Talent Management magazine has published an article on Obama vs. McCain: What the Election Means for Employers - and there are potential changes which will impact many aspects of employment policy and practice. This means potential change for many....but the article only really looks at likely to change to direct employment law. But of course there are much bigger (longer term) potential issues - healthcare reform, energy policy, trade policy impacting offshoring, etc. When we are thinking about effective workforce planning, these bigger issues need to be considered.

If you only look at the employment law issues, you are, as they say, not seeing the forest for the trees - the bigger, less tangible changes are the ones with the challenge and so the opportunity in terms of your long term talent management success.

Unfortunately, this is often what happens in scenario planning - rather than developing rich pictures of potential futures by exploring uncertain, intangible issues and thereby improving our ability to identify and respond to different future outcomes, people take small, easy variables and use them to create slightly altered forecasts of the future. Think of those as trees instead of forests.

So which way are you exploring how the election might impact your workforce future - the forest, or the trees?