Episode 105: What Will the Future of HR Look Like in 2030? (Isabelle Chappuis and Gabriele Rizzo)
On the show today, I am talking to Isabelle Chappuis and Gabriele Rizzo, the authors of a fascinating new book called "HR Futures 2030. A Design For Future Ready Human Resources".
Throughout our conversation, Isabelle and Gabriele run through their 10 traits for the future of work in HR and cover some of the key disciplines that HR leaders will need to consider to be successful in 2030 and beyond.
Isabelle, Gabriele, and I also discuss:
What is foresight and how can techniques from the world of defence be used in HR and in business to provide a strategic advantage
The importance of topics such as trust, community, digital, and sustainability, to organisations of the future
Three of the 22 disciplines highlighted in their book. The first is called, know your employee. The second is focused on the newly blurred lines between work and life. And the third is a fascinating new area called HR hacktivism
Their perspective on the role of technology in supporting employee experience
Support for this podcast comes from 365Talents. You can learn more by visiting https://365talents.com.
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Isabelle Chappuis and Gabriele Rizzo, the authors of a fascinating book on the future of the HR function “HR Futures, 2030. Design For Future Ready Human Resources” to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast.
Isabelle, Gabriele, it is great to have you both on the show. Isabelle, maybe you can go first.
Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to yourself and to your current work?
Isabelle Chappuis: Sure. Hello, David, let me just thank you and everyone listening for this great opportunity. We are really thrilled here, with Gabriele, to be here today, whatever here means, right? So for me it means Lausanne in the French speaking parts of Switzerland.
And so, you asked for a brief introduction. I am an economist by training. I am an author, obviously, right? And I am also an independent board member. And I guess I could also say that, I am an expert in executive education because I have been in leading positions in the field of exec ed, for over 15 years.
I have been Director of the EMBA and I founded and directed The Executive School of The Business Faculty of The University of Lausanne.
So in a nutshell, economist, author, board member, and exec ed expert, that is me. So Gabriele, maybe onto you.
Gabriele Rizzo: Of course, Isabelle. Well, of course David, it is great to be here with you today. I am a futurist, an author, and an executive defence advisor. I have a PhD in string theory and astrophysics. And over the past 15 years, I have grown up to be one of the usual suspects in the field of government and defence foresight. I am the NATO member at large for strategic foresight and futures studies. A member at large, is a honorary title given to those NATO recognises as the world-class expert, as they say. I am also the futures advisor to the chief scientist of the US air force and to the chief scientist of the US space force.
I also lead the futures thinking at the level of the vice chief of defence in Italy. Previously I have been the main futures adviser for the Italian minister of defence.
Together with Isabelle, we founded and direct, The Swiss Centre for Positive Futures.
That is the foresight entity, the summit, of futures thinking at The University of Lausanne . The centre focuses on major trends and weak signals and their influences on society, economy, and technology.
What we do is provide seamless transition, from near to far, with incredible sharpness, so that leaders can see no limits in their opportunities.
David Green: Brilliant. It is great to have you both on the show. I think there is a wealth of topics that we could get into, I would love to explore some of the stuff around NATO and NASA, Gabriele, but the subject today is HR because our listeners are predominantly leaders and practitioners in the HR function.
You have both got amazing backgrounds, I would love to understand what inspired you to write the book about HR, effectively, or the future of HR?
Isabelle Chappuis: All right, I will take that one. What is it that inspired us to write this book? So I have got a good story here, so let me tell you that. With regards to my career history, I worked initially in finance, in Zurich, and then as I said, I worked in exec ed industry. That is where I have been working at the intersection between academia and the corporate world and that was for 15 years and naturally I was always in close contact with leaders and CEOs and a lot of CHROs. And so in the last six to seven years, I have increasingly seen the divides between what professors would be teaching and what the world of work was actually needing. So I started digging into the concept of the future of work and then actually asked, or I'd say even I requested, in 2018, to be moved from the operations of leading the executive school, to exploration. So to look into the future of work and the future of skills, at The University of Lausanne.
At the beginning, what I did was like what a lot of people do, it was dive in to data-driven future of skills and how to use data to bundle jobs into tasks, into skills, to help re-orient individuals professionally and help them transition to new jobs.
