The Prerequisite Trap: Why Strategic Workforce Planning Has to Come Before Work Redesign

Last year, a whole lot of us said: "we need to redesign the work before we redesign the workforce." We were wrong, and it's time to revisit the sequence.

One line from the Gartner Symposium keynote this week has really stuck with me:

"Workforce planning shouldn't be driven bottoms up from work redesign, it should be tops down – starting with the strategic bets the business is making to grow and then aligning workforce investments and AI against those bets."

That's the same position we've been taking with clients this year. Start with the bets. Then align the workforce, and the AI, against them.

Increasingly that's not what buyers are actually doing. Over the past few months, some organizations that initially came to us to build strategic workforce planning have instead pivoted to near-term, tactical work. Mostly around job and process redesign. Planning is sometimes getting pushed to "later."

I am typically loath to criticize buyer decisions, especially when we lose (it just screams "sour grapes"), but in this case, I feel compelled to make an exception, mostly because of the impact these decisions are going to have on clients and prospects alike. So here goes:  

"Starting with job or process redesign as a prerequisite to strategic workforce planning is the wrong call."

I know I've said the reverse in the past - as have a lot of folks - but as the dust has settled, it's become clear that this puts way too much weight on work redesign efforts - which by their nature must be narrowly scoped and aimed at very specific problems or opportunities.

Let me be clear. Job and process redesign are critical workstreams, and they are an essential part of workforce transformation efforts. The problem is that establishing this work as a prerequisite introduces serious risk to whether SWP happens at all. And there can be no binary choice here - organizations should not be deciding whether they should engage in redesign efforts or SWP efforts. They need to design around doing redesign and workforce planning.

Process redesign is a Lean Six Sigma problem. AI is just a method.

Organizations are right that this is a pivotal moment. AI and agentic capabilities are forcing a rethink of processes, workflows, and the roles built around them. But let's be honest about what process redesign is. It's mostly a Lean Six Sigma problem. AI and agents are a method for the improvement, sometimes the best one. And while they may be the "cool" part, they aren't the hard part.

The hard part is diagnosis. Mapping the process as it actually runs, not as the SOP says it runs. Finding where value leaks: the waiting, the rework, the handoffs that break. Then judging every opportunity against this organization's reality. Its systems, its data, its controls, and the skills of the people who will run the new process. Point an agent at a process nobody has diagnosed and all you do is automate the waste.

A real diagnosis has to answer:

• What must stay human to protect the brand promise or satisfy regulatory and legal risk

• What the redesign is supposed to achieve

• What types of work live inside the process

• What can be automated with the technology you actually own, not the one in the vendor demo

• Where the effort should go once the redesign lands

That takes Black Belt-level process skill. Most HR teams don't have a lot of this on staff. Consultancies do, but that gets expensive fast. In either case, whether because of internal resources or external costs, there are constraints to how much of this work can be done simultaneously, even before you account for the "what happens next" work efforts.

Job redesign triggers the obligation chain

Job redesign is harder still, for a different reason. A role doesn't stand alone. Change the tasks inside it and you inherit obligations across the enterprise. In a previous post, I called this the "obligation chain." For any job redesign, here are just a few of the core workstreams that need to happen next:

• Labor demand. How many of the new role you need, where, and when?

• Internal supply. Who can step into it, who can't, and what reskilling or offboarding follows?

• External supply. Does the market even produce this role? Redesign often creates composite roles that look elegant on paper and don't exist in the market you hire from.

• Pay and leveling. New definitions, new bands, new internal equity questions for Comp and Ben.

• Learning. How do we train it? Onboarding and curriculum rebuilt for the new role. When routine tasks move to agents, the path that used to build judgment for senior roles can disappear with them.

• Change management and employee assistance. Change a job or a process, move people around inside the org, upend what they think they do and how they are valued - and minimally you need to do some level of change management. At the extreme ends, employees who are neurodivergent, prone to anxiety etc may need even more support.

Every link requires the expertise and work efforts of the extended team: business leaders, IT, Finance, HR, Comp and Ben, talent acquisition, L&D. That's a lot of downstream work and it's all necessary. It also caps how much redesign any organization can run at once.

Do the redesign math

I think it's also worth doing some math to estimate how much redesign work an HR team can actually complete at any one time. It comes down to four variables:

1. Capacity. The hours your people with process-diagnosis and change-management skills can give to redesign, after every other commitment on the plate, assuming no new headcount.

