Talent Management & Succession Planning
- Title
- Talent Management & Succession Planning
- Category
- Platform Innovation
- Year
- 2024
- Client
- Aviva
- Focus
- Talent Experience, Skills Insight, Succession Planning
A major UK financial-services organisation wanted to streamline talent-management processes, especially the succession track used to identify, track and prepare potential successors for critical leadership roles.
I led a strategic co-innovation engagement that turned a complex people-process challenge into a future-state talent-management direction, a tangible prototype and an adoption-oriented roadmap.
- User Journey Mapping
- Employee Experience Flow
- Talent Management Strategy
- Prototyping
- Executive Presentation
Engagement Lead, Senior Design Lead & Design Strategist
I led the engagement end to end — aligning customer and account stakeholders around the innovation challenge, leading design-thinking and co-creation activities, and building the executive story that connected the people-process challenge, the desired experience, platform possibilities and a phased roadmap.
The challenge
Succession planning involves high-value organisational decisions. To work well, it needs to connect the identification of potential successors with their development, skills, career paths and the insight available to leaders.
The design question: how might we create a more connected, actionable talent-management and succession experience that helps the organisation identify, track and develop future leadership capability?
The approach
A co-innovation approach that moved from stakeholder alignment to a tangible future-state prototype:
- Aligned customer and account stakeholders around the innovation challenge and desired outcome.
- Led design-thinking and co-creation activities to uncover workflow needs and opportunity areas.
- Translated stakeholder input into a customer-specific product and service direction.
- Collaborated with design, architecture and development colleagues on a clickable future-state prototype.
- Built the executive story, connecting the people-process challenge, desired experience, platform possibilities and phased roadmap.
The future state
The future-state direction connected several elements that are often managed separately: career pathways that make potential opportunities clearer, skills-gap visibility to guide development priorities, personalised learning connected to future role readiness, and leader insight to support conversations and succession decisions.
The aim was to make talent management more visible and actionable — not simply to digitise an existing process.
Successful conversations
Growth and succession depend on the quality of the conversations between managers and their people. The experience helps leaders keep track of important conversations and outline the topics they want to cover next.
Preparing the 1:1
Each conversation comes with a prepared agenda: suggested talking points, action items and notes — connected to feedback, learning pathways, aspirations and skills, so succession decisions are grounded in evidence.
Outcome
The engagement created alignment around a future-state direction, supported executive decision-making and informed an implementation-oriented roadmap. It demonstrated how a connected talent-management experience could improve the organisation's ability to develop and plan for future leadership capability.
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