Episode 259: Rethinking Strategic Workforce Planning in the Age of AI and Skills Disruption (with David Edwards)
AI is changing tasks. Skills strategies are evolving. And yet visibility into capability, cost, and risk across the workforce often remains fragmented.
So how do organisations move from reacting to workforce change, to planning for it in a way that actually shapes business outcomes?
In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, host David Green is joined by David Edwards, strategic workforce planning practitioner, advisor, and author of The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook, to explore what it really takes to make strategic workforce planning work in practice.
Join this conversation as they discuss:
Why workforce planning can feel “deceptively threatening” inside an organisation
What changes when leaders shift from thinking about headcount to thinking about capability, capacity, cost, and risk over time
What goes wrong when people analytics and workforce planning operate in parallel
Why looking beyond permanent employees reveals hidden workforce risk
How AI is forcing organisations to rethink work design, not just skills strategies
What stakeholders really need from strategic workforce planning
This episode is sponsored by Worklytics.
How productive is your organisation, really? Worklytics makes it clear — with privacy-first insights from everyday work data. See how meeting volume, manager effectiveness, collaboration health, and AI adoption are impacting your team’s focus, efficiency, and outcomes — so you can make smarter decisions, faster.
No surveys. No assumptions. Just clear insight into work. Right now, Worklytics is offering podcast listeners a free 30-day trial of their productivity analytics dashboard.
Learn more at worklytics.co/productivity
Link to resources:
This episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast is brought to you by Worklytics.
[0:00:00] David Green: According to McKinsey, strategic workforce planning is now a CEO priority. Indeed, two-thirds of CEOs say their competitive differentiation depends on having the right expertise in the right roles, supported by reskilling, selective hiring, AI agents, and strategic partnerships; the Build-Buy-Bot-Borrow model. Despite this, workforce decisions are still overwhelmingly being made with surprisingly limited visibility into capability, cost, and risk. This is something my guest today, David Edwards, a long time strategic workforce planning practitioner and author of a recently published book, The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook, has spent most of his years trying to assess.
David has worked across finance, operations, transformation, HR, and on both the practitioner and vendor side, which gives him a grounded perspective on why strategic workforce planning often makes sense in theory, but invariably proves difficult in reality. This is why I'm particularly excited about this conversation, as we explore why strategic workforce planning can feel deceptively threatening inside organisations, why turning it into a big HR process usually backfires, and what changes when you stop thinking about headcount and start thinking about capability, capacity, cost and risk over time. That's not all though, as we also dig into the relationship between people analytics and strategic workforce planning teams, what goes wrong when they run in parallel, and what good looks like when they're tied to real business decisions and outcomes. So, if you're trying to get ahead of change rather than constantly catching up, this episode will give you plenty to think about. With that, let's get the conversation started.
David, welcome. For listeners who might not know you yet, please can you introduce yourself and the work you've been doing in strategic workforce planning?
[0:02:13] David Edwards: Well, been in the strategic workforce planning space now for about 15 years or so, and have done so in a couple of major corporates, NatWest and Ericsson, in addition to having also been, for a short time, Product Manager and then Head of Advisory Services for workforce planning for the tech vendor, Visier. Mine, I think, is the epitome of an eclectic career. So, I've got a background in finance, in operations, in project management, tech vendor consultancy, and I also have considerable expertise in managing tumble dryers in a hospital laundry, because that's how I started.
[0:03:01] David Green: That's a first, we've not had that one before. We all start in different places. I actually started in the UK civil service, believe it or not, writing briefings for senior ministers and MPs, all the way back in the 1990s.
[0:03:13] David Edwards: There you are, we both started in that particular vein. Actually, there's a little sort of prequel, which was straight after school, I went to Kenya and spent a year there as a voluntary teacher.
[0:03:23] David Green: Okay, very good. So, obviously, background in finance, ops, project management, obviously you seen strategic workforce planning on two sides of the fence, from the vendor perspective and also the practitioner. And you've just written The Strategic Workforce Planning Playbook, which we'll be talking about quite a lot today. David, can I ask you this, because it's probably a question I like asking all of the guests on the show and they've all got different answers to it; what drew you into the world of strategic workforce planning and HR?
