traditional client may be as knowledgeable as we are in our field of expertise. Having spent over a decade in the financial services industry, don’t get me started on what happened after deregulation. To be sure … this is no longer my Fathers Chevrolet.

  That said … we do not have the luxury nor the latitude not to respond. And it need not be frightening. What it does mean is that we have to understand our environment and have a plan. We can no longer simply show up with the keys and let the day happen to us and expect to survive let alone thrive. In a subsequent blog we’ll talk about leveraging change as a competitive advantage.

  In the interim if you could use some practical assistance, RMI has a half day workshop on 'Managing Change'. We can tune and tailor it to your specific requirements or if this is a #911 intervention ... thats OK too ... and we'll bring the coffee. You have options. Feeling better?

Cheers;

Rick @ RMI
 

Posted By: Rick Kneeshaw 2010/03/20
Categories: From the Desk of the HR Manager