New is Old
You’ve heard that there is nothing new under the sun, and to some extent it is true.  All innovations are updates or extensions of something that has gone before.  Manufacturers add another ingredient and call it all new.  Consultants take an old concept and put a new title on it.  How do you tell if something is truly an innovation?

Is outsourcing an innovation?  No.  In 1949, 22-year-old Henry Taub started Automatic Payrolls, a manual payroll preparation service in Paterson, New Jersey.  Today, ADP provides outsourcing services for 585,000 clients and earns nearly $9 billion annually doing it.

Is talent management an innovation?  No.  It is simply a label for a more holistic view of managing the organization’s human capital.  TM is composed of many well-known individual acts and processes.  They are simply applied to new circumstances.

The central question is not what’s new; it is what difference will it make?  The focus must be on new value, rather than on being innovative for its own sake.  Doing something differently is only useful if it adds value.

The Impact Test
All organizations, profit and not for profit, have four focal points: quality, innovation, productivity and service (QIPS).  The first question should be which of the four are we trying to affect?  They are interactive.  If we do something innovative it has value only if it improves quality, productivity and/or service.

Next comes the question of where is the need and what is its sibling impact?  Obviously, we act in order to better serve customers.  What are the customers demanding or, is there something new we could introduce that they don’t even know they would like to have?  An example of the latter is the personal computer.  Computers have been in use in primitive non-electronic forms for hundreds of years.  Think of abacuses, Babbage’s difference engine and slide rules.  When Jobs and Wozniak developed the first Apple personal computer they were building on those earlier principles.

In human capital management what can you do that would be innovative and where do you expect to find its impact?  I submit that shifting your attention from reporting past outcomes to predicting future probabilities qualifies as an innovation.

Predictability
With the exception of R&D and market research, most data collected in organizations focuses on the past.  Accounting results, production data, sales records and customer reactions are all lagging indicators.  That is, they tell us what happened in some past period.

Which is more useful, to report on the past or predict the future?  When you plan a trip to a distant place do you study their weather history or do you look up the weather forecast?  You might do a bit of the former, but you will make plans based on the latter.  In management it is the same story.  We need to review our lagging indicators to learn from the past.  But we need the best possible view of the future to manage tomorrow.

How to Be Predictive
The first step toward anything innovative or predictive is to study the past.  The scientists who design new products stand on the trials and errors of those who have gone before.  Edison designed his light bulb based on 75 years of previous research that started in 1802 when Humphrey Davy created the first incandescent light by passing the current through a thin strip of platinum.

You can access one hundred years of management research on the internet.  If you want a short cut read Peter Drucker.  His seminal writings give you great insight into the fundamentals of organizational effectiveness.  Bolster that with the work of Maslow, Herzberg, Collins, Christensen, Charan and the current heavy thinkers.  Don’t take the bait offered by self-proclaimed gurus who parrot the work of others and put their name on it.  Remember what Drucker said, “The reason journalists call people gurus is because they don’t know how to spell charlatan.”

Don’t buy the latest panacea just because it sounds enticing.  Always start with a specific goal in mind. Think customer needs and work backward through QIPS to employee behavior.  What can you do to support more effective human capital performance that is traceable through your organization to the customer?  If it is innovative so much the better.  But the real test is does it add value?