Workforce Strategy: Designing a Workforce That Can Run, Serve, and Change
From Headcount Fights to Context-Toggling Strategy
The CFO calls it a “10% headcount reduction plan”. Operations calls it impossible. Strategy calls it reckless. HR calls it “flex.” Everyone argues the numbers — but nobody asks the prior question: what work are we actually asking this workforce to do, and which logics are we quietly forcing into the same exhausted bodies? This piece reframes “headcount” as a mislabelled problem. Most organisations don’t have an FTE crisis. They have a work-portfolio crisis: Run is punishable and therefore always wins; Serve becomes invisible emotional labour; Change becomes side-of-desk theatre — until trust erodes, transformation stalls, and the system starts consuming its own best people.
From there, the essay offers a practical design lens: treat the workforce as infrastructure, not cost. Map the real work into Run / Serve / Change, then design a portfolio across four segments — Core Strategic, Stable Operational, Flexible/Ecosystem, and Sunset/Legacy — each with different promises, risks, and legitimacy rules. The goal isn’t a perfect org chart. It’s a workforce that can keep running, keep serving, and keep changing without normalising Stretch, baking in Tangle, drifting into quiet disengagement, and triggering avoidable Breaks. If you’ve ever watched an executive team try to solve context with a spreadsheet, this will give you a language — and a way out.
1. Vignette – Maya’s “Headcount Crisis” That Isn’t
“Let’s just get this on the table,” the CFO said. “We need to take ten percent out of FTE over the next eighteen months if we’re going to hit the margin target.”
The room tightened.
On one side of the table, Operations immediately bristled.
“We’re already running hot,” the COO snapped. “Our teams are stretched, complaints are up, and every transformation programme for the last three years has used my people as the guinea pigs. You can’t cut and expect us to keep service levels.”
HR, trying to sound constructive, slid in a different angle.
“We’re not saying it all has to be permanent headcount,” the CHRO said. “We can leverage partners, project contractors, gig platforms. Flex the workforce around demand. Other companies in our space are doing it.”
“And we still have the transformation backlog,” the Chief Strategy Officer added. “Regulatory changes, the new digital platform, the sustainability commitments… If we pause Change to protect Run, we’ll be back here in three years with a worse problem.”
Maya watched the conversation ping-pong:
Finance wanted fewer people, or at least fewer fixed people.
Operations wanted more bodies in the frontline.
Strategy wanted protected Change capacity.
HR wanted more “flex.”
The CEO wanted all of it: lower cost, higher service, faster change.
The arguments were familiar:
Use attrition.
Freeze non-essential hiring.
“Rightsize” certain units.
Outsource what isn’t core.
“Up-skill” existing staff to “work smarter, not harder.”
Nobody was asking a prior question:
What, exactly, are we asking this workforce to do?
Which work is genuinely core, which is service, which is transformation?
Who is carrying all three in one role because we’ve never had language to separate them?
On the whiteboard, the CFO drew boxes and numbers.
“Look,” he said, “this is just math.”
Maya felt that familiar Praxis itch at the back of her mind.
It wasn’t just math. It was context, badly labelled.
They didn’t have a headcount problem. They had a work portfolio problem they were trying to solve with a spreadsheet.
2. From Jobs and Org Charts to Work Portfolios
Classical workforce planning starts with a deceptively simple question:
“How many people do we need in which boxes?”
You forecast demand, calculate workloads, set productivity assumptions, and work backwards to an FTE number. You then argue about whether that number is affordable.
Hidden inside that process is an older assumption: that jobs are relatively stable chunks of work, tied to a function and a place in the hierarchy. You add or remove jobs, slide people between boxes, and hope the system copes.
That logic worked tolerably well when:
markets were slower,
organisational change happened in big, infrequent waves,
and most work was either run the machine or sell what the machine produced.
It’s struggling now because the work itself has split into at least three distinct logics that rarely get named.
Let’s call them Run, Serve, and Change.
