In Episode 79 (bonus episode), I sit down with my good friend Vincent Barat, founder and CEO of Albert, for a conversation that almost didn’t happen this year. Vince joins me fresh off an unexpected medical drama that forced him to miss his SWP London session — and yes, we get into that story to start. From there, we dive into the material he never got to share on stage, including his “SWP Cookbook” and the four ingredients he believes define mature, scalable workforce planning: governance, data, skills, and drivers.

We talk governance models — centralized, local, and hybrid — and why ownership, accountability, and resourcing remain make-or-break factors. Vince also unpacks why organisations are shifting toward flexible, driver-based planning, how skills have moved from theory to pragmatism, and why scenario planning is now the real marker of SWP maturity.

It’s practical, candid, and classic Vince — insights, humour, and a few sharp takes along the way.

In Episode 78, I sit down with Fiona Vines, Chief Inclusion & Wellbeing Officer at BT Group, to trace her unexpected path from banking to HR to leading inclusion across mining and telecoms. I explore with Fiona why diversity alone doesn’t deliver performance without real inclusion embedded in the work, the worker, and the workplace. We connect inclusion to strategic workforce planning—from customer empathy and accessibility to risk, safety, and measurable outcomes. Fiona shares lessons from BHP’s gender balance journey, why leaders must pull (not just be pushed), and how policies like shared parental leave change workforce modelling and capability planning. We dig into job design, “greedy jobs,” and how AI and flexible models can unlock talent without sacrificing performance. It’s a practical, leader-first conversation on turning inclusion from an HR mantra into a core business system.

In Episode 77, I sit down with Elena Magrini and Alison Ettridge from Lightcast to explore how a risk-based approach to Strategic Workforce Planning can transform how organizations think about their people. We unpack the forces reshaping today’s labour market — from geopolitics and economic uncertainty to the accelerating impact of AI — and look at why workforce risk is now firmly a board-level conversation.

Alison and Elena share how Lightcast is helping organizations quantify and prioritise risk using labour-market intelligence, and why aligning internal and external data is the foundation for smart, forward-looking decisions. We also discuss the importance of scenario planning, the convergence of SWP, talent intelligence and analytics, and how skills, roles and tasks are evolving faster than ever.

If you’re rethinking how to manage uncertainty and prepare your workforce for what’s next, this one’s for you.