Since the 1980s an unprecedented rate of change facing both public and private organisations has produced a major reorientation of structures, systems and management methods. Human resource planning has not been exempt from this and the methods established in the 1970s and 1980s have increasingly been criticised as being prescriptive, over centralised and lacking a flexibility in planning for people under turbulent conditions. What then is the revised role for human resource planning when the skills of people are even more paramount in institutional success, lead times for internal skills development remain lengthy and the labour market is still not as responsive as it should be in terms of available competencies? This new role must also fit the situation in which formalised planning groups and structures as currently operated may be incompatible with the devolvement of planning and the empowerment of line managers in people matters.
This paper intends to overview the development of the human resource planning discipline and to suggest a reorientation of its conceptual basis to meet current institutional demands, particularly in the public sector. In doing this it provides new emphasis and scope to the notion that planning is about institutional learning and that the prime beneficiaries of this learning should be the managers themselves (Geus, 1988). To release this potential a systems approach is adopted that takes human resource planning well beyond the organising scope that the original founders of the discipline had envisaged, but it is to them that we must turn in order to provide the building blocks for the new concept.