2. Effort. What one serious redesign consumes, from diagnosis through the full obligation chain.

3. Portfolio. The number of processes and roles in the organization.

4. Shelf life. How long a redesign holds before technology shifts enough to force the next one.

Even a rough ballpark on the above would help you quickly estimate how many projects you can tackle at once and across what time horizon, and further the total percent of the role and processes you are actually able to redesign across that same time horizon or across larger intervals - per quarter, per year. Estimating the shelf-life - even ballpark - will help you back into the multiplier effect of technology change. Many of the roles and processes you redesign will be redesigned many times over the next few years which means there isn't one-to-one relationship between roles and processes and their respective redesigns - for a whole lot of roles and processes it will be many-to-many.

Run it with your own numbers. The direction doesn't change. Capacity is fixed. Effort is high. The portfolio is large. And shelf life is shrinking as AI capability accelerates. The result is a small share of the organization under redesign at any moment, and the share doesn't grow just because the backlog does.

This is why the keynote line has the sequence right. If you can only redesign a small share of the organization, the first question is "which share?" Only a top-down view answers it: the strategic bets, the roles and processes those bets depend on, and where the gaps will hurt most. Top-down planning is how you direct the bottom-up redesign. And you can't put planning for the whole organization on hold while you redesign a small fraction of it.  

The prerequisite trap

I call this the prerequisite trap: treating skills and redesign work as a gate that must be cleared before strategic workforce planning can begin.

Here's why it backfires. Long-term planning cares less about the skills we have today than the skills the business will need in three, five, seven years. That work faces outward. It starts from strategy and the shape of skill evolution, then translates long-term objectives into talent requirements. An inventory of today's skills is a starting point. It doesn't answer the question.

Redesign has the same limit. The role you redesign this year will likely be redesigned again before your planning horizon arrives, given the pace of technology change. Planning needs a rougher, higher-altitude view: where the gaps will be and what future work will look like, set against the talent you'll still have after retirements, attrition, and contract end dates.

Now put the redesign math next to the sequence some buyers are choosing. If planning waits until redesign covers the organization, and redesign can never cover more than a small percentage of roles with many of them requiring multiple revision cycles, the gate never opens. You haven't delayed planning. You've effectively scrapped it, and signed up for a never-ending redesign cycle instead.  

What do you gain in this scenario? A number of redesigned processes and roles, many of them critical. That's great. What did you lose? Any real forecast of the skills, roles, and talent the business needs, and of whether to build, buy, borrow, or bot to get there; any defensible workforce cost and risk modeling, and any related ability to evaluate different business-driven workforce scenarios... My two cents: that's not a super great trade-off. One of these is a tactical win that keeps HR small; the other is a strategic win that puts HR planning at the same level of FP&A and true strategic decision making. Ask yourself: of these two workstreams, which one will most elevate your standing with your Board of Directors or your CEO?

I think the answer is clear, and the "why" is obvious. This redesign work, innovative as it is, still looks mostly inward and mostly at the here and now. It keeps HR anchored in internal data rather than blending it with external labor market and competitive intelligence. It continues the focus on reacting to current conditions, vs. future-leaning forecasts and scenario modeling. CEOs and BODs appreciate operational excellence and operational improvements, but they most reward those execs who can bring a defensible POV to the table regarding business strategy and direction, a supporting plan on how to achieve the proposed outcome, and a commitment to monitor progress and adjust as necessary based on trackable metrics.

Run them in parallel, starting now

If your team is arguing to lead with redesign, they aren't crazy. Redesign and skills work feel concrete, fundable, and finishable. Planning feels abstract by comparison. The instinct makes sense, especially since it leans in to HR's historical focus on internal data and reacting to current problems.

The fix is to get the sequence right, then run everything in parallel. Start top-down: the strategic bets, the critical roles and processes behind them, and the gaps that put those bets at risk. Use that view to choose which redesigns go first. Then build the planning muscle alongside redesign and skills. As redesign clarifies how work is changing and skills work clarifies what you have, the planning engine sharpens with every iteration. The efforts feed each other instead of waiting on each other.

An imperfect plan that is directionally correct beats "ready-fire-aim," which is where most organizations sit today. It will stay directionally correct rather than perfect, because strategy, competition, and technology keep moving. That's fine. The goal has never been a perfect end state. The goal is to develop a workforce design engine that continuously shapes and reshapes the organization as conditions change. Just as FP&A never has a "final" financial analysis, workforce strategy will also become a living breathing artifact that evolves over time, sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

Alongside, not in front

Redesign and skills intelligence are muscles every forward-leaning HR team will need for the next decade. The end game of both is a strategic workforce plan. So start from the top, let the plan aim the redesign, and let each make the other better.

That connected view, external labor market intelligence alongside internal work, skills, and planning data, is what we've built the TalentNeuron Workforce Intelligence Platform around. Happy to show you what it looks like in practice.

So here's my question: in your organization, is skills or redesign work running alongside workforce planning, or standing in front of it?