Design Thinking and Agile HR with Natal Dank

Episode 4: Design Thinking and Agile HR with Natal Dank

Trina Sunday: Welcome, everyone. I’m Trina Sunday from Reimagine HR and we’re chatting today to Natal Dank, who’s the head of learning, coaching and consulting for Pixo Culture, chief Trend watcher for the HR Trend Institute and I followed them for quite some time. Natal is all things agile people centricity, purpose driven organisations. And for us at reimagine HR, we’re all about people, purpose and impact and doing HR differently. And so really happy to have you join me today, Natal, to have a chat around agile HR and what’s showing up in your world. So welcome.

Natal Dank: Thank you. I’m very excited to be here in the same time zone.

Trina Sunday: Australia does offer up multiple time zones.

Natal Dank: This is true, this is true.

At what point did you realise traditional HR didn’t work?

Trina Sunday: I’m painted just, I guess as part of expanding on, an intro there, just to get a bit of a sense around your backstory of kind of, obviously we’re going to talk about as an agile pioneer in terms of where that sits in the HR, but what’s kind of led you to that? What’s a bit of the backstory to help us understand how you got here?

Natal Dank: Well, it was interesting because you said one of the topics you wanted to talk about was at what point did you realise traditional HR didn’t work? And that kind of flows into my backstory. So why don’t we combine the two? And I always talk about it as the 25-box talent matrix at an organisation I was working at that tipped me over the edge and here I was spending time attempting to just make it nine boxes, let alone why were we using boxes in the first place. And it was one of those moments in your career where you go, aha. I think I need to find a new way of doing what I do. And I was, at the time, I was a global head of talent for a large international organisation and I just found we were spending a lot of time on the process and for me it wasn’t always clear as to why. And we weren’t even using the data that we were collecting in a kind of savvy way, we were just collecting a lot of information, and it was also an environment where it wasn’t transparent. People didn’t feel they could openly discuss this process with their people. So, it sort of led me on a bit of a journey to think, okay, how do I get back to why I love this profession, which is how do you build great organisations? And it was encouraged to kind of go solo, try some consulting and one of my first organisations that I worked with were agile at their heart and they were by then a fairly successful organisation. But they had begun as a startup and I was challenged to help them evolve performance and reward for an agile part of the business, which was their big tech team, which was sort of the main part of the business. And I did what we always do.  I went and read the engagement survey. I looked at what I thought was the cool, the cool kids, so Facebook and Google and all these at the time, which has slightly changed these days. And also, I went and interviewed lots of people, what do you think we should be doing? And then I designed my beautiful, gorgeous blueprint of what we should do, and I was, I was cutting edge, I knew I was taking out ratings, I was changing bonuses. It was going to be so good. But the head, the chief IT officer said, well, how do you know it’s going to work? And I said, oh, well, best practise, this is what other companies are doing. And he’s like, well in my line of business what we do is we test, we run experiments, we get data and based on the evidence we make some changes, and you need to do the same thing in this space. So, I kind of stumbled into it. I was very fortunate to work with teams that were working in this way, and really wanted to experiment to solve the problems that they also saw. But I came out of that just going, oh wow, we’ve just co created the solution and we did announce pretty big changes by the end of this sort of period of experiments. We changed bonus structures; we did some pretty big things. But the concept of change management was fundamentally altered because we did it together. Listening to real feedback, looking at the data and I just went, wow, this is a new direction. And this, I think this contains a lot of the answers I’ve been looking for. And yeah, from then on, I started agile HR meetups, I started working with HR teams, some of the first that really wanted to work in this way. And from there it’s just really, it’s, it’s just as you’ve seen, it’s just sort of exploded as a kind of global type of movement, I think, because that’s where business has gone as well.

Trina Sunday: Yeah, and that really resonates with me because I think, I’ve been 20 years in HR and then OD and obviously now have my own business reimagine HR. But I started my career in marketing, marketing, PR, events management. I was in business commons first. And so, for me, I’d always struggled in corporate HR around how I was being taught to HR in my early career and watching the exams around me, looking for best practise as you talk about with all of them, the cool kids as you describe them or what’s happening, but the reality is it doesn’t work for everybody, right? And so, for me, from a marketing perspective, I could see the parallels between product development instead of looking at HR as a service and what the changes are that go with that.