[0:03:53] David Edwards: Well, I certainly wasn't an HR lifer, as you can tell from all of those different backgrounds. I was initially drawn in whilst I was working at the Royal Bank of Scotland, which subsequently became NatWest, and had been asked if I would work on a right-shoring project, which was a nice little euphemism for moving roles across from the UK over into India because it was going to be cheaper. And I just got interested in the data, because that role quite quickly morphed into managing exits. And I was struck by not only how much data there seemed to be floating around in different pots, but how little use was actually being put to it. And I got the opportunity to work in the transformation division of NatWest, and that led me to a project which involved rationalising the vendor community, the third-party providers of statement of work. And that really started to open my eyes up, because I started to understand just how many people there were involved on that side of the fence.
But it was also giving me considerable insight into not just the number of employees that we had, but what they were doing and what their kind of churn rate was. And the big revelation for me was when I discovered, by joining about six or seven different bits of data together all on the spreadsheet, it nearly bloody killed me, that I was able to say to the guy who was the CEO at the time of the bank, plucked up the courage to ask to go and see him, there were something like 900 employees that we had let go at the same time as we were hiring into very similar roles, in very similar locations, in very similar time zones, about 900 external staff. We were literally shovelling people out one door, bringing similar people through another, and it just seemed wrong. From that, I and a wonderful colleague of mine, called Tom Carrigan, whose ability to show despair as a thing of beauty really ought to be showcased in a museum somewhere, but we put together a clearinghouse that basically saved about 600 people, we estimate, from redundancy by putting them into other jobs. And that's been the bedrock for me of everything that I've done since then.
[0:06:50] David Green: Before we get on to talk a little bit about the book and what inspired you to write it, what's your definition of strategic workforce planning?
[0:06:57] David Edwards: It's evolved and it keeps evolving. It is a realisation that the way we work, the way we do business, is being massively changed by technological advancement and also by social change as well. I am a late-ish baby boomer. Generational changes and attitudes are certainly making a dramatic difference to the workplace, and we've managed to get about ten minutes in without mentioning the letters AI, I think that's quite an achievement, but it is the elephant in the room that we simply cannot ignore and it is going to change things. Now, the problem is I'm not sure that many people really know exactly how. They instinctively can sort of see that it's going to alter the way we work, but the precise way in which that's going to happen is really difficult to actually pin down. It's a bit like trying to nail jelly to the wall at the moment.
Strategic workforce planning is a form of synthesis of all of the different impacts, pressures, trends, and also empirical and data-led evidence. And that synthesis results in being able to say, "These are the things that we should be worrying about and doing something about, and these are the things we don't have to worry about". Now, that makes it less of a process and more of a way of thinking. And I believe that as I've gone through not just writing the book, but also my own experiences, I'm increasingly averse to the idea of thinking of it as an annual process and more of a, "Okay, how is that now changing our expectations about the future?"
[0:09:01] David Green: This episode is sponsored by Worklytics. How productive is your organisation, really? Worklytics makes it clear with privacy-first insights from everyday work data. See how meeting volume, manager effectiveness, collaboration health, and AI adoption are impacting your team's focus, efficiency, and outcomes, so you can make smarter decisions faster. No surveys, no assumptions, just clear insight into work. Right now, Worklytics is offering podcast listeners a free 30-day trial of their Productivity Analytics dashboard. Learn more at worklytics.co/productivity.
You've just published a tremendous new book, called The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook, which is on Kogan Page and available to everyone listening to this to buy. What inspired you to write this book, and why now?