What struck me is that those jobs are changing so fast and functions and disciplines are evolving so super quickly, that basically it is going to be hard and exhausting for individuals to cope with the pace of change. So back then, I thought, you know what, I need to find a way to anticipate more, so that we could train people to be relevant longer. But for that, I needed to go and look into far futures, like 10,15 years. And there's no data about the future, so I had no clue how to do this and who could do that. So I had to do some homework, which I did, and I realised that it is really in the defence world that you can find the real professionals in the field of foresight. I mean the really best ones, because if you fail at anticipating in defence, Gabriele would be able to tell you that better than me, but the stakes are super high because lives could be threatened and nations could lose their sovereignty. So, in defence, you do foresight right.
So I reached out to Armée Suisse, which is the Swiss army, and slowly that led me to NATO, which was of course, really cool. And eventually I met Gabriele and that was serendipitous, it was through LinkedIn, in a way.
So now just imagine me asking this high level expert in the defence realm, with a PhD in astrophysics and going, please would you help me look into the future of work and the future of HR? His initial reaction was really like, is that a joke? But I think it was really good, I cracked that one line that got his attention.
Human skills obsolescence is a national security threat and education is our first line of defence. So basically I used his language and that's how I got his attention and that's how I got this brilliant Roman futurist, from the defence world, to come up to Switzerland and help me run a foresight workshop on the future of HR, at the horizon 2030. That is how the whole story started and I think Gabriele has a great final of the story, now.
Gabriele Rizzo: Yeah, that is a great springboard from where to start. I was coming from the world of defence, where I still am actually. So in the world of defence, there is this painstaking attention to how you create knowledge around foresight, how we exploit foresight products, so there is a wealth of knowledge, techniques, methodologies, and practices around alternative analysis, critical thinking, that is a trove of a couple of hundred techniques. So there is extensive knowledge there. I was coming from that side of the water, where my works have been guiding strategies of PPPs, public private partnerships, that were worth almost $3 billion.
As well as that, I have been shaping industrial investments for $25 billion in research development and innovation and my main part of work was informing the $1 trillion of defence investment in the alliance.
But Isabelle, she is extraordinary with people and she was extraordinary with her pitch to me, so I decided to help her give shape to the idea and nailing her vision.
But then, COVID hit. And COVID has had this incredible acceleration to everything digital and it brought us forward something like 10 years in 10 days. We started experiencing everything that we have imagined in the book. So we worked in virtual space, as it were the physical space. We were mixing and melding our in life and online experiences in what is called “onlife” which we will have a chance to talk about later I hope. And building step-by-step this, what was thought to be a white paper, 10 page white paper, very easy, short and sweet, but instead it grew more and more because we discovered that we had so many things to say from the workshop that we had at the very beginning of January 2020, before COVID.
So it became the book that we have.
David Green: Isabelle, you were kind enough to send me the book a few weeks ago and I have been reading through it and really enjoying it. It is great to hear the story behind the book as usually when you pick up a book, you don't know the story behind it, but that is a wonderful story.
Gabriele, I would love to delve a little bit further. We hear a lot of terms banded around such as futurism and foresight, obviously as an expert in these areas, I would love to understand your definition of what they are and maybe what the difference is as well? Then maybe applying it to the defence industry, why is it so important in the defence industry? I guess that is particularly topical at the moment with the situation in Ukraine.
Gabriele Rizzo: That is a great question. Let me just remark very briefly that futurism is an archaic and somewhat incorrect way to talk about foresight, more or less on equal footing with futuristics or futurology, so it is an old style and archaic way of referring to that.
To arrive at the definition of foresight, I need to walk you through a very brief introduction that speaks of anticipation, futures literacy, futures studies, and then defining foresight.
So imagine you are having a dinner tonight, of course you have to think of what you have to buy before getting dinner or what recipes you want to prepare tonight. The fact that you are imagining what you need to do to actually get to this dinner scenario, is an innate capacity, it is inherent of every one of us, it is imagining a future state of a complex system, in this case us, in the future so that we can make decisions in the present. This capability is innate and it is called anticipation.