2.1 Run – Keep the Machine Going
Run work is the backbone:
processing claims, payments, orders;
maintaining systems and infrastructure;
ensuring regulatory compliance and risk controls;
making sure the lights stay on and the numbers add up.
It is disciplined, routine, measurable. When it fails, you know quickly: outages, errors, fines, angry customers.
Run work demands:
reliability,
efficiency,
tight feedback loops.
It likes clear roles, stable teams, good tooling, and thoughtful standardisation.
2.2 Serve – Create Trust, Relationships, and Experience
Serve work is everything that makes your organisation more than a machine:
designing and supporting co-ordination interfaces
relationship-building with clients, regulators, partners, communities, unions, the media,
the internal work of culture, engagement, and care.
It is partly visible in metrics (NPS, churn, complaints), but much of its value is tacit:
the trust that gets you the benefit of the doubt,
the extra patience customers give you during a failure,
the willingness of staff to go the extra mile.
Serve work demands:
empathy,
judgement,
emotional labour,
local sensemaking.
It doesn’t always fit neatly into a KPI, but when it’s absent, everything feels brittle.
2.3 Change – Build Tomorrow’s Machine
Change work is the effort to:
implement new systems and processes,
redesign operating models,
launch new products and markets,
respond to regulatory shocks and competitive threats.
It lives in projects, programmes, agile squads, innovation labs, “transformation offices”. Done well, it creates options and resilience. Done badly, it generates PowerPoint, fatigue, and cynicism.
Change work demands:
experimentation,
the cross-functional collaboration delivered through Serve bridgework,
tolerance for ambiguity,
and the ability to say “not yet” or “no” to ideas that are attractive but premature.
Change is always competing for attention with Run (“we still have a day job”) and for emotional energy with Serve (“we still have customers and employees to look after”).
2.4 The Default: One Person, Three Logics
In most organisations, we don’t name these three. We wrap them together in a single job and hope people can juggle:
The branch manager who must hit daily operational targets (Run), soothe upset customers and staff (Serve), and implement every new initiative from head office (Change).
The underwriter who must process cases (Run), maintain broker relationships (Serve), and participate in pricing or system redesign projects (Change).
The regional HR lead who must deliver BAU processes (Run), support leaders and staff (Serve), and roll out the latest “future of work” programme (Change).
When everything is important and urgent, one logic quietly wins: Run.
Run is visible and punishable when it fails.
Run has clear metrics, daily targets, and angry stakeholders.
Run is where you get shouted at.
So:
Serve becomes “nice to have” that people squeeze into lunch hours and after-hours emotional labour.
Change becomes “side-of-desk” work that gets rushed, delayed, or done superficially to tick boxes.
Then, when transformation stalls or customer trust erodes, we conclude we need “more agile”, “better culture”, or “a new operating model”—without ever admitting that we designed jobs that made it almost impossible for people to do anything except Run.
NB: In the work I’ve done with Stefan Norrvall, we argue that Serve work should be designed into the organisational architecture, which:
translates Change intent into enforceable constraints,
designs platforms, systems, and grammars that apply across domains,
prevents local autonomy from fragmenting the organisation.
While taht is still a design goal in our work, this essay assumes conditions in which this hasn’t taken place, meaning Serve load is being carried by individuals, often invisibly. The thinking within it can be treated as a gateway towards possible longer-term design decisions.
2.5 A Different Starting Question
What would happen if, instead of beginning workforce strategy with:
“How many people in which roles can we afford?”
we began with:
“How much Run, Serve, and Change do we actually need in each part of the business, over the next 3–5 years?”
That single shift reframes everything:
In a highly regulated, low-growth market, you might need:
heavy Run, decent Serve, tightly focused Change.
In a fast-growing digital business, you might need:
robust Run, very strong Serve around key customers, and substantial ongoing Change.
In a legacy business facing disruption, you might consciously decide:
to maintain Run and Serve just long enough while you invest disproportionately in Change elsewhere.