[0:10:22] David Edwards: Well, I'd started writing a few sort of pithy, whimsy kind of inspired articles on LinkedIn. I've always loved words, I've always loved playing around with words and using storytelling and analogy. And it turns out that storytelling is actually quite an important art in the practitioner's bag of tricks. Kogan Page approached me and said, "Well, we've seen some of these articles. Have you ever thought of writing?" And the honest answer was, no, I hadn't. But actually, when I started to put together a framework for the book, it was very clear that I felt I had quite a lot to say. There are some fantastic books out there which go into the theory, the thinking. What I didn't think was out there was the practitioner perspective and the real nuts and bolts. The real world is extremely messy, and there is nothing messier than the arguments that we have over data, over what we should be doing next. Politics is not an adjunct to this process, it is absolutely central and a constant in that process. I wanted to get all of that out, but also I suppose I wanted to extend my own capabilities as a writer, to see whether my slightly quirky style of writing could apply itself to this, and also to tease out some of the, you know, "Why are we doing this? Let's make it a little bit simpler than it is".
It is really, really simple, SWP, and I want to emphasise that to anybody who's listening or watching. It isn't this vast array of different sort of toolkits that's available to you, it's asking a very, very simple question, and it is this, "Is your workforce fit either for its current or for its future purpose?" Now, if the answer is yes, there aren't any other questions. If the answer is no, which is much more likely to be, there are two other questions. The first is, "What's the risk to the business as a consequence of it not being fit?" and, "What can you do that will maximise the benefit for the business and for its people in the act of mitigating it?" That's it. Everything else kind of stems and flows from that.
[0:13:11] David Green: Very good. I've never heard anyone describe workforce planning as simple before, so I'm pleased for that. I know you mean 'simple', what its purpose is. But in the book, David, you position strategic workforce planning, and we talked about this a little bit already, less as a process and more as a different way of thinking about the workforce and its future fitness for purpose. Can you unpack that a bit for our listeners? So, what changes when organisations treat strategic workforce planning as a way of thinking rather than as an HR process or a long-term headcount forecast?
[0:13:49] David Edwards: Well, there are a couple of prerequisites, I think. And the first of which is that there has to be a collaborative and executive-led will to bring this about. I am firmly of the view that if you simply try to implement it as an HR initiative or as any other initiative -- David Wilkins, I think, from TalentNeuron said that this year they picked up 50,000 SWP-like vacancies outside of HR. That kind of gives you a sense also as to the identity crisis that SWP sometimes endures. You stop seeing the workforce as a headcount, but instead you see it as capacity, capability, cost, and risk over time. I keep on using the word 'risk' in every conversation I have because I don't think that we actually use it enough, and yet we should. At what point did the workforce, as an entity or as groups of individuals, cease to become a risk to the business being able to do its work? It's almost as though we've kind of assumed that they can somehow be commoditised and simply brought in or taken out at will; whereas, especially in this day and age, when we do have skill shortages, where we are inevitably going to be seeing, especially in Western Europe, significant talent constraints, we've got to take this an awful lot more seriously.
We have problems breaking out all over in the demographics of the current workforce. And we therefore need to move away from, "How many people do we need?" And this is where my thinking has definitely evolved, even in the last year, to sort of, "What's the work that needs to be done? What are the outcomes that matter? And what can what mix of options get us there?" And that sort of leads me towards the revised thinking I've got about SWP, not as an exercise in strategically planning the entire workforce, but in planning and having an operating rhythm around those parts of the workforce that are themselves strategic. And that's a very different kind of approach. But if you think about it, if you want SWP to succeed in a business, what better way could you make that happen than by focusing on those elements of the workforce which really matter to the business. We haven't done enough of that in the past.
[0:16:54] David Green: I think you're right. I heard a good example of this on stage at UNLEASH a couple of years ago. Alexis Saussinan of Merck Group was on stage, and he was explaining, exactly as you were saying, that their strategic workforce planning is really focused on the most important roles within the organisation, and bringing in the other piece that you talked about there about having the collaborative and executive support. They don't initiate a strategic workforce planning project unless it's got a sponsor from the board or the board minus one. And I think that executive support is so important because, I mean I'm sure you can do a lot of work in strategic workforce planning, a lot of work, and if it's not for the right person or people within the organisation, it probably goes nowhere.