Anticipation is the capacity of an organism to incorporate, what we call, “the later than now” into its functioning, in ways that are irrelevant now.
Not everyone is able to access and to make use of anticipation in the same way. Our capability to access different futures and make sense of them differs from person to person. So this is something that however, can be learned. So the capability to sense and make sense of the future, is what we call a futurist literacy and it is a capability for the 21st century.
But why do we imagine the future? And what shapes and influences the origins and the structure of the futures we imagine? And most importantly, once we have answers to these questions, that means having a better grasp of anticipation, does it mean that we are able to make better use of imagination?
These questions are the core of what future studies does. Enhancing our understanding of anticipation.
Foresight is at the intersection between future studies and strategy. Foresight does not use the future as an objective to reach, but rather as a construct that is expandable with the only to open up an increased understanding of better decisions in the present. Foresight is the ability to eliminate the volume in the future cone of possibilities, trends, and themes to be in the futures, to prevent the loss of initiative and provide strategic advice. So clearly, that is why it is paramount in defence, because defence is hard.
For anything to work in the defence world, it has to withstand extreme and most often, completely unique requirements because as Isabelle was hinting at, defence is one of the few high assurance organisations where if something fails, people will die.
Now for that specific reason, a staggering amount of painstaking research, design, engineering, development, are poured into creating defence capabilities and it takes a whole lot of time.
The research is showing that it is not just a folklore, that it takes 20 years from imagining to have the big red button and actually having the big red button on your desk. This means that the moment you are thinking of having that capacity, so you launch all that research, design, engineering, and development activities, it takes 20 years. So it is a different world. You start doing things in a world that is different to the one that these capacities and capabilities will be deployed.
That is just a broad strokes on what is defence foresight and why that is important.
David Green: Brilliant, fascinating area. One of the great things about this podcast is people can learn new things and I think that is a great example of learning something new, which may be slightly outside HR.
But maybe now, Isabelle, we can start to apply that to HR? Obviously both of your backgrounds are predominantly outside HR, we have talked about you wrote the book, but why specifically, did you write about the future of HR? And why do you feel, for example, that HR and HR leaders are so important to help organisations prepare for the future?
Isabelle Chappuis: All right. Unlike Gabriele, I am not a futurist. At best I am an aspiring futurist, but it is true too, that the future of work has been one of my main axes of thinking and of research, over the past years. It really became increasingly clear to all of us, that the world of work as we knew it, that is back in 2019 when we launched the HR 2030 project, that world of work would eventually cease to exist, right? Because the values on which this whole system is based, those values are no longer relevant and they are just simply no longer sustainable. We had been seeing those signs of change for a long time already, but I think these changes, they were approaching really really fast. So it was clear to me when we launched all this, that HR leaders would find themselves at the centre of this turmoil. At the centre of what we can call “a perfect storm” they would have to manage human capital that was wrongly out of step, with a disrupted environment, and also manage a human capital which was going to need to be used to working with intelligent machines, robots, AI, and the like. So, why is it that we wrote a book on HR, especially when we are not HR specialists? It is because companies need to anticipate and we know that there are ways to anticipate correctly and in far futures. So companies, they need to anticipate the incoming disruptions and I think HR, needs to guide organisations and also their human capital into the future. We know the future is coming faster and faster at us. In fact, the pandemic, that was a wake up call for all these upcoming disruptions so to do that, we need a future ready HR.
David Green: Certainly one of the things that we talk to organisations about in our work, which is predominantly around people analytics and harnessing people data to make better decisions, make better outcomes for employees and businesses, is having that outside in thinking for HR. What we were talking about then was yes, it is about external to the organisation, but we are also talking about understanding the challenges of the business. What you have produced here is something at a new level, it is really about bringing that outside in thinking, which is so important to support organisations.
Now, I know one of the key catalyst for the book was a workshop that you ran with a large group of HR practitioners. I would love to hear a little bit more about what happened in that workshop and how you used that, as well as other information, to start to build out the structure of the book?