Once you see the work as a portfolio of logics, not a pile of jobs, headcount questions change flavour:
You stop treating everyone as interchangeable “resources”.
You start asking:
Who should be mostly Run, with pride and support?
Who should be mostly Serve, with relational room to move?
Who should be mostly Change, protected from Run’s constant gravity?
Who legitimately needs to toggle between all three—and how will we keep them from breaking?
The rest of the essay is about that: designing a workforce portfolio—core, stable, flexible, sunset—that matches your Run/Serve/Change reality, and stops asking the same exhausted people to carry three incompatible logics in one exhausted body.
3. Four Workforce Segments for a Three-Logic World
Once you see Run / Serve / Change as three different logics, the next question is:
Who should carry which logic, in what proportion, and with what promise?
You can’t answer that for every individual from scratch. You need a portfolio view—a way of segmenting the workforce that maps to how your business actually works, not just how your org chart looks.
One pragmatic way is to think in terms of four broad segments:
Core Strategic Workforce
Stable Operational Workforce
Flexible / Ecosystem Workforce
Sunset / Legacy Workforce
Each plays a different role across Run, Serve, and Change. Each carries different risks if you mismanage it.
3.1 Core Strategic Workforce – The Context-Holders
These are the people who:
hold pattern-recognition across products, markets, and cycles;
integrate Run metrics, Serve realities, and Change ambitions into something coherent;
are believable to multiple stakeholders because they’ve “been there” in different roles.
They might be:
senior underwriters or actuaries who understand both technical risk and broker politics;
regional COOs who’ve worked frontline, head office, and project roles;
product leaders who can talk credibly to sales, tech, and operations.
In terms of the three logics, their job is to toggle:
enough Run to stay grounded in reality;
enough Serve to keep key relationships healthy;
enough Change to steer transformation without becoming detached from the front lines.
When you overload them with Run (“just help clear the backlog”) and transactional Serve (“jump on this escalation”), Change quietly dies. They become glorified firefighters.
When you shove them entirely into Change work with no contact with Run and Serve, they drift into PowerPoint fantasy: transformation designs that don’t survive contact with customers, regulators, or legacy systems.
Handled well, this segment is your navigational infrastructure. Handled badly, it is your most exhausted and cynical group.
3.2 Stable Operational Workforce – The Backbone
These are the people who make Run and much of Serve actually happen:
contact centre teams;
operations and processing staff;
technicians, analysts, branch staff;
schedulers, supply chain planners, field engineers.
Their work is often:
repetitive but non-trivial;
constrained by systems and rules;
exposed to real customers and real risk.
The Run/Serve mix matters here:
In some contexts (manufacturing plants, back-office operations), Run dominates and Serve is internal (supporting colleagues, internal customers).
In others (branches, hospitals, utilities, airlines), Run and Serve are inseparable: you can’t keep the machine going without treating the human on the other side decently.
For this segment, mismanagement looks like:
chronic Stretch – too few people doing too much, for too long;
Tangle – constant mixed messages: “follow the script” vs “delight the customer” vs “up-sell the product”;
Drift – being told they’re “our most important asset” while their jobs are treated as disposable.
You don’t need these roles to be constantly toggling into Change. You do need:
humane, stable work design;
some say in how processes evolve;
visible pathways into other segments for those who want to grow.
Done right, this is the backbone you can build on. Done wrong, it’s the source of a slow, grinding legitimacy crisis.
3.3 Flexible / Ecosystem Workforce – The Shock Absorbers and Specialists
This segment includes:
contractors and consultants;
BPO partners and shared service centres;
platform workers and gig arrangements;
niche specialists brought in for specific projects.
At their best, they are:
burst capacity for Run in peak periods;
specialist capability for complex Change;
a way to test new services or markets without overcommitting the core.
At their worst, they become:
a shadow permanent workforce doing core Run and Serve work without security or voice;
a way of avoiding hard decisions about Sunset/Legacy work;
a source of resentment for internal staff: “They get the interesting Change work while we keep the machine going.”