[0:17:47] David Edwards: You are absolutely right. As a group of people, they have an unusually broad view of what's going on across the business, more broad than most people outside of, say, the company's ExCo. And yet typically they will be, at best, around CEO minus three, and sometimes below that, and that can sometimes be a source of frustration. One colleague of mine likened it to the little boy calling out the emperor's new clothes. And the thing that strikes me about that is I actually looked up and said, "Well, what happened to the boy?" And the answer is nothing. He doesn't feature in the story at all again. And the emperor, who's wearing no clothes, doesn't suddenly rush to cover himself up. He carries on walking because it would demean his dignity to do otherwise. There are parallels, I think.
[0:18:48] David Green: Despite mounting evidence of people analytics and strategic workforce planning working very well together, they are invariably akin to two juggernauts that haven't always coexisted comfortably. What does good look like when people analytics and strategic workforce planning are working in sync, and what goes wrong when they're not, in your experience?
[0:19:11] David Edwards: Well, let's start with what goes wrong. I think if they are not in sync with each other, then you get analytics stuck just sort of proving things, and you get SWP getting stuck predicting things, but not actually ably expressing to the business why this stuff should matter to them. And neither of them then typically is anchored in any sort of decision forum with authority, or you get just tool-first thinking, you know, dashboards without decisions or plans without any kind of credibility. I think the other failure mode is possibly cultural. Analytics teams can accidentally signal sort of, "Well, we're the truth", and SWP practitioners can say, "Well, yeah, we're the strategy". And in reality, there is a strong mutual interdependence, because as I said earlier on, SWP is a synthesis of lots of different things. Well, people analytics is one of the fundamental elements in that synthesis, because your first go-to with any understanding as to what's the most critical part of the business, or what are the new pressures or trends starting to affect your business, how are people equipped to be able to do that? Back to that question, are they fit for that future business purpose?
People analytics can learn a good deal from SWP about context, about why certain things might matter more than others. But I think also SWP practitioners should be spending a lot more time looking at those analytics which come out and say, "Which of this stuff matters?" Analytics needs to be able to say, "This is a red flag". Even on a purely statistical basis, "There is something sort of odd about this". But the SWP practitioner can bring that context and say, "Hang on a minute, there's something much deeper going on here". And I will give you one example, if I may.
Intellectual property and licensing, all of that kind of stuff is big, big business in a number of manufacturing and technology companies. It can generate billions of dollars, but it is typically exercised and practised and traced and defended by a very small number of people, less than, say, half or even a quarter of 1% of your entire workforce. Do we know exactly what the demographics are of that workforce? Do we know what the attrition rates are? Do we have succession plans in place for those people? Do we have any sense as to whether certain people are more important than others? Can we actually tell from even a role description or a skillset or even a set of tasks whether one person within that group is so much more important than the other? We can't necessarily, not even with all of the different sort of data sets that we now hold particularly high in regard. Those are the sorts of things that we can really bring some value on.
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What I love about listening to you, David, and obviously I've been fortunate to know you for quite a few years now, is you're a real strong advocate for widening the lens of strategic workforce planning beyond traditional focus on permanent headcount. So, when organisations start looking at the whole workforce, so contingent labour, gig, dare I say, bots, etc, what opens up for them that maybe wasn't visible before?
[0:24:39] David Edwards: Well, the first thing is money. I actually came into strategic workforce planning, I alluded to it earlier on, through an odd angle, which was looking at third-party staff. Now, by and large, third-party staff don't count as headcount, and they cost an awful lot and you will find a lot of organisations with large technology functions will have quite a lot of them knocking around in the workforce, especially in change functions. Now, that's interesting, and one of the revelations that we certainly came across in NatWest, was a realisation that we were spending more or less the same amount of money on change each year, and it was a nine-, ten-figure sum, if I've got that right. Anyway, it was a lot of noughts on it and it wasn't changing that much over five years. And yet typically, we were hovering around 45% external staff all the way through. Why were we doing that?
A lot of that boils down to, firstly, long-established relationships with vendors; secondly, the very fact that it's difficult, harder even to hire permanent staff; and thirdly, they're often easier to get through because they are a purchase order and they're not a hiring requisition. And purchase ordering has its own financial limits. There's a lot of cost aspect to it, the unit cost of these people tends to be higher. The second is risk. I mean, what's the fragility? What's the flight risk or the loss of IP that flows from having 45% of your change workforce in particular not actually working for you? I don't like the idea of that for a second.