Isabelle Chappuis: I think that you are right here, it is about getting a broader perspective of what is impacting the world of HR and we did that. We did that workshop before COVID, BC, right? Because we started everything in 2019 and it is true, we worked with a large group, I think there were about 40 to 50 people and most of them are featured in the book by the way. But they were not all HR practitioners or HR experts per se, they were what we call “key actors” of the world of HR and that is different. Of course we had HR experts, we had CHROs, but that was only 30%, the rest were for one part obviously academics.
They were economists, data scientists, we had also experts in AI, we had medical doctors. And then we also had another group, the remaining 30%, which was made of disrupters. For example, we had founders of startups in HR tech or in education. So that was a very diverse group of people. Also we tried to have a 50, 50, male to female. So that was for the who.
You also asked how we used the workshop to structure the book. That was thanks to Gabriele and his really unique expertise in foresight. What we did is, we designed a workshop structure, which was based on the methodologies that we borrowed from the world of defence, from his world. Besides the obvious thorough literature review, we used existing future of work scenarios, that are available, which were based on the potential impact of disruptive technology. So from that picture we had, we drew those 20 new disciplines and the implementation guidelines that came with it, that we have in the book.
So basically same function but a new environment. It is like Gabriele said, 20 years, right? In 20 years, when you push the red button, it is not the same world, same thing here. In 10 years, the world of work is different, so new environment, new disciplines for HR.
David Green: That is great because if you had just had 30 HR professionals in the room, you would have collected some interesting opinions and data and everything else but I love that mix of bringing academics and economists, who are typically thinking longer into the future. Data science because obviously, what you are doing needs to have the data behind it as well. AI and technology, and then the medical element as well, now I have not got to this part in the book yet but I presume part of that is looking at longevity of people and how long people are going to be working for? So really fascinating.
Again, for those that haven't got the book yet, there are some beautifully designed images in there. We are going to talk about this one now, which is the 10 Traits For The Future of Work and HR, that you cover.
So let's talk about that. There are a lot of emerging areas in there, that we have talked about a lot on this podcast, such as the speed of change, the impact of digital and AI, dematerialised work, trust and community. Can you share your thoughts on the 10 traits that you have developed and then, what they actually mean for the HR professionals listening?
Gabriele Rizzo: Sure, absolutely, David. So the idea of the traits of the future is about exactly looking 10 years out and shaping these future scenarios so that we are able, by this description, to capture a whole lot of signals that would unable to be just there if we were just looking at the present and projecting these out 10 years. So we are not looking at our 2030 version of 2020, but we are looking at entirely complex, organic 2030, by weaving in all these changes. The traits are as such, general traits, however they are looked at through a HR lens. For instance, the first one is more faster. So that is about the speed and impact of technology. We combine that into how does this exert a change on skilling, up-skilling, the stages of working life. How does this change the impact of the external environment into organisations and your organisations processes. Going end to end from recruitment to retirement and what does retirement mean in an exponential world. The second one is a keystone of what we are doing, the digital cleaving power that is coming from philosophy actually, the work of Floridi, on the ethics of information. Cleaving is a very specific, very special, word in English because it is both separating and gluing together, I am just saying this for our non native speakers in the audience. So the cleaving power of the digital technology is exactly taking a part atoms of reality that we thought indivisible and re-gluing them together in a way we weren't foreseeing, for instance, location and presence. So we are together today to have this beautiful conversation, but not exactly together the way together was meant to mean, right?
Then we will look at community. The fact that due to these changes, to these forces that are shaping the future, the human response is self organising to understand and channel these transitions happening at a very high speed. And this of course is mediated by another trait that we look at, that is trust, it is an intangible enabler for organisations. This enabler is crucial because it is the empowerment of individuals and the empowerment of technology, you can't actually on board, or use, or lean, on a technology if you don't trust that.
Another trait that we are looking at is centaur and knights. That comes from the idea of how different generations coupled together with technology and moreover also, the new and different ways in which if you have exponential technology, then you have exponential compression of time because you have time having exponentially more value than before. So how this compression of time forces different generations to integrate the best of human and machine intelligence. Some of them can simply morph together, like a centaur. Some of them can just be more like a knight, he has the power to harness an animals might, but as well you can be on your horse or you can get off your horse, so it is not a unicorn.