Joel Light talks about agile design thinking and how it relates to HR

And so, design thinking and talking, Joel, is something that’s a big part of the work I do with HR leaders and teams that want to do things differently. How do you describe it to people that don’t really know? And do you see it go hand in hand? I mean, I do, but I’m curious to know what your thoughts are around agile design thinking and how you talk about it and how it relates, I guess, to HR.

Natal Dank: it’s interesting, there was a thread on LinkedIn today about this conversation of lots of debates of how for HR to reimagine themselves, they needed to actually think of themselves doing something differently and they needed to look beyond HR for the sources of that inspiration. And I talk a lot about what, like more and more, particularly over the last few years, I just think a lot of what I’m doing with HR leaders and teams, it’s just really good business skills and exactly that. It pulls on what’s already tried and tested in areas like marketing, product development and design, software engineering, tech teams.  This is a proven methodology that grows great products, solves people’s problems and builds this great customer experience. And in turn that generates value, whether that’s value because the product got sold, or whether that’s value within an organisation, because people want to work there, they want to give their best work and they feel like that’s a great deal for what they get in return. So much of what we’re borrowing is already out there and I think what often we need to do is help people translate it to the space of HR people and culture and translate it for us.  use certain words that resonate.  I find that people often don’t understand it if they just hear pure agile language or even, sometimes design thinking language can be very, I suppose when you’re only talking about designing a kind of tech product or something, people don’t automatically see how, how it relates. So often it’s just giving them all the case studies and examples of how you do it day to day. And then going back to your other question. Yes, definitely. For me, design thinking and agile, they’re almost two sides of the same coin. They’re directly interrelated. I also see them, while you can pull on design thinking at any stage of designing a people product, there are key moments where it’s fundamental and one of them is right at the start, which I call kind of discovery work. And at the start of that, what is the problem you’re trying to solve? Because the nature of the people space is these big, massive, really vague, complex topics. They can be anything to anybody, and you’ve got to find out, well what does it actually mean for this organisation, for these particular leaders? What would we really do to shift the dial, and those tools greatly help you drill down in that way?

Trina Sunday: Yeah, because I think that’s a big part of it, isn’t it? because we often will create solutions to the wrong problem and then we invest so much energy and time and get so far down the track that then there’s an element of pride and ego. In my experience that means, oh gosh, we can’t go back, we’ve invested too much, we’re too far now. Like let’s make it happen. But I think for me that’s what I find so liberating about agile methodology as well is that you don’t have to have it right. And so, I think about design thinking, I agree, it’s those early discovery phases because that’s where you want to understand what the problem is and really be clear on what you’re trying to achieve. But then agile gives you the get out of jail free pass in some respects around not having to have it 100% perfect, and for those that don’t follow agile methodology and that are kind of coming into this space new, it’s the iteration, isn’t it? Like it’s the reality around you create a product, prototype it, in a sense and you test it and then you just continue to refine it.

Natal Dank: Yeah, definitely. So, I think it’s breaking a few things down. One is within the world of people and culture, it’s quite easy to jump to the solution and actually a lot of senior leaders we work with give us the solution. So, they sort of turn around and say, oh, this team needs training in this way because theyre not doing this and this and this. A CEO reads the inflight magazine and turns up and says oh, we need to be doing skills-based talent, blah blah blah. And it’s like, okay, great, well, what’s that mean? We also have a big industry selling solutions that give us the result. So huge HR learning systems, everything from workday to others sort of dictate processes and ways to do things. And again, with anything like that, why introduce a system?  It needs to be solving a problem. You need to be helping people get their job done. So, I think there’s also the nature of what, the kind of the context that we work in, and then we all do it, we all. My partner constantly tells me not to give him the solution, just to listen and to discover how to problem solve together. And I think because you’ve perhaps seen similar issues around leadership, or you’ve, you’ve had to solve things around learning and wellbeing in previous organisations, you naturally go, oh, well, I did this great thing before, or I’ve got this great system I’ve used. Oh, let’s bring it in here. But how will you know it’s going to work? You’ve always got to have the evidence and the data and a lot of, I think, what agility and HR and design thinking, it’s actually intimately linked with evidence-based HR, and there is a big movement around that as well. But evidence based, it’s not just researching well and collecting data, it’s having evidence to take that next step. And I think that’s important because when we say to people, oh, it’s about releasing something that’s not done yet or fully finished, people think, oh my God, how could you do that? It’s embarrassing, or, we can’t release crap into the business.  it needs to be ready. And so it’s helping them unpack that fear and showing them that actually at every stage of development, you need evidence that you can move on to the next stage. And if you don’t have evidence, then you need to question, is this the right thing? Do I need to change? Do I need to pivot? Should I not even be working on this? Is there something more important over here to work on? And so a quick experimentation, which can be as simple as showing people an email, as you walk around the office or send them some examples of what you’re about to release, will immediately give you some data that you can work on. And I think for me, that’s the best way to help people view it, because there is this reluctance at first, I think, to embrace that experimental mindset. And because we’ve had a tradition of top-down waterfalls.