In terms of logics:
A good ecosystem design uses this segment for Run at the edges (well-specified, lower-risk work) and Change at the edges (pilots, experiments, niche projects).
A bad design quietly outsources core Run and Serve, then wonders why quality, trust, and tacit knowledge erode.
The key is clarity:
Is this truly peripheral or experimental work?
Or is it “too hard to fix” core work we’ve dumped on cheaper, less protected labour?
Without that clarity, you’ll say “flexible” and your people will hear “disposable.”
3.4 Sunset / Legacy Workforce – The Awkward Truth
Every organisation has work that:
exists because of old technology or regulation;
is being automated, digitised, or phased out;
is maintained because someone important doesn’t want to face the consequences.
The people doing that work are often:
long-tenured;
deeply knowledgeable about how things really run;
emotionally invested in what the work used to mean.
From a Run/Serve/Change perspective:
They still carry Run (the old machine has to keep going until the new one works).
They often carry hidden Serve (keeping old customers and staff calm during transition).
They are rarely invited meaningfully into Change (they’re seen as “part of the old world”).
Mishandling this segment produces:
bitter Break – “after all these years, this is how it ends”;
reputational damage in communities and industries;
resistance to future transformation: everyone watches how you treat today’s “legacy” workforce as a preview of their own fate.
Handled honestly, you can:
honour their contribution;
offer real pathways into other segments where viable;
design sunset roles with dignity rather than endless limbo.
This is emotionally and politically hard. It is also where your claims about “people being our greatest asset” go to live or die.
3.5 Seeing the Portfolio
Once you sketch your workforce like this, the conversation with Finance looks different.
Instead of “We need to cut 10% FTE,” you start asking:
How much Core Strategic capacity do we really have—and where are those people currently drowning in Run?
Is our Stable Operational backbone properly staffed and designed, or are we quietly eating through it with overtime and goodwill?
Are we using the Flexible/Ecosystem segment to genuinely extend capability, or as a band-aid for unresolved structural issues?
Where is the Sunset/Legacy work we’re pretending is just “BAU,” and what is our humane, explicit plan for it?
You move from a flat headcount debate to a portfolio conversation:
where different segments have different logics, promises, and risks;
and where shifting work between segments is a strategic act, not just a cost move.
To do that well, you need to look beyond spreadsheets into the Estates and cultural logics that shape how different workforce segments experience stability, honour, and change.
That’s where we turn next.
4. Estates, WEIRD vs Local Logics, and Workforce Expectations
Workforce strategy isn’t just an economic puzzle. It’s also:
a moral story (“What do we owe these people?”),
a structural story (“What roles and contracts do we design?”),
a livelihood story (“How do families and communities survive?”),
a legitimacy story (“Who counts as ‘us’?”),
and an emergent story (“What’s already happening under the surface?”).
The Five Estates give us a way to name these layers:
Meaning & Morality
Structure & Order
Enterprise & Livelihood
Narrative & Legitimacy
Emergence & Disruption
Your WEIRD vs local lens then shows how differently each Estate is experienced in different cultures and markets.
Put together, they explain why a workforce portfolio that looks neat on a slide can feel like betrayal, abandonment, or chaos on the ground.
4.1 Meaning & Morality – What Promises Are You Making?
First Estate questions sound like:
“What kind of organisation are we?”
“What do we stand for in how we treat our people?”
“Who do we protect when times are hard?”
For each segment, ask:
What is the implied promise?
Core Strategic: “You help us navigate; we give you voice, influence, and growth.”
Stable Operational: “You keep the show on the road; we give you stability and respect.”
Flexible/Ecosystem: “We work together while it makes sense; we treat you fairly even if you’re not ‘ours’.”
Sunset/Legacy: “You built this; we won’t pretend you don’t exist when it’s time to move on.”
In WEIRD corporate cultures, the moral story often leans toward individual choice:
“We offer opportunities; you own your career.”