The third thing you get is options. You start to think much more laterally about what is possible to solve a particular problem. It's not, you know, we're going to build, buy, borrow, bot, etc. It's not one of those, it's a mix of them. And we're actually now having to face up to that truth because AI is forcing us to actually say, "Well, do we buy staff or do we bot them?" But there are other options as well. And let's not forget that internal mobility has the ability to save an organisation a fantastic amount of money, so there is a financial appeal; but it's also got the ability to greatly enhance the employee proposition by actually progressing them through their careers. And there are numbers out there. You know, 50,000 per person is not an unusual figure that gets bandied about. Yet, I'm not convinced that the whole move to internal mobility is yet really yielding the kind of results that it could.
Now, I'm getting on my high horse here, but I would argue that strategic workforce planning or looking at the workforce strategically, let's call it that, gives you an earlier indication as to what is likely to happen over a longer term. And that creates a larger window of opportunity for you to do things differently. And internal mobility is chief among that, but also being able to negotiate perhaps better exclusivity or longer-term resourcing commitments with vendors is also an option, and that can yield discounts for you. And that's where I have certainly seen the real win-win start to come out of this. And it also tells a sad but important truth that strategic workforce planning itself is not intrinsically valuable, unless the way you go about executing it is also enhanced and improved and made much more collaborative. And that speaks to an even broader truth, that this is an ecosystem in which people analytics, workforce planning, recruitment, learning, development, procurement, all of those things actually are massively more dependent on each other than perhaps they'd be prepared to let on at present.
[0:29:49] David Green: Who would you say are the critical stakeholders that need to be around the table for strategic workforce planning to work?
[0:29:56] David Edwards: Elizabeth Stapley of Arup, she gave me the phrase, "It takes a village". The more you think about it, you know, I used the Millpond analogy earlier on. Well, don't be surprised then if actually you need quite a number of different people in from the get-go. You absolutely need to have finance in there because you need to build a business case, but you need finance not only to help you build that business case, but to endorse it. And further, also agree the ways in which you are going to attribute benefit to strategic workforce planning as opposed to something else. And HR traditionally is not terribly good at that, or it will go off and sort of develop its own figures. And I say the politics of this are that you ask finance to help you to develop that. Go with some ideas and then let them run with it, because if it's backed by them then it will get supported by others.
Secondary, as we've already mentioned some of them, L&D, talent acquisition, talent management, reward. Let's also throw in now, whoever is responsible for organisation design or work design, because I'm going to add another B to the lexicon, which is 'bend'.
[0:31:26] David Green: Bend, oh!
[0:31:27] David Edwards: Yeah, do you like that? Yeah. All my own work, that one. AI is going to change the work and therefore it's going to change the workforce. It's no longer going to be sufficient for us to simply backfill a role which becomes vacant. We've got to ask ourselves, actually, does that role going forward, or does the work that that role performs still get performed in the same way? So, that has to be an element of it. Strategy. It took me a year to get an invite to regular group strategy meetings in one company. And did I contribute an awful lot to those meetings? No. Did I get a lot from those meetings? Hell, yes, which I was able then to start to fan out. Because a lot of this is, again, that synthesising of stuff. It's not saying, "You must do this, you must do that", but, "Here's what I am hearing, here's what I think it means for our people, therefore put that on your radar as you continue to develop out your workforce strategy".
[0:32:51] David Green: Well, I suppose, David, how can you do strategic workforce planning if you don't involve strategy?
[0:32:57] David Edwards: Well, yes, call me old-fashioned, but in one of the many definitions which is out there, you know, is your workforce up for executing on its future business strategy? What does the strategy mean? The strategy entails change of some sort or other, so focus on the change. Which parts of the workforce are changing? Now, it just so happens at the moment a heck of a lot of them are changing, but there are still micro-segments within that, and I do believe very strongly in micro-segmentation of the workforce to actually say, "Well, this lot, they're carrying on very much as they were. This bit, is it going to change? We need to do something about that. We need to respond to it".