Trina Sunday: Yeah. because it doesn’t have to be that giant user acceptance testing exercise. Right. Like, I think that’s, again, where we can over engineer it in the sense where it’s just about having conversations with people and it’s having that chatter. So, this is what we’re looking to release. What do you think? You’ll get real sleep totally, real fast, in my experience, where people will tell you if something’s rubbish or not on point or why would you do that? And, but I think sometimes that level of evidence is difficult for HR. I’d imagine to then be able to get different bone and support and there’s a bit of chicken and egg with this because I think there’s a credibility, a brand and a reputation of,  that’s needed by HR in terms of this is the value we bring to the organisation, the business, the company, to I guess have some grace and free rein to move in more of an agile way.

HR processes can often reflect the culture of the organisation.

I’m just thinking as you talk around the dependency of the culture of an organisation, of how successful. So, if you’re wanting to be driving agile HR, I’m wondering what HR teams can do if they’re in a backdrop of a culture that’s probably not constructive and that is a bit blame oriented and doesn’t have that safety for failure.  experimentation often requires that grace and you, that learning and growth environment. And so, I just wonder what your observations around how successful agile HR can be. If you’re in an environment which you talked about, the context, that’s maybe the culture’s not as supportive of that typically. And I’m wondering if you’ve seen that.

Natal Dank: Yeah, definitely. I think again, I’m going to kind of unpack it a bit. So, for me there’s a couple of things that sit in that. One is what’s going on with the culture in the first place. Has HR even been a part of that previously? And I think we do need to be conscious that sometimes the traditional way that we’ve worked in HR haven’t set us up for success of now switching. So, if we have released big performance management heavy processes and they haven’t been that successful or they’ve made people feel that it’s a burden or it’s done to them, then there’s actually even a perception of HR that might need to change. So I think that’s, maybe that’s also being conscious. Yeah, we have sometimes been part of that culture. HR processes can often reflect the culture of the organisation. So it’s good to sort of look at ourselves as much as the wider culture then. Definitely, yeah. you’re going to have environments where even the word experiment seems a bit scary. And so running an experiment is linked to having a hypothesis. Everything we do has a hypothesis.  we think if we do this, this is going to happen.  We don’t actually know when we set out with that, I call it a hunch, an informed hunch, and that is, and a hypothesis is you then just write it out, not quite nicely, and you go and you can test it. A hypothesis is that you can test it. And so what I find is actually, it’s usually being conscious of language. So I don’t really talk about agile in those environments. I don’t necessarily always talk about experiment, but I talk about that. What is the business problem that we have to solve? And I talk very much about the value that would result if we solved it. And that is value from the business bottom line that’s valued to the end customer. So the person that’s buying the products and services or using the community services and that’s then the employee. And for me even that starting point, a lot of people, teams don’t start with that. They often go for were going to try and influence the engagement survey or were going to hopefully at least retain more people or something is the data point. But we need to shift into that business language and what I’ve found that if you then talk about the problem that you’re trying to solve in business terms, most people want to be part of that, and they also want to see evidence as to how and why to solve it. So usually I shift it to, okay, we’ve all seen this problem, all of us have got hypotheses of what to do or we’ve got ideas of what to implement. Can I go and test this particular one first and get some evidence that we should invest more time, more money to roll out the solution? Generally business leaders go, yep, because I don’t want to spend money unless I know, I’m sure. So again, if we start putting it into those sorts of words and presenting it like that, I often find in most environments they’re ready to do it. And I don’t say I’m running an experiment; I’m just going to go and get some data to demonstrate this is the right thing to do. I’ve even had ones where you can set it up where the executives are the user testing group. So, you run a weeklong design thinking kind of hackathon, by the end of it, you’ve got the executive coming in and they’re the user tests to the solution that you’ve come out with. And I’ll pick a big one, I’ve done this at very large organisations, very conservative. Pick a big organisational problem that they’ve been trying to solve for a while. And what’s interesting is the leaders see there’s a different way of solving it. They also see the rapid result, but they generally sign off on something in that room and it means you can get going. So even if the rest of the work on the project isn’t necessarily fully agile to begin with, just by accelerating the result with that immediate sign off, by running that short hackathon experiment, here’s the prototype. What do you think can just make so much ground? So, yeah, there’s different ways you can go about to try and start to influence that environment, but I think it really does start with language and talking about business problems, not just, we need to change the result of the engagement survey.

