Chris Hare and the Trouble with a Crisis That Never Happens

Chris Hare had made a career of asking companies to think ahead. By August 2023, he was asking himself why such a reasonable request was so difficult to sell. He and his co-founder, Alicia Roach, had built a business around strategic workforce planning, the discipline of working out which people an organisation will need to deliver its ambitions. The logic seemed straightforward. The reception could be exhausting.

Then came a meeting with Dan Heath, author of Upstream, during an executive leadership programme. Heath’s work gave Hare a useful explanation for the resistance: people can see a crisis being solved. A crisis prevented leaves much less evidence for the awards committee. Someone who recruits a missing specialist at the last minute has a story to tell. Someone who arranged the training three years earlier has an ordinary Tuesday.

“Strategic Workforce Planning is hard to explain but crucial to do,” Hare wrote. The sentence carries the tension running through his working life. He sells planning software, but much of his public work concerns the human difficulty of agreeing on what to plan for. Before the numbers can help, the people around the table have to admit they may be imagining different futures.

Before the software, the awkward questions

Hare’s route into that conversation ran through consulting and corporate management. His experience includes Mercer and PwC, and general manager roles at Mirvac and NBN. Planning, rewards and programme design were part of his remit. These are jobs that put ambition into contact with resources: what an organisation promises, what it can afford, and what its people can actually deliver.

He met Roach while they were working at NBN. She brought experience leading strategic workforce planning at NBN and Qantas. In early 2014, they founded Quantitative HR Consulting, known as QHR. Their partnership began with professional services, giving them an opportunity to work through workforce questions across different organisations before putting a method into software.

That order mattered. A consulting engagement lets experienced people interpret a particular problem. A product must make enough of that reasoning repeatable for someone else to use. The founders were learning which elements of workforce planning travelled across industries, which needed flexibility, and which assumptions had to be challenged before a forecast could mean anything.

The company dates its initial software development to 2018. Its technology launched globally in 2020, when the organisation adopted the eQ8 name. There is a pleasing complication in this origin story: the founders were creating a tool to help organisations manage transitions, while facing a transition of their own. Expertise and an existing consulting business did not make the product’s first customers automatic.

The customers didn’t simply come along

When the founders moved towards software, their consulting clients did not immediately migrate to the platform. Hare and Roach used capital from the services business to build the new venture. Effectively, they had to win a market again. Familiarity with a customer’s problem is useful; persuading that customer to buy a different way of solving it is another job.

The international response surprised them. They had expected their early software customers to be Australian. Instead, articles Roach published on LinkedIn brought enquiries from large American organisations. MetLife and the United Nations became customers in March 2020. The founders had found an audience for a specialist discipline well beyond the place where their consulting partnership began.

Hare later described the experience of seeking investors in Austin, Texas, with the phrase “kissed a lot of frogs”. In November 2022, eQ8 secured a Series A investment led by OIF Ventures. The company records the round as US$4 million. The funding followed an earlier expansion: its Austin headquarters had opened in July 2021.

“We are not serial entrepreneurs,” Hare said during the fundraising story. That is an unusually useful detail in a founder’s biography. It places the company’s beginnings in a conviction about a problem they had worked on, rather than an appetite to start whichever business happened to be fashionable. Their experience supplied the question. Building a software company became the way they tried to answer it.

The forecast begins with a disagreement

Listen to Hare explain his work and the boardroom appears before the spreadsheet. In conversation with David Green in October 2023, he described leaders who could endorse a five-year plan while holding different assumptions about how it would unfold. Signing the same strategy document does not ensure that finance, operations and HR agree about what happens next.

His examples make that gap concrete. One division might grow while another contracts. Customer behaviour might change halfway through. A transformation project might arrive six months late. Each possibility changes the work to be done and the people needed to do it. An annual hiring number has limited usefulness if the assumptions beneath it remain unspoken.

Hare’s prescription was modest enough to fit in a diary: bring leaders together periodically for a focused conversation about the future. Begin with a few quantities that make the discussion tangible. Ask what growth or decline would mean, where customer demand is moving, and how the organisation intends to respond. Software can support that exchange. Somebody still has to start it.

There is a commercial argument underneath his concern for people. If an organisation lacks the capacity to serve customers, its revenue ambitions become harder to fulfil. Recruiting, developing employees and redesigning work require different lead times. Planning gives leaders a chance to compare those options while there is still time to choose among them.

Learning to say, “I’m here to help”

By December 2024, Hare was writing about a lesson he and Roach had learned through a difficult journey: belief in workforce planning would not, on its own, win colleagues over. He had expected others to recognise the discipline’s value. His revised approach began with a more personal question: what worries the person whose support you need?

For business leaders, that could mean uncertainty about delivering results. For finance, unpredictable workforce costs. For HR colleagues, the repetition of urgent problems that never seem to stay solved. Hare organised his advice around a short offer: “I’m here to help.” It gives a planning exercise an immediate reason to matter to someone with a crowded calendar.

The product was also reaching towards people with less time and infrastructure. In April 2024, eQ8 introduced Essentials, designed to lower the effort required to begin workforce planning. Hare described an audience that understood the importance of people but was not ready for a full enterprise implementation. The aim was to make strategic conversations accessible earlier.

“Strategic Workforce Planning has become my life’s work.”

Chris Hare, August 2023

His writing makes room for frustration, including his own mistakes. That candour gives the professional mission a recognisable human scale. Someone can be convinced an idea is useful, spend years explaining it, and still discover that the explanation needs work. Hare’s willingness to revisit the pitch is part of the story of the business itself.

Who gets to become experienced?

Artificial intelligence adds another dimension to his argument. In his 2025 writing, Hare examined the early-career jobs through which people learn a business. He pointed to roles such as junior analysts, coordinators and customer service representatives. Alongside completing tasks, those jobs give newcomers contact with colleagues, customers and the practical judgements of a profession.

His concern is about what follows when organisations automate those tasks without designing alternative routes to experience. Where will the next generation of managers practise? How will someone acquire the judgement that a later role expects? Hare argues for deliberate learning pathways, including apprenticeships, internal moves and rotations, as companies change the work available to beginners.

Those are proposals, rather than a settled account of what AI will do. Their significance in Hare’s story is the timescale. He is asking leaders to examine the future consequences of a decision that looks attractive in the present. A shorter task list today can alter who is ready for responsibility several years from now.

A future big enough to share

In June 2026, his conversation with Encountas founder Leonie Rothwell widened the frame to entire industries. Hare argued that organisations facing common capability gaps could cooperate on the foundations of workforce development while continuing to compete through products, service and execution. Industry associations, with their connections to education and government, could help convene that work.

“Anticipation allows you to do things that take a long time, ahead of time,” he said. The line explains why he keeps returning to planning even when the future is uncertain. Learning takes time. Building capability takes time. A forecast can be revised; the years needed to develop an experienced colleague are harder to recover.

There is a related development inside eQ8. Its current AI offering sets out to guide users through workforce planning, drawing on the practice of Hare, Roach and colleague Amie Munro. The company presents Hare’s contribution in terms of stakeholder support, scenarios and conversations that can withstand questions from a board. The interpersonal work has followed him into the product.

For all the technology involved, the request Hare keeps making remains quite ordinary: sit down together and work out what you think is coming. He has built a career around the possibility that a useful disagreement today might spare an organisation a much more expensive surprise later. The reward may still look like an ordinary Tuesday. He would have reasons to be pleased with that.