We go through dematerialised work that one of the key points we make there is, that there are transformational take aways happening and we go through the three sation’s, as we call it, taskisation, pulverisation, and servitisation of work and economy. Where pulverisation is the un-bundling of jobs and profiles in simple and disconnected tasks and skills.
Taskisation, is the rebuilding of different profiles that were unimaginable before, because you were able to just play like Lego bricks with skills and provide completely new, different profiles, that were impossible to imagine in one single person before and thus giving rise to new jobs.
And servitisation is the enabler of all of all that is. The fact that all the available offer and value-adding services are relying on a worldwide, hyper-connected, platform that enables this feeding of different profiles from everywhere in the world. This also speaks to the paramount part of the technologies that we have and another trait that we have is AI and humans. That is about the capacity of artificial intelligence and machine cognition to scale individuals up, out and within.
Then we go through opportunities and then enabling laws of course, because jurisprudence needs to move at the speed of light and not the speed of law in a world that is disrupted by exponential technologies.
And then the last that I would like to just make a very specific remark about, is this new value schemes. The new generation will have a posture towards business, that is not just about the usual bottom line, but it is about trust, responsibility, attention, merit, and sustainability. It is not that the new generation just aspires to a better respect for the environment and more transparency in business, that is shallow and worn out to think that of sustainability.
So more environment, as I keep hearing in lots of forums, is an overly simplistic way to think about sustainability. It is not the environment, new values is all of that list. It is trust, responsibility, attention, merit, and the fact that I am not choosing who to give my expertise based on my stipend, but on the trust that a brand inspires. I am not working for the law firm who protected those responsible for the opioid crisis in the US. It is that I value a moral leader that shows off work-life balance, rather than a Porsche. Or it is let me see what hashtags this brand has supported before. And these are just examples in the present because new values in 2030, will require us thinking in a new and entirely different way.
So it is understanding new metaphors of meaning in 2030.
End of the sermon.
David Green: No, no, fantastic and really good to get a sort of breakdown of the 10 traits. And certainly that last one, if we think back even 10 years, yes obviously some employees cared about the environment and sustainability, but now that is an absolute demand that if you are working in an organisation, you want that organisation to care about the climate. You want that organisation to be very clear around diversity, equity, inclusion, and to actually benefit society as well. We saw at the executive round table, of the biggest companies in the US, I think about 180 of them, they said that it is not all about profit anymore, it is about sustainability and it is about supporting communities. So that is now, as you say Gabriele.
You outline the 10 traits and then you start to talk about 22 disciplines for the future of HR and how they interlock with those 10 traits that you walked through there, in such good detail, Gabriele.
We don't have time, unfortunately, to go through all the 22 disciplines. So first, I would love to hear a little bit more about the, "know your employee", discipline.
Isabelle Chappuis: All right. Just before I talk about this discipline, you have to see that those traits that Gabriele, was mentioning, these are very broad trends. So our idea was to see how they weave with each other and how they impact the world a bit more concretely, to give to HR leaders indications on where they should be developing or making their discipline evolve. That is where we have these 22 disciplines that emerged, so looking at those traits and being a bit more concrete. You wanted to know about, know your employee, so why should we know our employees? What is it that most companies lack these days? Besides digital skills it is clearly engagement. Employee engagement. So we have all seen the wave of resignations that led to the, so called, great resignation or great attrition. So now, how do companies build engagement? And I think they will only reach honest engagement, if they care. If they about their employees aspirations and when they offered to help co-design their lives beyond their work and to do so, they need to know them, they just need to know their employees. And the name, know your employee, which the acronym is KYE, that comes from the famous KYC acronym, know your customer, which comes from the finance world. So in the finance world KYC strategies have been developed to avoid fraud attacks, corruption, money laundering, and to enter business sustainability and success. Here it is the same. It is not, know your customer, it is, know your employee.
Here, we are also adding the idea of customer intimacy, so that is another concept that we are bringing. Customer intimacy is about, the more you know about your customers needs and interests, the better you can serve them and the more you can sell. So the more customer insights we have, basically gathering data, analysing them, exploiting them, in all possible ways that we can collect from customers, that is called customer intelligence. Now this customer intimacy is more than just gathering data, it is true engagement So what we suggest here with the KYE discipline is, that the more you know your employees, the more you can actually help to them, in their lives, their aspirations, and the more engaged they will be.