Trina Sunday: Yeah, yeah, because I think people that have followed me know that I call engagement surveys the happiness indices, where we’re trying to move a score that really is not impactful in terms of, our people, our customers, the planet.  like it’s not the game changing score, it’s not the focus. But I think there’s something in it, it’s the conversations that you talk about and even just the concept of having a hackathon, for example, and swift, from a designing perspective, it’s heavy consultation upfront. Right. And I don’t mean heavy in the sense that it’s utters, but it could save you months of effort, misdirected effort down the track. And I think that that engagement where you are then pulling people into the room to have the conversations and to brainstorm and freestyle in terms of,  being able to generate ideas that won’t come from people and cultural people, teams sitting there trying to sell something in isolation where we have potentially disconnect with the business, I think the language is really important. Like I think I flagged, that we use HR speak, which alienates our customers at the same time our internal customers. And then, so I do have in the back of my mind like adding agile and design thinking and hypotheses and,  like it’s more language around,  I think we need to be able to find space to work and we both do this in our own ways and different ways,  for people and especially HR teams to really understand what this means and then find language that works for them.

Natal Dank: Definitely.

Trina Sunday: Because at the end of the day, as you talked about, it’s about identifying what the real problem is that we’re trying to solve and then looking at what the opportunities are. And I guess the buying in comes from if you’ve got the problem right. People buy in because they want to solve that problem because it’s the right problem.

Natal Dank: Yeah.

Trina Sunday: Where a lot of the time actually we struggle to get support from a HR perspective, maybe because of that big project we’ve dropped that wasn’t successful or. But it’s because we are not necessarily meeting the business problem where it’s at.

Natal Dank: Yeah, look, and I think a big part of this is also the traditional way that HR has worked up until now, the delivery model that sits behind that. So, I wrote a new book recently and in one of the interviews, the head of TomTom who’s been a long term in climate with me, he said well it feels like HR have more silos than any other part of the business because we’re so broken up into these little topic areas. And if you go out to look at other professions, yeah sure there’s maybe a few kinds of parts of it, but the fact that, if any business problem, if you give it to an e learning specialist, generally it’ll be an e learning solution that results. If you give it to a wellbeing person, it’s going to be wellbeing. If you give it to diversity Eco inclusion, you give it to recruitment. Me where actually often these business problems cut across all of those topics and actually need to pull on all of that skill set. And so, what I think is where we’ve tripped up before, so if we start seeing business problems as business problems as opposed to one part of the slice, if we then see the employee experience as our product made up of multiple component parts, onboarding, recruitment, team development, but delivered as one. Because that’s how people experience in the organisation, then we can start to actually work in a way that is much more prioritised and based on the value that we’re delivering and every problem we solve. Yeah, recruitment might be part of it, reward might be part of it, learning might be part of it, but it is, we’re solving the problem for what it is as opposed to just giving one slice of the solution we’ve worked. I’m sure you are the same. I was the head of learning and development, or talent, and I constantly had to get everyone’s time to move a project forward. And those projects would take so long to get done because we weren’t putting the right skill set behind it and the right prioritisation behind it. So, I think with one thing that definitely concepts of agile, and others do is it takes, again, what other parts of the business are doing and being ruthless in. Okay, this is the most important thing to focus on. This is also what we’ve got to deliver as a team because we’ve already committed to it, and this makes the employee experience happen. So that’s what we call Bau. But out of the effort that we then have remaining, this is what we need to solve first. This is second, this is third.

