Events

Location: Central London.

Speakers: Margaret Heffernan, Author and Broadcaster; Sarah Gillard, John Lewis.

Overview: History is littered with organisations which should have seen what was happening in their industry, yet failed to take action, and now no longer exist. We have armies of people responsible for strategic planning, budgeting, and developing future leaders. And yet organisations struggle to predict how their markets are evolving, and to make timely changes to respond to external threats and opportunities. Your people most likely know what’s happening in your market, and what your organisation should be doing. Often, however, this information doesn’t get acted upon.

This event and the accompanying report will explore why organisations are so poor at spotting what is happening in front of their eyes, and how we can help our organisations avoid the vicious cycle of creative destruction. We will seek to answer the following questions:

• What organisational mechanisms are required to scan the environment in a structured way?
• How can we build capacity to detect weak signals, and most importantly to take actions today to prepare for different outcomes and experiment with alternative solutions?
• What leadership capabilities do we need to improve our capacity to anticipate the future and act on it?
• What are the elements of an organisation culture where people feel they can speak up about what they see and how to respond?
• How can we build agility and flexibility in the right places, so we are controlled and ‘tight’ where it’s essential, while remaining ‘loose’ where necessary?

CRF is a membership network with the purpose to enhance the knowledge, capabilities and effectiveness of the HR function in order to drive superior organisational performance. This event is part of the annual programme of events. If you would like to hear more information on CRF, membership, or would be interested to attend this event as a guest, please email harriet@strategic-dimensions.co.uk.

Location: Central London.

Speakers: Prof. Amelia Hadfield, University of Surrey.

Overview: We enter 2020 after a year of increasing global political uncertainty and economic turbulence – with rising tensions over world trade. The second half of the 2010s saw political upheaval affecting the hitherto relatively stable democracies in the West.

PARC’s paper Geopolitical Risk: A Changing Insecurity in 2018 concluded that the next decade is likely to see more of the same. The shifting power dynamics between China and the US, political and sectarian differences in the Middle East, Russia’s willingness to use military intervention and the potential escalation of conflicts in a number of strategic pinch points all threaten potential disruption to world trade and energy supplies.

Since then, we have seen a continuing rise in populist movements, fragmentation and political realignments in a number of countries. Shock election results have brought unlikely and unpredictable candidates to power. Western politics is seeing greater segmentation and polarisation of views – a trend that is echoed in, and reinforced by, the news media. Some fear for the future of liberal democracy.

In the UK, the upheaval of Brexit has fractured the political system and weakened both the major parties. Unstable government and wild swings in policy look set to become the norm. What sort of United (or Disunited) Kingdom will emerge from the Brexit earthquake? What sort of role might this country play in Europe and the wider world?

In these circumstances, forecasting becomes on the one hand ever more difficult, but on the other a continuing imperative if we are going to be able to develop coherent business strategies and make sensible operating decisions. After three decades during which the political environment was relatively benign for Western business, politics is back with a bang. Business cannot afford to ignore it.

PARC is a membership network for business leaders interested in organisational and individual performance and reward solutions. This event is part of the annual programme of member meetings. If you would like to hear more information on PARC, membership, or would be interested to attend this meeting as a guest, please email harriet@strategic-dimensions.co.uk.

Location: St Albans.

Speakers: Wanda Wallace, Leadership Forum.

Overview: Everything that goes wrong in organisations occurs or is avoided in a conversation somewhere. Equally, everything that goes well starts with a good conversation. From engagement to motivation, inspiration, persuasion, collaboration, innovation, oversight, risk – all increase or decrease through conversation. Culture is discovered in conversation, innovation is sparked or throttled and collaboration results from conversation. Yet all too often the most difficult conversations are avoided, and what should be said goes unsaid. Better conversations are therefore a worthy, performance-improving goal.

This practical workshop will enable participants to:

• Understand the importance, nature and structure of effective conversations.
• Through self-assessment, gain insight into their conversational style and preferences, learn how these create challenges for work relationships and explore and practise tactics for improving conversations.
• Consider defensiveness, motivation, and honesty in conversations, and understand their importance and impact on increasing or decreasing trust.
• Structure conversations better to align the goals of those with differing motives.
• Practise applying the principles to challenging conversations.

CRF is a membership network with the purpose to enhance the knowledge, capabilities and effectiveness of the HR function in order to drive superior organisational performance. This event is part of the annual programme of events. If you would like to hear more information on CRF, membership, or would be interested to attend this event as a guest, please email harriet@strategic-dimensions.co.uk.