“We can’t guarantee jobs, but we’ll support your employability.”
In many non-WEIRD contexts, the moral story is more relational and collective:
“A good employer looks after its people.”
“This job is part of the social fabric; we trusted you.”
If your workforce strategy leans heavily on WEIRD “portfolio career” narratives in a context where people have built their lives around the company, expect quiet Tangle and Break:
“You told us we were family. Now we’re just numbers.”
4.2 Structure & Order – How Do You Formalise the Differences?
Second Estate is the world of:
contracts, grades, job families;
union agreements and labour law;
governance and policies.
Here, you decide:
who is permanent vs fixed-term vs outsourced;
what benefits and protections each group gets;
what pathways exist between segments.
WEIRD logics often emphasise:
flat structures, mobility, “fluid careers”;
a belief that people will move if they’re unhappy.
Local logics may emphasise:
seniority-based progression;
clear distinctions between “real staff” and others;
strong expectations around notice, severance, and honour.
If you:
push more work into the Flexible/Ecosystem segment without adjusting governance,
or leave Sunset/Legacy workers in permanent limbo,
you’re not just doing cost optimisation. You’re redrawing the moral and legal boundaries of who counts as part of the organisation.
This is where rushed outsourcing deals and casualisation create long-term scar tissue that no EVP slide can heal.
4.3 Enterprise & Livelihood – Who’s Paying the Bills?
Third Estate is about:
wages, benefits, and job security;
local economies, families, and social safety nets.
In WEIRD core economies, there is at least an ideological assumption that:
individuals can move between employers;
the labour market will absorb displaced workers;
social welfare systems provide some fallback.
In many markets your business touches, none of that is reliably true.
A “stable operations” job may support multiple dependants.
A BPO contract in a regional city may be the main livelihood source for hundreds of families.
A sudden “sunset” decision can destabilise a whole town.
A workforce strategy that:
treats Stable Operational staff as infinitely squeezable,
or uses Flexible/Ecosystem arrangements to bypass local labour norms,
may look efficient in the short term but creates systemic risk:
political backlash;
regulatory intervention;
reputational damage;
and a talent market that quietly decides you are not to be trusted.
Enterprise & Livelihood is where your HR choices collide with development economics. Ignoring that doesn’t make it go away.
4.4 Narrative & Legitimacy – Who Counts as “Us”?
Fourth Estate is story and status:
Who is seen as “core”? Who is “temporary”?
Which sites or countries are “head office” and which are “outposts”?
Who gets the leadership attention, the visits, the success stories?
In many organisations:
Core Strategic staff in HQ are cast as protagonists.
Stable Operational staff are background characters.
Flexible/Ecosystem workers are barely in the script.
Sunset/Legacy teams are ghosts—only mentioned in risk registers.
Overlay WEIRD vs local:
In WEIRD narratives, moving around—changing employers, countries, sectors—is cast as ambition.
In many local narratives, staying—building something in one place—is the source of legitimacy.
If your workforce portfolio:
romanticises the mobility of Core Strategic staff,
treats Stable Operational staff as interchangeable,
and erases the existence of Flexible and Sunset segments from your official story,
don’t be surprised when:
engagement initiatives fall flat;
“culture” feels fake;
people roll their eyes at your transformation slogans.
Legitimacy isn’t just what you pay people. It’s whether they can see themselves in the story you tell—and whether that story matches what actually happens when hard decisions are made.
4.5 Emergence & Disruption – What’s Already Happening Under the Table?
Finally, Fifth Estate is everything that doesn’t show up in formal plans:
high performers doing Change work unofficially because nobody’s asked them to lead;
informal mentoring and back channels filling gaps left by weak formal development;
shadow IT, workarounds, side hustles;
quiet quitting, parallel job searches, “just until my bonus vests.”
This is where your workforce strategy is being tested in real time.
Ask:
Where are people already reconfiguring Run/Serve/Change on their own?