That is what we are looking for, we want more engagement. So this is the whole point of the KYE discipline.
David Green: You could argue that the lines between work and life have become much more blurry over the last 2 years, in the pandemic in particular. Can you talk about how the discipline of aspirations and life design fits into a post pandemic world?
Isabelle Chappuis: That totally follows on from the previous question, right?
The lines are blurred, the lines between private and professional life are blurred. We are working from home now and plus, life used to be straightforward with study, work, and retire, but this three stage life, this has gone. And I think so is the old psychological contract between the employee and employer, where the employee would offer his loyalty in exchange for security. Today, there is no being loyal anymore because no employer can really offer security anymore.
So today, if the employer wants performance and engagement and we said that this is what we want, they will need to offer employability and career guidance or else employees will leave as they have actually heavily done in the past pandemic, that led to the great resignation. Now of course, a lot of people will say no, but we have been offering transition support already. But I think, honestly, this has been mainly in terms of outplacement services and the idea behind it was, to prevent legal or image risk when people were laying off employees.
So today, if employers want to secure those right talents, and we have a war on talent, that is currently making headlines, they will have to adapt and strive to become lifelong partners for their employees.
So HR, should manage the relationship with their employees, but before, during, and after their employment and actually back because nothing is linear anymore. An employee or even a trainee, they may come back decades later, as a consultant or even better as a client. So those real relationships and genuinely caring about employees aspirations, that actually matters for the bottomline. So the idea behind that aspirations in life design discipline, that anticipating and easing change within or outside of the organisation to infinitely improve business.
David Green: Fascinating and completely agree. Some of the stuff we are already beginning to see.
Lastly, you used a great term which we really like, hacktivism, for one of the disciplines. What is the discipline of HR hacktivism?
Gabriele Rizzo: Well, in a world that is moulded by complexity, converge, and exponentiality, you can just be pondering responses, ready with a broad and crisp, ample apertures of options.
So you have to create high risk, high value, alternatives for HR to be prepared for the unforeseen and amplifying organisational resilience.
Now the discipline of HR hacktivism, encompasses a passion for tinkering and fiddling around a number of different ideas, new expansionary or even radical. You play with ambidextrous ideas.
HR hacktivism then organises or event teaming and reverse brainstorming on everything HR, examples of ideas that can be tackled in here could be, understanding unspoken forces at work, organisational culture, or whatever strengthens this practice of complacency, and finding possible ways to integrate all of them into a more successful corporate culture, or even experimenting with new value schemes.
The idea is being a constant source of HR adaptation and doing structured or unstructured exploration of possibilities. We have to remind that it is fundamental to be ready for constant disruption. So you have to be agile. You have to be creative. You have to be prepared for the unexpected.
So hacking HR here, is like finding the angle not seen. Taking the road less travelled. Challenge the established paradigms and thrive in an orthodoxy. And that is very rapid and agile.
David Green: That leads really nicely to the question that we are asking everyone on this series. We live in an experience economy and that is only going to get increasingly so as well and hacktivism is a great tool for HR to help unlock that experience economy when it comes to the enterprise itself.
So this is the question we are asking everyone on this series and I would like one of you, or both of you, to walk us through it.
What is the role of technology in supporting employee experience?
Gabriele Rizzo: I will give you an answer to that straight from our new work and our new book, that will be out at the end of the year, that is around education futures. Technology ecosystemify and tech as you want it. So the two mantras here are ecosystemify and tech it as you want. Ecosystemifying is tied to the fact that technology creates ecosystems, now you need an ecosystem because in a complex world everything is interconnected and the more interconnections you have, the more complex the system. So you have to be aware of all the connections that are creating emergent properties that you may be willing to exploit and thus you need to create ecosystems to be able to exploit these emergent characteristics. As complexity is classically measured as the number of interconnections then you need to create more interconnected networks and it is not just creating networks of communication. So it is not just your phone, PC, app, fridge connected light, it is about creating networks of meaning. So what is connected between home, office, life, movement, transport and all that, and that is underpinned by technology of course.
