If your organisation is going through significant transformation, perhaps leaders need to become better at creating clarity when they don’t have all the answers.

If innovation is critical, leaders may need to become better at creating psychological safety, challenging established thinking and allowing experimentation.

If growth increasingly depends on cross-functional working, leaders may need to influence without authority and think beyond their own function.

If you’re promoting technically brilliant specialists into management, the challenge may be something quite different: helping them move from being the person with the answers to enabling other people to perform.

And as AI becomes embedded in everyday work, leaders will increasingly need to exercise judgement about where AI can add value, when humans need to intervene and who remains accountable for the outcome. These aren’t interchangeable leadership challenges.

Try this question. Ask your senior team:

“If our strategy succeeds over the next three years, what will our leaders need to be significantly better at than they are today?”

Ask everyone to answer individually before discussing it.

Then compare the responses.

Importantly, don’t start with your existing leadership competency framework. Start with what the business needs.

You can map the answers back to your leadership model afterwards.

3. Where are our future capability gaps?

Workforce planning can easily become headcount planning.

How many people do we need? Where? At what level? At what cost? Those questions matter.

But knowing how many people we need isn’t the same as knowing what capability the organisation needs.

McKinsey argues that workforce planning needs to move from operational capacity planning towards strategic capability planning, particularly as automation and AI reshape tasks and skills.

And the scale of that shift shouldn’t be underestimated.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs research suggests that 39% of workers’ core skills are expected to change by 2030. Technology skills such as AI and big data are among those growing fastest—but so are human capabilities including creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, agility and leadership.

This is why looking only at roles can be misleading. A role may still exist in 2027 or 2030, but what excellent performance in that role looks like may have changed considerably. Consider an analyst.

If AI can produce a first-pass analysis, summarise large quantities of information and identify patterns in seconds, perhaps the analyst’s value shifts towards asking better questions, challenging assumptions, interpreting findings in context and exercising judgement.

The job hasn’t necessarily disappeared but capability profile has changed.

This is what you can do make a step in the right direction. Make your workforce planning conversation more practical

For your most strategically important roles or populations, create three columns:

What matters today?  What will matter more tomorrow? Where is the gap?

Then ask:

• Which tasks are likely to change?
• Which capabilities will become less differentiating?
• Which will become more important?
• Which capabilities can we build internally?
• Where might we need to recruit?
• Where do we need to redesign roles rather than simply replace people?

This starts to turn workforce planning into capability planning.

4. Are we developing our talent or simply identifying it?

Many organisations are reasonably good at identifying talent. There are succession plans, talent reviews, nine-box grids, HiPo lists and conversations about readiness. But here’s a question worth asking at your next talent review: 

What has actually happened to the people we identified as talent last year?

Take five names from your succession or high-potential population.

For each person, can you identify a meaningful development experience they have had during the last 12 months?

Not simply a course they attended. Have they:

• Taken on a stretch assignment?
• Led something outside their usual area?
• Had meaningful exposure to senior leaders?
• Received good-quality feedback?
• Worked across functions or geographies?
• Been coached or mentored?
• Developed greater self-awareness?
• Been given an opportunity to fail safely, learn and try again?
•  

If the answer is mostly no, you may have a talent identification process rather than a talent development strategy.

There is another reason this matters now. As AI begins to take on more routine early-career work, organisations may inadvertently remove some of the experiences through which people traditionally developed expertise.

McKinsey recently highlighted research, documentation, data clean-up, basic coding and preliminary analysis as examples of tasks increasingly being streamlined or absorbed by AI. Yet these are also tasks through which early-career employees have historically developed instincts and judgement. That creates an important talent question:

If AI removes some of the traditional learning ground, how will we deliberately create the experiences through which our future experts and leaders develop?

We may need to become much more intentional about experience-based development.

Try a “talent reality check”

At your next talent meeting, select a small sample of people identified as future talent 12 months ago and ask:

What is this person demonstrably more capable of doing today than they were a year ago?

If that’s difficult to answer, don’t redesign your nine-box.

Look at what happens after the talent review.

 

5. How does AI change all of the above?

This is perhaps the question that now needs to run through the other four. For many organisations, the AI conversation has understandably begun with technology:

• Which tools should we adopt?
• What are the risks?
• What are our policies?
• Where can we increase productivity?

Those questions are necessary. But HR needs to take the conversation further as AI isn’t simply changing technology.

It is changing work. And when work changes, roles change. Skills change. Career paths change. Leadership expectations change. Learning changes. Potentially, organisational structures change too. So instead of asking only:

“Do we have an AI strategy?” we should also be asking: “What does an AI-enabled organisation require from its people?”

If AI can generate a good first draft, perhaps writing the first draft becomes less valuable while critically evaluating it becomes more valuable.

If AI can produce analysis, perhaps leaders need to become better at interrogating evidence rather than simply receiving information.

If AI can give employees immediate answers, perhaps managers create value less through being the source of knowledge and more through context, judgement, coaching and sense-making.

And if AI takes over the entry-level tasks through which people previously learned, organisations will need to rethink how expertise develops.

This is why we believe AI needs to sit within the people and organisation strategy, not alongside it as a separate technology workstream. Put AI into every people-planning conversation

So here is what you can do:

For each major element of your 2027 People Plan, add one question:

“How could AI change this?”

For example:

Workforce: Which tasks, not just jobs, will change?

Talent: How will people build experience and expertise?

Leadership: What decisions should remain distinctly human, and where does accountability sit?

Learning: What capabilities become more important when information itself becomes easier to access?

Organisation design: If work can be distributed differently between humans and AI, do we still need to organise ourselves in the same way?

Culture: What behaviours will encourage experimentation while maintaining appropriate challenge, judgement and accountability?

The objective isn’t to predict exactly what AI will do. It is to make sure our people strategy isn’t built on an assumption that work will remain the same. From People Plan to Business Capability. There will, of course, still be programmes.

There will be leadership development, talent initiatives, coaching, assessments, recruitment, succession planning and learning. But these should be responses to the organisational need, rather than the starting point. As you move into your 2027 planning, perhaps the most useful conversation isn’t:

“What should HR deliver next year?”

Instead, start with three questions:

• Where are we going?
• What will that require from our people and leaders?
• Where does today’s capability not yet match tomorrow’s ambition?

Once those answers are clear, deciding what HR should actually do becomes considerably easier.

And perhaps that is the real opportunity for HR as we move towards 2027: not simply planning another year of people activity, but helping the organisation build the leadership, talent and organisational capability required to deliver its strategy.  That is a very different kind of People Plan.