[0:33:54] David Green: What is happening on the technology side to support strategic workforce planning? What's your view on that?
[0:33:59] David Edwards: I talk about SWP as currently being the Emerald City, because we're seeing a lot of technology providers who are building yellow brick roads from their origination, whether that be people analytics, or talent management, or talent intelligence, or market intelligence, org design, work design, you name it. These paths are now converging on strategic workforce planning because that gives an element of, "So what?" or perhaps more specifically, "So, what next?" about the work that those technology providers currently do. But there is a 'so what next' also to the subsequent bits of workforce planning, which is how do you blend that mix of a Build-Buy-Borrow-Bot more effectively. So, I'm very pleased to see companies like, and this is by no means an exhaustive list and I apologise to those who I miss out, you know, Crunchr, One Model, Visier, Orgvue, Ingentis, Nakisa, TalentNeuron, TechWolf, Eightfold, Horsefly, they're all kind of circling around this, and there are more besides.
You notice I didn't mention the really big ones, SAP, Oracle, Workday, Anaplan, but they're all now starting to say, "We need to have an updated vision for strategic workforce planning". And you know the number-one-rated event at UNLEASH World in Paris was almost the last session, which was hosted by Russell Klosk with the guys from Workday, Oracle and SAP. It was the number-one-rated breakout. Oh, and by the way, the one that Russell also hosted that I was in and Christian Vetter from TalentNeuron, that was rated number six. So, SWP matters to the people out there, and everyone is now starting to turn their attention to it. But we've got to think of it as an ecosystem play and not just individual components. I'm not saying it's wrong to have individual components, but Stacey Harris has been talking about this for a long time, from Sapient Insights, this need for clustering of solutions.
[0:36:54] David Green: How should HR, people analytics and strategic workforce planning teams be thinking about AI right now?
[0:37:01] David Edwards: Well, what they should be thinking most of all is, "We need to be getting ahead of the curve, because otherwise this stuff is going to be done to us". I think, and I commend you for an excellent summary of the things HR needs to be thinking about next year that you published on LinkedIn recently, my comment back to that was, "Fortune favours the brave". HR need to actually step out of their comfort zone and be prepared to say, "We know stuff about this. We know what the dynamics are of the workforce. We know what the issues are within the workforce". These are the things which AI is either going to help or it is going to impede. And we're not doing that at the moment. It's an enabler, and it's potentially a trap. It can sort of improve analysis, scenario modelling, job architecture, skills inference, all of that sort of thing, but it's different work.
HR, we're supposedly the experts in that. We've got to start taking the lead. Otherwise, what we will see, I don't mean this disrespectfully, but it is natural for the business to evolve the work that they already do. Others need to be saying, "What different could we be doing? Is it just going to be an augmenter or a re-engineer, or is it going to be an innovator?" So, if we're not on the front foot, AI becomes a cost-cutting exercise, and I think we're already seeing plenty of evidence of that, and a cost-cutting exercise which front-runs the benefit of AI on the assumption that they will come.
[0:39:00] David Green: One of the other topics that we hear a lot as well as AI, perhaps not surprisingly because the two are very closely related, is skill strategies. So, where do you see skill strategies fitting in when the work itself is shifting so quickly? You talked about this a little bit earlier. Do we need to talk about the work first and skills second, and what's your thinking about that; and how can strategic workforce planning help that? And let's say you were given an opportunity to do that today for an organisation, where would you start?
[0:39:34] David Edwards: Start with the work every single time. I feel for people who have invested so much in the skills-based organisation, but I suspect that they are currently finding that that doesn't answer the questions about how AI is going to change the way their organisations work. Now that's not to say that all of that investment is wrong, it's just that at this time, skills need to step back into the chorus line and allow the evaluation of work to come centre stage. We will need to know those skills and we need to keep on working on how we acquire better knowledge of people and their capabilities, in order to qualify them for the work that we are going to need them to do in the future. But just at the moment, I think we need to sort of take one step up the ladder and look at it that way, and yes, hope then that our ability to gather information on what people not only can do now, but have also been able to do in the past, and it's always challenged me as to why it is that we don't capture that data more effectively, but that is going to be key to being able to understand who is able to make switches across from one capability to another and who isn't.
