Building executive succession planning software

Please don't.

The earliest org chart?

When an entrepreneur builds or conceives a robust HR product, but then demos executive succession planning as their crowning glory, I sigh a sad sigh. Never in the field of corporate endeavour has any meaningful executive succession planning decision been significantly influenced by the output of succession planning software. Never might be a bit strong, but if I were building a statistical model about real world succession planning decision criteria, succession planning software based on the data in the HR system would be first casualty in my dimensionality reduction model.

It is a shame, because it demos so well. It paints the perfect picture of HR in control. Usually the demo shows an org chart, often of the top leadership of the company. With a click of a button, you can search for a new CEO or CRO. It brings back a list of 4-5 people who fit the position somewhere between 89,3% and 97,5%. It can instantly do the domino effect, creating successors of successors of successors. Thanks to the skills of modern designers, the UX has a beautiful aesthetic. It creates the magnificent illusion of objective decision making and precision. A sprinkle of AI makes it even cooler.

For these succession planning products to actually work, it requires a perfect inventory of the position, and all its requirements (both now and in the future), an objective assessment of the skills and desires of the employees and external options (both now and in the future), and perfect algorithm to weight it all. It requires an organization who’s future you can predict. No organization has this.

Come to think of it, it would still fail, because as long as companies are run by people, decisions on whom to promote will involve politics, favouritism, horse trading and some alchemy. We will still read Machiavelli’s Prince long after today’s code is no more. The TV series Succession is a lot closer to reality than we would like to admit.

There are other things you could be doing with great workforce data.

This is not to say that skills information can’t be profoundly useful in discovering hidden and/or diverse talent in your organization. It is not to say that taking note of potential successors for key roles is a waste of time. Understanding whether organizations have a shortage of second level managers, or a serious diversity problem is a good thing to do. Knowing what people are capable of, and what they want to do should be important goals of modern HR technology.

Nailing operational workforce planning in a way that delivers genuine business benefit while improving employee engagement is a far more worthwhile, and attainable goal than trying to predict the next CEO or CRO. Ensuring that skilled employees are operating complex machinery makes business and safety sense. Using advanced ML techniques to model out longer term workforce supply and demand is gold. Understanding mid term skills gaps helps you build training that the business actually wants and needs. Skills inference can dramatically improve organization agility. Done right, career planning tooling can help employees discover new opportunities, and promote equity. With robust skills data, organizations may well release that redeployment is a better option than fire and rehire. Internal gig marketplaces have their place, but perhaps less prominently than those building them believe. Combining HR data, operational and finance data can make all sorts of operational and strategic decisions better. I’m excited about new ways to visualize organizational data, and I’m expecting organizational network analysis to finally move from the lab into mainstream HR soon.

Accurate org charts are useful for all sorts of things. When the HR org chart data is rock-solid, beautiful things can happen, from application security and access control, to better employee communications, more granular P&L modelling and more.

I think we will see an explosion of new ways to collate, enhance, visualize and interrogate organizational information. If you are working on something there, I would love to learn more (More on that early org chart here).

There are a 1000 challenging HR problems that we can attack with modern technology. Let’s get on with those, and in the meantime stop creating and feeding the ridiculous expectation of the perfect org chart with system-defined-to-the-second-decimal-point-executive successors. Picking a new leader is a fraught exercise, to think otherwise is folly. Ask Starbucks.

As I usually do, here is a song. Future Islands. Seasons (Waiting on you).