Isabelle tech it as you want.
Isabelle Chappuis: All right. Sure. So what we mean here with, tech it as you want, is that technology should be used as much as possible to allow for digital transformation and not merely digital transposition. So HR should create the conditions so that you can use technology in a way that you want and not just be limited by technology. What we see a lot is the fragmentation of tech tools, adding a new tool, a new CRM, a new ERP, and sooner or later some kind of access to the Metaverse. If all those tools are just added with little coherence or just because they exist, that fragmentation will kill employee experience. So technology, if you want to support employee experience, it really needs to be implemented after a thorough reflection of the processes so that the technology becomes a tool for humans and not the other way round. Too often today, I think humans are expected to think in a way that aligns with systems and it should be the other way round.
So that is, tech it as you want.
David Green: I couldn't agree more. Well, Isabelle and Gabriele, it has been brilliant to have you on the show. As I ask each of you to let people know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media, I would also like to ask you to summarise one area each, where you think practitioners can start to prepare for the future today, based on the HR futures 2030, book. Gabriele, I will come to you first.
Gabriele Rizzo: The decision makers want options. They want to make their vision a reality. So they need to take every perspective and see clearly from every point of view and that is where they need to transition from near, to far, to see every detail in sharp focus.
So my advice for HR leaders and decision makers today, is starting up a foresight practice so that you are able to build future informed options and have that broader overview of the disruptions in coming, that will make your organisations decision-making and workforce, future ready.
That is also what allows you to prepare for the unthinkable. In our book, there is a chart where you have, act now, create the advantage, and they are prepared for the unthinkable. HR hacktivism, that we talked about before, is a way to prepare for the unthinkable. Trust portfolio management, one other discipline, is a way to prepare for the unthinkable. Who would have thought that we would be in a world where we are unable to establish trust between two parties and we have to discuss distribution of trust. How distributed trust impacts on HR.
That is a number of topics for decision makers to have broad and clear directions so that they can decide better. Foresight is not a way for decision-makers to ask what to decide, it is a way for decision makers to decide better.
David Green: Gabriele, I think you have summarised what people analytics should be within HR functions, there, really, really well. I will come back to you for your contact details in a minute, Gabriele.
Isabelle, one takeaway you think that HR can put in for practice today, as well?
Isabelle Chappuis: All right. Of course we have got 22 disciplines to work on and eight years to get to 2030, so that is quite a lot. We do understand that not all HR leaders are on the same way to deal with the incoming disruptions.
So Gabriele, was mentioning this low-cost, high-impact graph that we have in the book. So I think one of the obvious low cost high impact, low hanging fruits, that can quickly be put into action for the people listening today would be what we call, the strategic sustainability in casting discipline. Which is very trendy and very necessary because suddenly, with everything that has happened, environmental issues have been put to priorities far behind.
So what concretely could HR do that is first walk the sustainable talk and support and guide their employees to design their own activities at work, or outside of work, so that they can as individuals, have a stronger sustainable impact.
Some ideas. Crowdsource ideas among employees to improve processes or reduce employees environmental impact.
The second would be, design carbon footprint models for employees so you can propose applicable or actionable solutions to help them minimise their impact. How do they come to work? Is it by car, by bus? When do they turn off the computers? And so on. So easy, low hanging, low cost, high impact actions.
The last, which is again, one of those very quickly implementable actions and one that a lot of companies here in Switzerland, are starting to do, is to give your employees the opportunity to offer their time, be it one day or two days a year, to a noble environmental or societal cause, during their work hours. This is good for them, this is good for the world, and it is good for the company's brand.
So that would be my take.
David Green: What a wonderful way to finish a really enjoyable discussion, from my perspective. Thank you for being on the show both of you and listeners, definitely check out the, HR Futures 2030, book. How can people stay in touch with you?
Gabriele Rizzo: Sure. We have social media presence. We are both present on LinkedIn and Twitter, so please do reach out to us.
David Green: Isabelle and Gabriele, thank you both so much for being on the show and look forward to seeing more of your work in the future.