Some Specifics
(Nov 21, 2008) Here’s the light-bulb.
By assessing your organization with Population Distribution Diagrams, you can see risks, opportunities and the consequences of organizational history. The tool creates a perspective that is unavailable with other means.
A good PDD analysis contains a look at history (how did we get here?), and the current situation (What are our strengths, weaknesses, risks and opportunities?). One of the most challenging aspects of organizational and workforce design is developing a robust understanding of current assets and liabilities. Because PDDs inherently force you to look at the consequences of decisions, they offer a powerful supplement to conventional workforce appraisal processes.
That’s key.
By design, PDDs force your perspective to include the future consequences of your decisions. That’s the difference between sustainability by design and reactive, transactional running around. A PDD analysis creates a context that forces the organization to come to grips with a range of realities. This makes for more informed and complete decision making.
While no process can entirely eliminate unintended consequence, a PDD project provides a framework that can help avoid down the road cost increases. It highlights the fallacies of single focus metrics like “attrition rate” and other policies that mandate purely uniform approaches.
In other words, PDDs make it possible for a Recruiting and Staffing function to behave strategically. That’s a big deal. Most practitioners want a place in the organization’s strategic conversation. That’s hard to do when you represent a reactive function.
PDDs provide a way of describing the future state of the organization. They offer models of health, disease and opportunity.
So, the simple steps are to reevaluate history, develop a robust inventory and imagine the future. Utilizing PDDs, a set of futures can be articulated that allow (maybe even force) Recruiters to take proactive strategic steps in each and every transaction.
