The Tenth Fleet

I recently read an article by Paul Furber in a local IT publication - ITWeb Brainstorm Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 06, February 2010, [itweb.co.za] with the title "People: the forgotten power-house for change" wherein Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers uses the story of the US Navy's Tenth Fleet to illustrate the power of people that could change the way organisations do business. Malcolm Gladwell told this story whilst speaking on the power of real-time analytics during an IBM conference in the US.

I liked this article because it spoke directly to what I believe the true mandate of HR is in the information age - to assit the organisation to create, share and apply knowledge continuously - also known as the process of innovation.

Malcolm Gladwell mentioned the fact that when the US was losing millions of tons of shipping to the German U-Boats in World War 2, the Navy urgently started to look for solutions to the problem. The conclusion of its investigative efforts indicated to the fact that it had adequate intelligence capacity in the operational theatre - it was breaking enemy communication codes, it tracked the U-Boats successfully, and interrogated enemy captives, but it had nobody that tracked these sets of information, integrated it and then made sense of it! To make matters worse, they did not share the information they already had throughout the all the structures and commands of the Navy.

So the Navy put together the Tenth Fleet - it still exists - an information analytics group that gathers this information and interprets it. When this unit started to master the integration of the various information they received, within weeks the battle for the Altantic seas was won and the US controlled that Ocean therein untill the end of the war.

What makes the story important is that it wasn't about leadership or resources or knowledge but about setting up a group that could make sense of the information and by using social power to communicate it effectively to that organisation. Malcolm reminded the attendees of the conference that they were the Tenth Fleet of their organisations - they could reframe their problems, leverage their social power and commmunicate their knowledge to others, then transformation becomes possible.

HR organisations can be transformed by the HR people themselves if they accept full ownership of their customers, the quality of their services, their business processes, their data & information as well as their applications. Only then will they be able to create or combine, share and apply knowledge to the benefit of the organisation as a whole.

HR cannot possible try to fulfil a more strategic role/ mandate if it has not taken full accountability for its comprehensive architecture and the integration of the various dimensions or layers in that architecture!