Which segments are bleeding talent faster than you admit?
Who is doing Change work in their own time because there’s no formal role for it?
Where are flexible workers becoming de facto core without recognition?
WEIRD logics often assume:
markets will self-correct;
individuals will simply leave if unhappy.
Local logics often produce:
endurance and silence until a tipping point;
collective moves (e.g., unionisation, coordinated departures).
If you don’t read these emergent signals, you’ll keep thinking you have a headcount problem when you actually have a trust and configuration problem.
Once you see your workforce through the Estates and WEIRD/local lenses, the idea of “taking ten percent out” starts to look dangerously blunt.
The real strategic work is:
deciding where to build and protect Core Strategic capacity;
how to honour and stabilise Stable Operational work;
what to genuinely place in the Flexible/Ecosystem arena, with clear terms;
and when to face Sunset/Legacy realities with courage and decency.
The next section turns that into a concrete design process—a way to move from “we need cuts” to “we need a workforce that can Run, Serve, and Change without breaking itself in the process.”
5. Designing a Context-Toggling Workforce Strategy
Once you’ve named Run / Serve / Change and seen your four segments, you can stop treating workforce strategy as an angry negotiation between Finance and “the business,” and start treating it as design.
A simple design frame:
Map the work → place it in the right segment → build pathways and toggling → align metrics and stories.
Not a one-off. A rhythm.
5.1 Step 1 – Map the Work, Not Just the Roles
Most leaders can tell you their org chart in detail. Very few can tell you, by function or market:
What proportion of effort is currently Run, Serve, Change.
What proportion it should be over the next 3–5 years.
Where the biggest mismatches are.
Start there.
For each major area (e.g. retail, corporate, ops, risk, IT, HR):
Describe today’s mix.
“Roughly 70% Run, 25% Serve, 5% Change” is already more honest than “we’re all doing everything.”
Describe the required mix.
“Over the next three years, we need ops to stay 70% Run but move 5–10% more into Change for automation.”
“We need corporate sales to become 40% Serve, 30% Run, 30% Change as we shift to solution selling.”
Name the constraints.
Regulatory limits, tech debt, skills gaps, political realities.
This isn’t about precision. It’s about making implicit trade-offs explicit. If you can’t name the work portfolio, everything else degenerates into generic “we’re all under pressure.”
5.2 Step 2 – Place Work in the Right Segment
With that map, ask: Which segment should carry which chunks?
Core Strategic Workforce
Should be concentrated where Run/Serve/Change tensions are highest and where decisions have system-wide impact.
Regional leaders, key product/portfolio owners, senior risk and finance, certain architects and change leaders.
Their load should be intentionally mixed—but not hopelessly overloaded with Run.
Stable Operational Workforce
Should carry the majority of predictable Run work and a good portion of Serve.
Stable teams with clear roles, good tools, and sensible spans of control.
Not treated as interchangeable or endlessly squeezable because “we can always ask them to do more.”
Flexible / Ecosystem Workforce
Should carry:
well-specified Run at the edges (where quality can be monitored and contracts aligned);
experimental Change (pilots, niche services, temporary spikes).
Not used as a permanent workaround for unresolved structural issues in the core.
Sunset / Legacy Workforce
Should carry only the Run that genuinely must persist while new systems or offerings mature.
Should be on a visible glide path: reskilling, redeployment, or dignified exit.
Not left indefinitely in “wait and see” purgatory.
You won’t get this perfect. But even an imperfect allocation beats the default of “everyone do everything, all the time.”
One practical move Maya made in a similar situation:
She created a protected Change pool of 30–40 cross-functional people seconded out of Run work for 12–18 months.
She then reshaped ops schedules and staffing so that Stable Operational teams weren’t constantly cannibalised every time a new project appeared.
It was politically messy. It also made it possible to do real Change without burning out the backbone.
5.3 Step 3 – Build Development Pathways and Context-Toggling
The portfolio isn’t static. People move. The question is whether that movement is:
random and political, or
designed and developmental.