There’s a whole history and science behind a transition to shared service business partnering

Right, let’s get on and get cracking because there’s so much to do and I feel like we just haven’t up until now and we’re definitely starting to see it. You’re seeing people like Josh Burson talk about systemic HR, you’re seeing the Gartner model come out with the new kind of combined problem-solving pool, and it all pulls on a lot of these same concepts that links back to business agility. But I think, yeah, we just haven’t been, not just the right mindset, we haven’t set ourselves up to be able to deliver in that way until now.

Trina Sunday: Yeah, it’s ironic, isn’t it? that our own design and job design is not conducive to getting good business outcomes.

Natal Dank: Totally. And we go around helping everyone else break down silos and then we’ve got loads of silos ourselves.

Trina Sunday: Yeah, I know, I’ve flagged this with you, but it’s. And I have so much respect for Dave Ulrich and the work that he’s done. And there’s a whole history and science and evidence that’s up behind a transition to, a shared service business partnering,  centres of excellence type model, where even we’ve got those three streams and then within it, we’ve got the specialism, right? And so what I’m hearing you talk about is, and we would all experience it where it is a seamless employee experience at the end of the day, where people, there’s an employee life cycle, we know that everything is interconnected. And when we do kind of, as you say, give it to a lead that’s got a specific bent, then that’s the bent that the solution is going to come with. And everyone, in some respects will be jostling for position around whether they’ve got the time. And then we have issues with prioritisation and getting traction and so we get inertia, we can’t get momentum.

How do you see agile HR look differently? What is the structure?

So how do you see agile HR look differently? What is the structure? What does the team look like? If it’s not, mhm, that traditional, how do we change the structure?

Natal Dank: So some of the clients I’ve been working with and also feeding off some of the models I just mentioned. So I call it t shaped people and t shaped teams. And t shape is this idea you should be familiar with. The vertical is your specialism. Every person may have one or a few and then your horizontal is your general capabilities. So these are things that you’re good at. You can speak to, you can contribute to, but you’re not the kind of the expert. But we can get quite strategic with that. And this is a framework that I’m finding a lot of HR professionals really like because it’s helped them move beyond this idea of being a journalist versus a specialist because we always thought that was the way. And what you described with the Ulrich model is, yeah, we would have a business partner out there consulting with the business. They would then channel things into this centre of expertise which was full of all these specialists that didn’t ever have any contact necessarily with the business. They would design these solutions and then it would go back out either through the business partner or the operations team. And it’s just a model. That means any design is too far away from the customer and you’re always going through middle people.  and it would just create these massive bottlenecks. And then if you had centre of expertise also releasing things out, you would just, you took so much of the cognitive load of your organisation,  people can only take in so much change, take in so much communication,  and we’ve all been there when several different messages from the same team come out at the same time because they didn’t realise that, oh, you were doing that today? Oh we were also releasing this. So that’s kind of where we ended up. And so what I talk a lot about now is kind of those three areas, but in a different way. You need to have what I call a product team. So this is your, it’s end to end problem solving. And you take in the business problem, and you see through the product development lifecycle, and you create the solution for that problem, but then you need to know where that goes. So who maintains it? Where does it sit? How much capacity do you have? Is it digitally enabled, so no one has to do admin. Is it something that kind of lives itself in the business or is it something that you’re going to have to run conversations for on a quarterly basis? And what does that mean? So then next to it is what I kind of call a strategic HR team. This is generally your data. This is often maybe still some strategic business partners or product owners your kind of wanting to call them. And definitely what I now see is a key role, which is what I call a portfolio manager or a portfolio team. And this is the ability to visualise all the work across your function. So be that a small function of 20 people, or ten, or a large function of several hundred, and that portfolio needs to represent the employee lifecycle, the product that you deliver out and so on. That portfolio is going to be the things that you already do, and you’re committed to when you’re running, as well as some of these new initiatives that are coming out of this product team. And then next to that is an uber sexy and fundamental. Either you can call them operations services, the heartbeat and the sexy. Exactly. We undermine this group, but you need to have a team that runs the systems, that runs the work, that makes it happen. Exactly. And we do, we create all these solutions in HR and people, and then we either we haven’t decided where they go, or we haven’t talked about the capacity that it equals for people, or we haven’t talked about how to automate it to the point where it doesn’t add more to the capacity that we’ve already committed to. And so a number of teams, the tomtom example is a good one. And actually, I just saw that Josh Burson has called it an example of systemic HR, and I’ve put it in the book, in the new book as well. But it is literally just these three key areas. They had something called essentials as well, which is sort of a couple of kinds of platform owners, core gurus as such, but it’s stripping it back. And another team at reward gateway, they call it the people product team, is employee experience, then they’ve got an ops team and then they’ve got strategy. And the three of them, the whole idea is it’s a delivery model that is just delivering the product across the organisation. So anything you create, you know where it goes, you know how it’s maintained and you know in future, whether you need to innovate it, get rid of it, change it, or just keep maintaining it. So this idea that you’re constantly tracking what’s out there, what’s happening, what’s the data. And this is like running essentially a product team in the business.  This is what you do with your customers.  So why aren’t we doing the same for HR?