Location: Stockholm, Sweden.

Speakers: Prof. Alyson Meister, IMD Business School; Amy Sawbridge, Curious Strawberry; Fredrik Schuller, BTS.

Overview: This is an opportunity for participants to be challenged in their thinking around the role of HR, to share experiences with colleagues and to identify practical steps they can take to increase business impact in their organisation through the translation of strategy, purpose and brand into capability and effective culture.

The event will be structured around three key themes:

• HR’s role in creating and executing strategy and purpose. We will argue that HR’s role is not just to operate people processes, but to lead an internal process that translates organisation strategy and purpose into the capabilities and culture required for successful execution.
• Bringing organisational purpose to life. A clear sense of organisational purpose guides the actions of leaders and enables employees to relate their personal goals, values and sense of purpose to the organisation’s mission. To be authentic, the organisation’s external purpose should be reflected in its internal culture and representative of the actual experience of employees. We will discuss how to do this, and how traditional models of careers in companies are being challenged by individuals’ need for purpose.
• Aligning employee experience and employer brand. Consistency between espoused brand values, employee experience, organisational culture and environment is essential but hard to achieve in reality, particularly when trying to identify a red thread across multiple units or brands. We will examine how to achieve consistency, the impact of employees on the employer brand, and how to measure and evaluate the employer brand.

CRF is a membership network with the purpose to enhance the knowledge, capabilities and effectiveness of the HR function in order to drive superior organisational performance. This event is part of the annual programme of events. If you would like to hear more information on CRF, membership, or would be interested to attend this event as a guest, please email harriet@strategic-dimensions.co.uk.

Location: Central London.

Speakers: Sam Dumitriu, The Entrepreneurs Network; Gavin Kelly, Resolution Foundation; Angela Knight CBE, Non-Executive Director.

Overview: Tax will be one of the main political issues of the next decade. A financial crisis followed

by a decade of sluggish productivity growth has left Western economies in poor shape, and governments carrying relatively high levels of debt. The global phenomenon of ageing populations will pile more pressure on already stretched public finances.

Governments will struggle to strike a balance between headline rates for political purposes and the total tax take which dictates fiscal policy and public investment.

Tax is of massive importance to the world of work, in particular to performance and reward, where its impact is often misunderstood. So, what are some of the issues?

• Is our tax system too complex – and what do we actually mean by ‘tax simplification’?
• What distinguishes the UK approach to tax on employees and companies? Do other countries do it better – and how?
• Is the interaction of tax, allowances and benefits causing marginal tax rates much higher than headline 20p and 40p rates suggest?
• Is this destroying the incentive to work harder and gain promotion? To what extent is tax a driver of behaviour?
• Is the UK in danger of driving out its entrepreneurs and foreign investment – both of which generate employment and growth?
• How big a problem is corporate tax evasion – and can it be solved on an individual country basis?
• To what extent is the gig economy eroding the tax base – and what are the practical solutions?
• Are there any politically acceptable solutions which might address the challenge of raising UK productivity?

PARC is a membership network for business leaders interested in organisational and individual performance and reward solutions. This event is part of the annual programme of member meetings. If you would like to hear more information on PARC, membership, or would be interested to attend this meeting as a guest, please email harriet@strategic-dimensions.co.uk.

Location: Central London.

Speakers: Prof. Arturo Bris, IMD Business School.

Overview: IMD Professor of Finance Arturo Bris, Director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center, will take us on a world tour of global competitiveness, surveying financial, economic, technological and social development. Looking at the issues as a series of walls – between generations, between rich and poor, between genders, between economic powers, between people and their leaders and between us and our planet – Bris will examine what it will take to break down the barriers that divide us.

Professor Bris will argue that we need a greater sense of urgency to tackle the blocks to our progress. Some walls, such as gender and climate, can only be broken down by a shift in mindset. Others, like trade wars and immigration, require action. Progress will require collaboration: governments, companies and society working together to solve our urgent problems. Underpinning all of this is the need to put technology at the service of people.

What’s the way forward? Bris will take a holistic view, with responsibility shared between individuals, governments, and corporate entities. We will have to move towards more inclusive prosperity, which ultimately is the backbone of competitiveness.

CRF is a membership network with the purpose to enhance the knowledge, capabilities and effectiveness of the HR function in order to drive superior organisational performance. This event is part of the annual programme of events. If you would like to hear more information on CRF, membership, or would be interested to attend this event as a guest, please email harriet@strategic-dimensions.co.uk.