{"id":1819,"date":"2011-03-14T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-14T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1819"},"modified":"2011-03-12T23:23:12","modified_gmt":"2011-03-13T07:23:12","slug":"serendipity-versus-decision-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1819","title":{"rendered":"Serendipity versus Decision Support"},"content":{"rendered":"

Would I be where I am today if I had all the facts every time?\u00a0 I\u2019m actually confident that if it were up to me, I would be digging ditches for a living somewhere (not to demean ditch diggers).\u00a0 Let\u2019s face it, I started off all on the wrong foot.\u00a0 Being an Asian American kid with a prodigy brother, I was definitely the stupid one (I\u2019ll assume you\u2019ve all read about the Asian \u201cTiger Mom\u201d thing lately).\u00a0 I was the kid who, at the age of 6, was told by my piano teacher to quit.\u00a0 I was the kid who was told by my 5th grade teacher, \u201ctoo bad you\u2019re not your brother.\u201d\u00a0 I was the Asian kid who graduated high school with only<\/strong> a 4.2 GPA.\u00a0 (All of that is true btw).\u00a0 I was also the kid who by some miraculous stroke of good fortune, managed to get accepted to my first choice college.\u00a0 Being of relatively low income, my parents were quite please when I got a significant financial aid package (nothing compared to the brother, who incidentally got into every single Ivy League \u2013 also true).\u00a0 At some point in the summer, I was sent a letter from my college of first choice and informed that they would no longer be able to offer me the amount of aid that I required.\u00a0 With quite a large amount of desperation, I called around to various colleges, and was re-admitted to my (I think) 4th choice school with the financial aid that I needed.<\/p>\n

It was at this school (one of the Claremont Colleges in S. California), where rather than hoards of students in large auditoriums being lectured to (a system that had clearly failed me so miserably to this point), I was instead surrounded by classes of maybe 15.\u00a0 OK, maybe 20 max.\u00a0 Rather than being lectured to, we sat around a table and talked about the book we read in the prior week.\u00a0 I sat around on committees where I was literally a vote as a student to decide whether professors got tenure or not.\u00a0 Rather than simple learning, I began understanding.\u00a0 I really do consider this to be the first of several unplanned turning points.\u00a0 Listen, I\u2019m serious when I say that I was not a good student.\u00a0 But learning for me happened a different way than for most.<\/p>\n

We often talk about analytics and how it changes how we operate in HR.\u00a0 High quality data leads to high quality choices \u2013 and often times that is true.\u00a0 But it is also true that we don\u2019t always have all of the data that we need at any specific point in time \u2013 if we had everything we needed to know, we might make vastly different choices.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll take succession planning as an example.\u00a0 We know who the top 10 succession candidates are for top positions (hopefully).\u00a0 We know when they will be ready, what their relative skills and competencies are, and how their strengths compare to one another.\u00a0 But we don\u2019t know which of them are going to jump ship and go to another company before the position becomes vacant.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know which of them are going to stop growing, regardless of our best efforts to continue developing them.\u00a0 The best that we can do, is to invest in a pool of candidates, and hope that one of them, the right one, is ready when the time comes.<\/p>\n

We use decision support and analytics to crunch the numbers for us, but at the end of the day, it\u2019s still serendipity \u2013 it\u2019s still luck.\u00a0 The hope here, is that while analytics and decision support can\u2019t be a perfect predictor, we can in fact \u201cmake our own luck.\u201d\u00a0 We can improve our odds at getting the best outcomes.\u00a0 At the end of the day, it is not serendipity versus <\/strong>decision support, but a combination of the two that will make our best data work for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Would I be where I am today if I had all the facts every time?\u00a0 I\u2019m actually confident that if it were up to me, I would be digging ditches for a living somewhere (not to demean ditch diggers).\u00a0 Let\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27,47,8,2],"tags":[62,158,239,300,141,299],"class_list":["post-1819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-metrics","category-governance","category-strategies","category-hr-technology","tag-analytics","tag-business-intelligence","tag-decision-support","tag-luck","tag-measurement","tag-serendipty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1825,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions\/1825"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}