Trina Sunday: Yeah, and I think that there’s so much depth to what you shared in just a really small amount of time there. And I think it’s where I would encourage people to look at your books. I’m excited for the new book, but I think it’s one of these things where we talk about mindset a lot and I try to avoid the language, actually, but it’s having these different perspectives. Right. fresh ways of thinking and things. And even just having that product lens versus service is a massive shift, in my experience, to most of the HR teams that I’m working with across APAC. And I know that there’s a lot more innovation and depth and backstory to this coming out of Europe. I’m finding the work out of Europe to be far more progressive in terms of where this is connected. So I’m not sure if that’s your observation, but I think there’s so much room in there and I think the structure of our teams is not serving where we’re at. But interestingly, I’m still finding lots of HR teams that are struggling and pushing forward with the centres of excellence or just trying to get to that model and that’s how far behind we are in some spaces. And so for those that myself in a team that feels really far from the possibility of what we’re talking about, which might be a bit exciting to them in terms of that, I want a piece of that. That’s the kind of HR environment I want to be in.

UK and Europe contain some inspiring examples of moving forward with agile working.

Are there things that individuals can do differently within that to kind of give themselves this different way of practising, really a different way of thinking. Do you have thoughts on how people that are not mature space might start to level up?

Natal Dank: Yeah, definitely. I think what’s interesting with what you just talked about, like, I think it’s mixed. So, yes, the UK and Europe contain some really kind of inspiring examples of moving forward. And look, some of, even my work, I started doing this ten years ago or something based in the UK and Europe. So some of the clients I’ve worked with, for example, have been doing this for a long time. You don’t sort of embrace these ways of working and it changes straight away. Yeah, the tomtom model. I worked with them for a number of years where we just went, we started with design thinking and then we started with bringing in a full kind of the portfolio and the agile ways of working. And it was only after doing that for a year or so that they went, okay, the structure is now getting in the way and I think you’ve got to get to those points, the danger. I was speaking to an organisation the other day, they’ve gone for structural change straight up, but now they’re full of people that have never worked this way before.  and they lack the skills, they lack the mindset or whatever you want to call it. But there is, there’s a way of, you’ve got to have some mindset is sort of that, you’ve had a few haha moments, isn’t it? And you’ve realised why you want to work differently or the value in it. So that’s one thing. It’s a long game. It’s intermittently connected to business agility and the way that businesses are changing. So I think that’s something to hold onto. It’s not always just about HR needing to change, it’s actually about evolving our skills to deliver value in new ways across the businesses. And business is needing to evolve itself. The world is so complex now, it’s so forever changing and we need to be able to be part of that. So I think once you step back and realise, okay, this is actually bigger, it’s part of a bigger movement across how we do business, how we build organisations, how I need to develop my skills, then I think you can get that there’s a bit more reason and passion and okay, then what can I do in my day to day? The t shape is actually a really cool model to do and actually think about what the core capabilities I need to be successful across multiple projects and then what other specialism I bring and how do I get more strategic about how I develop my t shape. But then any team, no matter how you’re structured, there’s going to be projects that you’re working on. And so go and get a multi-skilled, interdisciplinary group of people together. And even if it’s for three days, even if it’s every Thursday for half a day, for the next month, you work on that problem in a true multi-skilled way. The benefits you will find from that and the acceleration of results, it can be quite profound. So if you’re running the wellbeing project, most people will probably be needing to use people in other parts of HR. Okay, go and see how you can do that more as a team as opposed to just always pulling on individuals capacity and capability. And,  when trying to get meetings in the diary and trying to do this, actually try and embrace that as, okay, how do we move this forward quickly as a unit, as a multi skilled unit? So the more people do that, the more you start to break down. I think that, oh, well, this sits in our domain, so we do this part and this sits in our. Yeah, it’s because if you, you as that collective group are talking about the business problem and. Okay, what are the different aspects that need to come out to solve this business problem? You’ll just produce better work as a result. Yeah.

