Stop treating HR as the team that “supports” change

At the Future Talent Council Summit in Stockholm, the pattern was hard to miss: HR is being handed more responsibility just as the old people model is cracking. AI is accelerating work beyond the operating system it sits on, culture is fragmenting in the middle and leaders are still expecting HR to fix it without really giving them the keys to create something totally new.

That gap between what’s really happening and what organisations are set up to do is where things are getting sticky.

Here's what I heard at this international meeting of minds across HR, academia, investors, students and leaders of industry.

1. Work design has no clear owner

One line from Stockholm has stayed with me: “No one really owns how we redesign work.” Around the room there were nods of approval. Ask around most executive tables and you will hear the same list: is it the CHRO, the CIO, the COO? If everyone is a little bit responsible, then no one has the mandate.

That is exactly how companies end up in AI “pilot purgatory”. AI gets bought. Tools are rolled out. People are “trained”. Workflows are marginally faster. But the underlying design of work - who does what, which decisions move where, how value is actually created - stays almost exactly the same. Or worse, the flaws in the current system become exacerbated.

Hans Vestberg, former CEO of Ericsson and Verizon, offered a much clearer way of thinking about the problem. In his world, workforce planning now has three buckets:

• Your own employees – the core competencies you choose to keep in‑house.

• BPOs – the work you intentionally outsource to specialists.

• AI and virtual agents – the digital capacity you now effectively “employ”.

His warning was simple: if you do not invest in redesigning structure around all three, you will end up with “triple the resources and the same structure.” That is not a productivity story. It is a governance failure.

For HR, this is the moment to step into work architecture, not just talent process. If you stay the team that helps change land, rather than the team that shapes what change should be, AI will happen to you, not with you.

2. Culture is what leaders make predictable

It was striking how often speakers talked about culture in behavioural, not brand, language. Vassar Qadir, Group Chief People Officer at the BBC, gave what might be the cleanest definition of the summit: culture is the behaviours and values you “tolerate, encourage and reject.” Another leader described it as how people’s “hearts and stomachs feel on Sunday night” about Monday morning.

The more interesting part was what they showed, not what they said.

Facing a “massive body of change”, the BBC didn’t start with a campaign. They started with the manager layer:

• 3,500 team leaders trained in 12 months on values, culture and leading through change.

• 300 top leaders put through an 18‑month “Enterprise Unleash” programme anchored in purpose and values.

• 22,000 employees taken through a “skills factory” for re‑ and upskilling.

That is what it looks like when culture is treated as operating infrastructure rather than internal branding. It also underlines an uncomfortable truth: culture lives or dies in the hands of your middle managers. If they are inconsistent, overloaded or under‑skilled, your culture will be too.

For HR, the question is no longer “Do we have clear values?” It is: “How predictable is leadership in this company when things get hard?” If the answer is “It depends who you get”, that is the real culture gap to close.

3. Leadership is still the multiplier (and the bottleneck)

Hans Vestberg also offered a refreshing lack of romance about leadership as a job. “If you want to be a leader, you damn well invest in being a leader.” This also came with an example anecdote from his own approach.

On the back of his security badge, he still keeps a list of roughly 40 people - board members, direct reports, external stakeholders - and makes a point of calling them every week, “regardless of whether I have something to ask.”

Boards are slowly catching up. Vestberg noted that around 15% of board time in large organisations is now explicitly spent on talent management, succession and workforce strategy. That is a big shift from the days when people topics were tacked onto the end of meetings. However it still doesn't feel nearly enough given the tension we are living through.

The catch is that many still talk about leadership in the abstract rather than in terms of the actual leadership operating system: who is trusted, who is followed, whose behaviour is copied and rewarded.

In an AI era, where individuals can access powerful tools on their own, this becomes even more critical. If leadership is the only thing tying a fragmented, hybrid, augmented workforce together, then low‑quality leadership is no longer just painful. It is incredibly high risk.

4. Learning is too shallow for the world we are in

One of the grimmer stats referenced in Stockholm: 42% of workplace training still lasts just one day. That is enough to check a box, not enough to change how anyone thinks, decides or behaves. In the context of AI disruption, it is basically a waste of attention.

Neuroscientist Vivienne Ming went further, arguing that the whole education and development system is over‑weighted towards credentials and dramatically under‑weighted towards the foundational human capabilities that actually matter. “Fancy degrees are nice once you have foundation skills,” she said. “Otherwise they predict nothing and they do nothing.”

Courage, curiosity, resilience - the things that enable people to navigate constant change - are still mostly left to chance. They happen to you, or they don’t. Organisations talk about them as desirable traits, not capabilities they can build.

For HR, the implication is straightforward and uncomfortable: more content will not fix this. There is no workshop that makes managers courageous overnight. The work is in designing environments where people can safely practise new behaviours over time, with feedback and stakes in the outcome. That takes investment and patience. It also takes a willingness to admit that much of what is currently labelled “learning” is little more than theatre.

So what is HR’s real opportunity?