I've worked in multinational organisations where annual objectives have been set and 6 months or a year later my performance measured against these. IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation both used this approach. But that was the 1980's. Since then I've mainly worked in smaller organisations and few of them ever used performance assessment methods. But things have changed, the world has changed. Organisations of all types and sizes face uncertainty due to external factors:

• shrinking budgets
• government-driven austerity measures
• emerging markets
• currency wars
• newly formed, more agile competition

Why do these external factors affect internal HR policies and processes? Because uncertainty makes strategic planning a formidable challenge and that makes setting task-based objectives difficult. To survive uncertainty organisations need to be agile, their product and service portfolios necessarily become more complex. What organisations need from their people therefore is the ability to freely adapt at a velocity that ultimately amounts to competitive advantage, or to put it more starkly, the ability for an organisation to survive uncertainty.

Critical to surviving uncertainty is learning agility. People that possess learning agility have buckets or energy, embrace change and have their finger on relevant pulses. And for organisations:

1. they are critical thinkers who examine problems carefully and make fresh connections.
2. they know themselves well and are able to handle tough situations deftly.
3. they like to experiment and can deal with the discomfort that surrounds change.
4. they deliver results in first-time situations through team building and personal drive.

It could be argued then, that how someone works is more important than setting objectives around what they do. One might argue: "A sales target is a measurement of what someone must achieve not how they achieve." Agreed, but if what is being sold changes during the course of a year, learning agility will quickly become really important.

Surviving uncertainty does require the diligent management of resources. Managers need to focus on how people work as much as, if not more than, what they plan to achieve through-out the year.

For further investigation:

— Lominger Assessment. You might also want to take the free online assessment:
http://insight.lominger.com/insight/

— A Manifesto for Social Business:
http://www.customerthink.com/blog/a_manifesto_for_social_business