Dreams: Where human resource development is headed to deliver value

My psychologist wife has taught me that to understand our past, we can read our journals. To understand our present, we need to look honestly and seriously in a mirror. And to understand our future, we need to examine our dreams. Dream analysis has two parts. One part focuses on our daytime dreams, which symbolize our hopes and aspirations and define where we want to go. For organization leaders, this focus implies having a direction where their organization is headed. The other part of dream analysis examines the subconscious elements of our nighttime dreams. These dreams often deal with the implicit challenges we face and give our mind a way to ponder those challenges and concoct ways to deal with them through our dreams. So by analyzing our nighttime dreams, we can begin to accomplish our daytime visions. The same logic may be applied to the human resource development (HRD) profession. We can look to our past in textbooks and articles, and we can grasp our present by looking in the mirror of what we do, but we create our future by examining our dreams. These dreams are rooted in the challenges of organizations today and how HRD professionals should respond. They also highlight the hopes and aspirations of HRD professionals. I begin with a brief overview of the current context of business (profit and nonprofit), suggest an overarching vision for the dreams of HRD, report ten challenges that most organizations face, and suggest responses that HRD can make to those challenges.