Three basic flows matter:
From Stable Operational into Core Strategic / Change
Bring ops and frontline people into transformation teams and strategic roles, not just as “process SMEs” but as genuine co-designers.
This injects Run/Serve reality into Change, and offers tangible futures to those in the backbone.
From Flexible / Ecosystem into Core Strategic or Stable Ops
When contractors or partners prove themselves as critical to your future, create on-ramps.
Otherwise, you end up with key capability living outside the legal boundary of your organisation—until a competitor poaches your best vendor staff.
From Sunset / Legacy into New Work
Where possible, offer real reskilling options into growing Run, Serve, or Change areas.
Where not possible, be honest early—so people can shape their own exit, not wait for the rug to be pulled.
Alongside movement, you build context-toggling capability explicitly:
Teach leaders to know which logic they’re in:
“Right now, my job for the next 90 minutes is pure Run.”
“This meeting is Serve; our job is to listen, de-escalate, and repair.”
“This project is Change; we will have to say no to some Run demands to learn anything.”
Use rotational assignments and project “gyms” as practice grounds:
ops leaders in strategy projects,
strategy folks doing time in frontline operations,
high-potential people doing stints in regulators or partner organisations where it’s allowed.
The point is not to turn everyone into a superhero. It’s to grow enough leaders who can hold multiple contexts without pretending they’re all the same.
5.4 Step 4 – Align Metrics, Money, and Stories
Finally, you make sure the system isn’t incoherent.
Run metrics – reliability, efficiency, quality, risk.
Don’t punish Run leaders for not doing Change if you’ve overloaded them with work.
Don’t overload them with Change targets without giving them capacity.
Serve metrics – satisfaction, trust, retention, relationship health.
Make sure they’re real, not vanity scores.
Protect Serve time and emotional labour in workloads and staffing models.
Change metrics – learning velocity, option value, trajectory.
Not just “on-time, on-budget delivery” of pre-decided projects.
Reward thoughtful “stop” decisions and honest reporting.
You also check your narrative:
Are you telling a story in which Stable Operational people are genuinely valued—or just saying “frontline first” while treating them as cost?
Are you talking honestly about Sunset/Legacy work—or hiding it behind vague transformation slogans?
Are you describing Flexible/Ecosystem partners as part of your extended team—or as anonymous service providers?
If the metrics and money say “Run above all,” and the story says “we’re all innovators and change agents,” people will believe the money.
And if the story says “we’re a family,” but Sunset and Flexible segments are treated as dischargeable parts, people will believe the exits.
A context-toggling workforce strategy doesn’t eliminate these tensions. It names them, makes choices, and aligns structures and stories so people aren’t constantly gaslit by the gap between what’s said and what’s done.
6. Thresholds, Hidden Risks, and “People as Infrastructure”
When workforce strategy is treated as a spreadsheet exercise, the damage doesn’t show up immediately in headcount charts. It shows up in threshold states.
You see:
teams in permanent Stretch,
leaders stuck in chronic Tangle,
whole segments sliding into quiet Drift,
individuals hitting Break and walking,
unrecognised Leaps that the system can’t or won’t support.
Think back to Maya’s “headcount crisis”.
Operations was already in Stretch: overtime, shortcuts, rising error rates. Stable Ops staff were carrying more Run than their roles were ever designed for.
Core Strategic people were in Tangle: trying to juggle Run fires, Serve expectations, and a wall of Change programmes with no clear prioritisation.
Some parts of the Flexible/Ecosystem workforce were in Drift: doing semi-permanent core work without stability or voice, unsure whether they had a future beyond the next contract.
Sunset/Legacy teams were hovering near Break: told for years that “change is coming” but given neither a credible plan nor the truth.
You don’t fix those states by announcing a new EVP or rolling out yet another “high-performance culture” slide deck. You fix them by reconfiguring the work and the promises.
