Learning at the top: leading companies come together to explore the future

And although attending conferences is fun, you're hardly going to learn much and you're probably on the speaking platform anyway, so people will have come to learn from you. And keeping up with the latest ideas in magazines and journals is interesting, but when it comes to thought-leadership, really, a guru has to go it alone.

That is, until now.

Because a strategic consulting company called Tosca has come up with a brilliant way to keep its expert clients engaged and on the learning track. Tosca has brought together senior people, many of them in HR, from non-competing companies across the world, into consortia to explore themes that have been concerning them all and which they want to spend time thinking about. Together, they research future-focused HR topics in depth, sparking each others' thoughts and ideas, sharing tips and best practice and eventually bringing back some really good initiatives into their own companies.
This style of learning seemed to me to be so beneficial that I agreed to be one of the people who went to speak to them, and have been even more impressed at the process, the more I understand it.

They begin by describing why they're interested in the theme and what it will mean for their company if they can develop new and better processes and practices. They set their objectives, if you like (although the faint-hearted be warned: the outcomes are not always certain and the process not always transparent. That's the nature of exploration at this level; you're never quite sure what's going to come of it).

Once the theme is more clearly in focus, the member companies commission research, gather leading thinkers to talk to them about the theme, read all the latest papers on the topic and begin to formulate their own thinking. A major part of the learning consists in travelling around the world to be hosted by one of the members or to see for themselves what is happening in that region or industry.
Towards the end of the process, they begin to summarise their thinking and determine how it could impact upon their company's performance. The final outcomes are carefully assembled by Tosca into white papers, executive summaries and slide presentations for members to use in house with their own senior teams.

Of course it's not a new idea: think of it as evolving from the idea of an action learning set, or working like a Conference Board commission in the US, or a government select committee in the UK which investigates a particular topic and then reports back to the House of Commons.

But the advantages of working in this way are considerable. Unique learning takes place in a highly stimulating, supportive and experimental atmosphere, largely due to a combination of academic, expert contributions during work sessions and the practical experience of the participants. Sharing ideas and engaging with leading-edge experts provides insights that cannot be gained from published material. Members find that their understanding is challenged and changed by hearing the perspectives of other multi-nationals.
The consortium members work intensively in a series of meetings over 6-9 months and establish strong, lasting relationships. As a result, members continue to share information and use each other as sounding boards on a number of different issues. Getting a trusted perspective from respected individuals in a completely different industry has been a big bonus for all concerned. Finally, and very importantly, participants can have confidence in the robustness of the project findings because of the breadth of inputs. Throughout each consortium project, Tosca maintains a dedicated website keeping members updated and informed, and holds regular teleconferences to keep them up to date and allow them to reflect in between their meetings.

The first consortium

Tosca's first consortium experience in 2003 studied the Future of Work. With a range of academics and experts from across the globe, the consortium members (Shell, Manpower, Zurich Financial Services, Unilever, Herman Miller, International Labour Organisation and the Chinese State Shipbuilding Corporation) grappled with the implications of a variety of issues including:

• Within a decade, half the world's labour force will be located in China or India

• There will be more over 50s than under-14s in the world by 2020

• All the technology currently used at work will be obsolete within 10 years

• West Germany's manufacturing labour costs are 30 times higher than India's, 3 times higher than Korea's and 50% higher than the UK's

• In India over 60,000 call centre staff changed jobs in 2002 at an estimated cost to the industry of $60m

The members of the Future of Work Consortium had varying needs and uses for the material generated - some to inform future strategy, others to test alternative hypotheses, one to underpin customer presentations, another to drive thought leadership throughout the organisation and one to feed their shareholder presentations.

The Second Consortium

As they found the model worked well, several of the Future of Work Consortium members asked Tosca to set up another project and two new member organisations joined them, BT and Prudential. The chosen topic was How to be a Great Employer. For most enterprises today, no market is more competitive than the market for employees. The challenge for great employers is not only to make potential employees aware of their organisation as a good place to work and bring the best applicants successfully through the recruitment and hiring process, but to retain them, ensure their understanding of the organisation's goals and commitment to them and provide the environment and structures to motivate them to give of their best. Meeting that challenge today is tough enough but figuring out how to meet it in the future when societies, people, technology, organisations and markets are changing so much will require quite new levels of sophistication.

Meanwhile, shareholders demand a decent return and society requires good corporate citizens. So the question the consortium members wanted an answer to was, 'How can these potentially conflicting demands be managed?'

After travelling to California to hear what the Institute for the Future had to say, and tuning in to the thoughts of the Human Resources Institute's futures team in Florida, members also met with a range of national and multinational companies in Mumbai and made a trip to Poland, a new accession country to the EU, to see how the energy and workforce in eastern Europe was being used by global companies setting up offices there.

This consortium completed its work in May 2005. One of their key findings is that the quality of leadership and high levels of trust are significant differentiators for high performing organisations and they identified a range of learnings and actions for organisations who seek to be Great Employers over the coming decade, drawing it all together in a Navigation Chart.

The third Consortium

Another consortium is now assembling to build on Tosca's previous work. Cisco has joined the group, enticed by the topic which this time is Leadership and Trust, and it looks to be just as fascinating as the first two topics.

Why do they want to study leadership and trust? Because in future, the traditional boundaries and structures of organisations will be more elastic and less hierarchical, so leaders must find new ways to replace status and hierarchy with indirect methods of leadership that allow greater freedom, lead to more accurate allocation of resources and provide a stronger force for focus on the common good. Leaders will need to return to basic principles to discover a different approach — one that can fully exploit the economic potential of collaboration and flexibility.

Ultimately, leaders want to be assured of two things: that parties will deliver end-products as promised and that parties will not abuse privileged access to corporate resources and relationships to the detriment of the corporate owner. Control is one, increasingly less effective, way of assuring these two things. Trust offers a different approach designed to assure the same thing.

And the next consortium?

Who knows what topics will emerge from this work, but consortium members and others have already been encouraging Tosca to look at:

• Diversity and Inclusivity
• Partnering with customers
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Strategy Execution
• Managing across Cultures
• Metrics for Managing Human Capital
• Succession planning
• Talent Management

Up to seven organisations participate in each consortium, and four people from each organisation can attend meetings, which allows for continuity to be maintained, particularly if people are unable to make all six two-day meetings over the project's duration.

Why no companies from the Gulf?

Looking at the work they have done so far, I am disappointed there has been no input from the Gulf region. As indigenous companies thrive and global companies locate in the area, they are facing all the challenges above and more, I would add, particular to the region. Let's see if companies from here can inform the consortium thinking, sharing wisdom around the world.