[0:41:08] David Green: Very good. So, David, before we wrap up and we get to the question of the series, if we turn back to your book, The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook, once again, what do you hope a CHRO or Head of People Analytics or Head of Workforce Planning does differently the day after they finish reading the book?
[0:41:30] David Edwards: Firstly, thank you for buying it, if you have read it. If you've just borrowed it, what are you doing? My dog needs feeding, he's not going to like that. But then, choose a starting point that's anchored to a real business situation or decision, something that's got cost or risk or delivery consequence, and stop trying to implement SWP as a grand programme. That's absolutely the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is, build a minimum viable end-to-end, let's call it a product, but you could equally call it an operating model. There are lots of governance, procedural, territorial blockers. You've got to know that for whomever you are doing this, that you can actually get from one end of the need to the other end of the outcome. And thirdly, credibility. Credibility is a product. What is it that's going to actually make this a credible approach? And you will inevitably conclude that you have to collaborate across a very wide sphere and spectrum.
[0:42:48] David Green: Very good. So, you listeners, if you want to know more about The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook, type that into Google with David Edwards, or go to Kogan Page or go to Amazon, and you'll be able to get the book there. So, David, this is now, before we let people know how they can keep in touch with you as well, this is the question of the series. Because it's the first series of 2026, we're looking forward a little bit. And by all means, apply a strategic workforce planning lens to this if you wish. What will be the role of HR in 2030?
[0:43:24] David Edwards: Well, I think it has to be less about running HR and more about shaping how the organisation works, which means it's got to be really credible in areas like work design; it's got to step up more, I think, in how we understand the different markets in which we can find capability; and I think we need to ask ourselves very seriously whether the existing functional silos that exist in HR are truly fit for future purpose. I'm not convinced.
[0:44:02] David Green: David, it's been an absolute pleasure, as always, to speak with you. I really wish you well with The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook. I've had the pleasure of reading it. I can certainly recommend it to listeners. Can you let listeners know how they can find out more about you, more about the book? And you mentioned, I think you also have a LinkedIn newsletter as well.
[0:44:25] David Edwards: I do. It's called the Dark Artistry Newsletter. It's available on LinkedIn, and you can find me on LinkedIn as well, I think relatively easily. And you can also catch up with me on davidedwardsswp.com, which is the new website, or david.edwards@darkartistry.net.
[0:44:51] David Green: Fantastic. So, lots of ways for people to stay in touch with you, David. Other than that, thank you very much for being a guest on the show and I look forward to seeing you, certainly at People Analytics World and UNLEASH, I think, in Vegas in March.
[0:45:06] David Edwards: Unleash in America, will definitely see you there, my friend. Yes, look forward to that.
[0:45:12] David Green: Good. David, thanks very much again for being on the show.
[0:45:14] David Edwards: Thank you, David. It's been a real pleasure.
[0:45:17] David Green: Thank you again, David, for joining me today. What a fantastic conversation. If you did enjoy today's episode, I highly recommend David's recently published book, The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook, where he demystifies strategic workforce planning in a genuinely accessible, practical, and most importantly, human way. To everyone listening, I'd love to hear your reflections on the episode, what resonated with you most from the conversation with David. You can join the discussion on LinkedIn. Just look out for my post about this episode and share your thoughts. I always enjoy hearing what you take away from our conversations. And if you found the episode valuable, be sure to subscribe, rate, and share it with a colleague or friend. It really helps us keep bringing these kinds of thoughtful, forward-looking conversations to HR leaders and professionals around the world.
To stay connected with us at Insight222, follow us on LinkedIn, visit insight222.com com, and sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter at myHRfuture.com for the latest research tools and trends shaping the future of HR and people analytics. That's all for now. Thank you for tuning in and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Until then, take care and stay well.