6.1 Who Are You Quietly Consuming?
A useful question for any executive team:
“Which part of our workforce are we using up faster than we admit?”
Clues:
Rising sick leave and attrition in certain roles or locations.
People who were once generous and creative now doing the bare minimum.
High performers becoming brittle, sarcastic, or strangely quiet.
Often, it’s your:
Stable Operational segment in markets that never get visited.
Core Strategic people who have become “the person we always ask” whenever there’s a problem.
Flexible workers doing full-time core work with half the security.
Sunset teams keeping old systems limping along without praise or plan.
Workforce strategy asks: Do we intend to treat them this way, or is this just what’s happened by default?
If it’s default, you have choices:
Reduce the load.
Increase the resources.
Change the promise.
Or admit that what you’re demanding is unsustainable and design a real exit.
6.2 Where Are You Pretending?
Another question:
“Where are we pretending something is ‘temporary’ or ‘flexible’ that is, in reality, core?”
Common examples:
Ten-year “temporary” outsourcing of key processes.
“Pilot” projects that quietly became the backbone of service delivery.
Contractors in key governance or risk roles “until we find the right perm hire”—two years running.
Sunset teams repeatedly told “this will be automated in 18 months” for a decade.
Pretence corrodes trust faster than harsh truth.
From a workforce-as-infrastructure view:
If something is core, treat it as core—build capability, honour it, design roles properly.
If something is genuinely peripheral, make that clear—and don’t sneak core work into it.
If something is on the way out, say so early, and offer paths.
People are more resilient to bad news than they are to endless ambiguity.
6.3 Who’s Carrying All Three Logics in One Body?
Every organisation has a set of people who:
run critical operations,
hold key relationships,
and informally lead transformation work…
…all at once.
They’re the ones senior leaders call when they want “the real story.” They hold multiple Estates in their head:
they know what’s moral and fair,
what’s structurally possible,
what will fly economically,
what will play well in the story,
and what’s emerging in the shadows.
In the short term, this is efficient: one talented person carrying Run, Serve, and Change.
In the long term, it’s a single point of failure.
Ask yourself:
“If these three to five people left tomorrow, what breaks?”
“What logics would we lose—Run competence, Serve trust, Change ambition?”
“What would it take to distribute that load without diluting it?”
If your answer is, “We hope they don’t leave,” that’s not a strategy. That’s a prayer.
6.4 People as Infrastructure, Not Just Cost
The real pivot in this essay is simple:
Stop thinking of your workforce as a cost to minimise.
Start thinking of it as infrastructure for sensemaking and adaptation.
Bridges and power grids don’t just “cost money”. They make certain futures possible.
Your workforce, configured well:
gives you the capacity to Run with reliability,
Serve with integrity,
and Change with courage.
Configured badly, you might hit your FTE and margin targets this year and still find yourself weaker:
depleted backbone,
burned-out context-holders,
cynical legacy teams,
a revolving door of “flexible” talent who never truly commit.
Workforce strategy that takes context seriously doesn’t promise painless choices. It does promise:
fewer nasty surprises,
more honest trade-offs,
and a fighting chance of keeping the people who can hold complexity with you, instead of leaving to do it somewhere else.
A final set of questions to leave on the exec table:
Run: Where are we demanding heroics instead of designing sane workloads?
Serve: Where are we free-riding on people’s care and conscience?
Change: Where are we pretending to transform while starving the work of time and people?
Segments: Which segment are we over-protecting? Which are we quietly sacrificing?
Thresholds: Where are Stretch and Tangle normalised? Where is Drift invisible? Where are Break and Leap happening without support?
If you can look at those questions without flinching, you’re already ahead of most.
The next step is to treat workforce design with the same seriousness you’d give to any other core infrastructure. Not as an annual headcount exercise, but as an ongoing act of leadership:
choosing who carries which context,
under which promises,
in which roles,
so that your organisation can keep running, keep serving, and keep changing—
without consuming the very people who make that possible.