Joe Gerstandt | keynote speaker, freedom fighter, freak-flag flier

I am attending HRevolution 2010 and not entirely sure what to expect, but I am very much looking forward to it. Giddy, you might say.  It will, at the very least, be a great opportunity to meet a number of folks that I know online but have not yet met in real life. I am also looking forward to the dialogue…I am hoping that it will be a big, fat poke in the brain.

I hope to leave with some new questions. I am a big fan of questions and I hope that we ask big, bold questions…maybe some new questions…maybe some questions that don’t even make any sense yet. I love questions like that.

I think that questions are for groups of people much like what sunlight is for plants…they can determine the direction of our growth. Sometimes when we gather together to talk about our work, we pay more attention to our answers than we do to the questions we ask, sometimes we just talk about the stuff that we already know. I think this might be different. I hope that this is different.

I am going to be facilitating a session about diversity, and it will be interesting indeed to see who shows up to talk about diversity at 9am on a Saturday! I think that issues related to diversity and inclusion are a good example of the challenges facing the larger discipline of human resources today.

We often approach the right issues in the wrong way.

Generally when I talk to a group of people about diversity and inclusion they are expecting to be lectured about what they can and cannot do when interacting with other human beings. They are expecting me to lecture them about compliance and to leave prepared to avoid all authentic interactions with co-workers. My work is not about compliance, it is about diversity and inclusion. Diversity and inclusion are not about compliance. Compliance is about compliance and somebody else does that work. Diversity and inclusion work is about understanding the organizational value of diversity and inclusion and how to capture that value. 

When I conduct in house workshops for organizations, there are always some folks that come in with a real sense of dread. That sense of dread is not actually about the topic, but rather about how that topic has been framed in the past. Participants leave pleasantly surprised, having a new and relevant understanding and some new tools towards creating value, but I think that this dynamic is reflective of where HR is at today.

We need to pick better frames for our work and for our conversations…we need to adopt an orientation of value, of solutions and of innovation.

Don’t get me wrong…I am not suggesting that we need to out-metric the CFO, I have no interest in that. CFOs work with tangible resources and we work with intangible resources. I don’t want us to learn how to better play someone else’s game, I want us to master our own game. I don’t want us to find a way to get a seat at the table, I want us to ignore the table and start our own party in the backyard.

And this is why I am attending HRevolution.