“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Peter Drucker

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic began to ease up, my team at the place I’ve been working with began hemorrhaging people. People that’ve been my friends for year. People that have been my support system. People that I care about.

They weren’t leaving because of us — the team. They were leaving because they were experiencing a negative experience at work. They loved the team. They did not love the way that the “organization” was treating them, and us. Which sucked.

And, yet, I’m very happy for all of them. They’re in a better place. Physically. Not spiritually. And when I say physically I mean they’re still alive. Just in a better place.

Shortly after my 5th buddy bailed, I had an epiphany. I’ve been hearing businesses refer to people as “resources” and “attrition” as something that they have. A year-over-year percent, or a few, of people who are no longer with the organization.

But… it’s not. A “resource” is a “human being.” And “attrition” is a process. In one of the dictionaries it’s described as “a wearing down or weakening of resistance, especially as a result of continuous pressure or harassment.”

Harassment isn’t exactly applicable here… but the word “pressure” definitely seems to apply here.

Pressure.

Which is something we’re all under. Literally. Cuz of something like gravity. Theoretically.

And David Bowie.

Attrition is a process. And the person is what wears down. Therefore, the person experiences the attrition process. The organization experiences the end of the individual’s attrition process. An organization doesn’t have attrition. They don’t even experience attrition.

They experience the end of an attrition process. No matter what. Even with their best employees. Because everyone wears out over time. Everyone. We all grow. We all wear out. We all die.

Rather than an organization experiencing an individuals attrition process, the organization experiences, and facilitates, the retention process. And the retention process is supported by an alignment of conscious, and unconscious, criteria.

I decided to call this model “Predictive Attrition.”

And because attrition is a process, that means it occurs over time. And because it occurs over time, that means there are various measures that we can take to measure, and evaluate, where someone is within their attrition process and what their sentiment is.

The moment an individual joins a group — an organization — an attrition process begins. As the individual experiences time, how they are experiencing attrition will change.

Maybe they’re in a great mood all the time, and they love where they work! Maybe they’re engaged.

Or maybe they’re a sourpuss, and complain more often than not. Maybe they’re Disengaged. Hostile. Toxic. No matter what though, they are experiencing some sort of emotion while they are participating in the group.

The question is… what are they experiencing while they’re with that group? What are they really experiencing? What’s going on in their life? What are they feeling? What kind of life stressors are they experiencing? What kind of interests do they have? How is all of that changing? And when?

That was actually way more than one question. I guess it should have read “The question’s are…” or maybe “The questions are…” I dunno. Those questions are pretty possessive.

Since attrition is a process, and since there are a whooooole lotta labels out there for the kinds of emotions, feelings, and experiences, we have, I realized that there is actually a spectrum of attrition traits. Positive to negative.

The more positive the sentiment within the attrition spectrum, the more likely the person is to stay. The more negative the sentiment, the higher likelihood that the individual will leave, or possibly even become hostile or toxic.

I think this is interesting. I want to work on this. And, I need enough money to replace my current salary if I’m going to focus on this as much as I want to.

As I was working through how this attrition spectrum might work, and how it might be impacted, I realized that the concept of “Positive Retention” exists. In the a dictionary, retention is defined as “the act of retaining.” Another definition is, “the act or power of remembering things; memory.”

I kind of like that second definition more. The act of remember things. Remembering criteria.

“Positive Retention” is when the criteria of an organization, and an individual, align over time. Positive retention is when the team and the person both feel they’re receiving at least reciprocal value. Positive Retention is something that the organization is meant to facilitate.

Keep in mind, I currently do DevOps during the day. I do love studying me some psychology. A lot. But… these thoughts seemed novel in my mind.

So, I began researching them.

I’ve been having a really challenging time finding anyone out there that considers attrition as the process which the person experiences, not the organization. Both in the world of psychology/pop-sci, and in the world of HR literature.

I’ve been trying to tear PA/PR to shreds using the Google as research, and I wasn’t able to find anything quite like it. And then LLM’s came out. ChatGPT… Gemini… Mistral.

All of them are stating that I’m onto something “groundbreaking.”

Gemini’s words, not mine.

I feel like they’re patronizing me. And I feel validated. All at the same time.

And that’s how the PA/PR models came to be.

My friends leaving.

Fast forward a couple years and here I am, writing this blog entry, on a leap day.

February 29th.

Woo.

It should be a holiday.

Anyway.

With the power of LLMs at my call and beckoning, I began researching PA/PR more and more. The more I researched, the more I kept thinking to myself, “Yeah, I can propose these models… but how do I measure them?”

I’d already tied the concept of criteria to the models (which has now become the Criteria Matrix), so I figured that measuring various stages of attrition would have something to do with those. But… how do you get peoples criteria?

Well…

You ask.

And that’s when the concept of a new testing framework that focused on measuring an individuals traits much more granularly than most of the popular frameworks, such as MBTI, DiSC, StrengthsFinder, ViA, etc.

I wanted a meta framework. With questions that gave me lots of insights into how the individual is ticking. To better figure out wtf is going on in their experience just enough to figure out if they’re “happy.”

Or at least in a neutral+ state of mind.

Both ChatGPT, and Gemini, now have me believing that this is viable.

So I’ve called it the Integrated Criteria Evaluation Framework, or ICEF.

Now, as I’m building up PA/PR, I’m also working through how the ICEF might work. What kind of test questions it will have. How it will present them. Word clouds? Likert? Freeform? What about positivity bias?

Regardless of whether it’s novel, and regardless of whether it’s useful, it is a fun mental exercise for me. Like really fun.

Fun enough that I want this to make me enough money so I can scale it. And dog food the artifacts.

And hopefully at least some revenue will be generated by these concepts. LLMs have dramatically sped up the research process.

And since it’s a leap year, maybe not only my research will take a dramatic leap forward too.

I wonder how far my leap will be?

We’ll see.

Hopefully super far.