Trina Sunday: And I think if you do that as a HR team, but then you are creating space for the multidisciplinary beyond your own team and you’re injecting your.

Natal Dank: Chief digital team then working with the business. Yes, exactly.

Trina Sunday: You’re proactively building those relationships that you will leverage later. Right. And so there’s a lot in that whole other podcast opportunities to talk.

You mentioned how people think they need to jump before they change model

Natal Dank: Especially about it. So can I just say one other thing as well? You mentioned how, and this is for another conversation, but you mentioned that people that don’t have the Ulrich model yet are then thinking they need to do that before they then change. And I really am a big believer that you don’t have to go to an old model before you go to a new one. Just jump that and go to the next one. Yeah.

Trina Sunday: Completely off topic. But,  I lived in Cambodia for a long time and it’s one of these things where it was seen as a developing country, not progressive, blah blah blah. And then, so you look at telecommunications and essentially they skipped the whole landline thing. Right?

Natal Dank: Yeah, no, it’s a really good example. Yeah.

Trina Sunday: They jump straight to mobile, straight to,  and don’t have this legacy. And I think that the gem in this is challenging our thinking around that nothing’s linear and we don’t have to follow the path that others have followed. If we have an opportunity, it’s not a shortcut. If it’s, well, it is a shortcut, but there’s an element, it’s getting somewhere faster because you’re heading in the right direction.

Natal Dank: Totally. And the thing is that tech change, business change is going to keep happening rapidly with AI coming in, for example, the need to save our planet from climate change.  All of these things mean that you have to jump because otherwise you’re always going to be too slow. You’re just not going to be part of the conversation that’s happening now.  if you’re running a traditional HR model and you’re trying to now bring AI in, you’re going to really struggle where if you go, all right, what is the model that we need to be able to embrace this new tech in a kind of morally great way that helps us, but helps our business, or how do we start to go after net zero targets and help the organisation change? All those things need a very different way, a different approach. So actually we’re kind of slowing ourselves down. I think if we don’t realise that we need to make that, it’s not even a jump. It’s just, as you say, there’s parts in the journey that you just don’t need to do because it’s being proven as its legacy.  that landline’s a legacy.  so just don’t do it. Yeah. Jump to the mobile.

Trina Sunday: They are anyway, so.

Natal Dank: Totally, yeah.

Trina Sunday:  so grateful for your time, I guess, to close out.

I’m keen to know what reimagining HR looks like to you.

I’m keen to know what reimagining HR looks or feels like to you.

Natal Dank: So it looks and feels like an accepted, valued part of the business and it’s,  and,  I think I was joking again with someone the other day that I used to say I embraced agile HR because I wanted people to like me at barbecues. Because when you go up and introduce yourself as a HR, and then I even worked in banking for a while, it was even like, more eye rolling? And so why is that? Why do we have this legacy in HR of this,  the fun police,  or was it human remains as opposed to human resources? All of these things, I’ve just wanted to always let go of that. And I think what we’re talking about here is, in today’s world, an organisation, their people strategy, the way they find the right people, the way they develop their people, the way they rapidly move and flex their teams around business problems and products to design or release, that is modern business. And if COVID showed anything that people are so central to an organisation, particularly as tech like AI come in, and so a great reimagined HR is that we are part of that business model and we’re not seen as the outsiders or the people that get them to do things that they don’t want to do. It’s actually just an accepted business unit. Yeah, I love that.

Trina Sunday: And it’s at the core of why I do what I do and why I started my business. Because I know what it feels like to be that person at the barbecue with the eye rolls. And I know how phenomenal it feels when you are that person that’s respected and valued and helping a business to smash goals.

Natal Dank: Exactly.

Trina Sunday: Or effortless. Because you are on point and it feels amazing. And I want more people to have that and not the toxic experience, which is why reimagine HR.

Natal Dank: It’s here.

Trina Sunday: Sal, thank you so much for your time. I’ve loved talking with you. I could talk to you for hours. Looking forward to seeing you in person soon. Very exciting. So thank you very much.