What Fantasy Football Taught Me About Making Better HR Technology Decisions
I've been playing fantasy football for the last 20 years. Over that span, I've had what I would call average success, with the goal always being to recoup my entry fees and make the playoffs. My overall record isn't great and most likely would've resulted in me being relieved of my head coaching duties quite some time ago. Week-to-week, my line-up decisions have traditionally included things like gut feeling and eye tests, past performance, expert and analyst consensus, projections and year-to-date player statistics. After carefully considering all the information available and locking in my line-up, I always had this huge sense of confidence that I made the best decision I could with the information available. My line-up choices always seemed to make sense... until they didn't. Just because my decisions looked great on paper, didn't mean they were right in practice. This is exactly how your HR technology decisions can easily go just as sideways as your fantasy football playoff line-up decisions.
When making your HR technology decisions, it's not uncommon to leverage analyst and expert research, peer reviews and feedback, and thought leadership. They can provide valuable information regarding vendor capabilities in the same way sports insiders provide player rankings, projections and matchup data, and how your friends might give you feedback on who to start and sit in your line-up. While this data, insights and feedback is important, the insiders and your friends don't always know your league rules, roster construction, risk tolerance, etc... This can significantly limit the context in which their recommendations are made. Similarly, an industry analyst is providing guidance based on generalities. While there may be some context such as organizational size, geography or function, valuable context such as your industry, strategic business priorities, workforce makeup, existing technology stack and readiness for change need to be considered when making critical HR technology decisions. We need to be purposeful and diligent in our use of analyst insights and recommendations, applying them in a manner specific to our decision making processes, whether it's your fantasy football line-up or your HR technology.
And then there's AI... Of course we're going to figure out how to leverage this amazing new tool to help us make decisions about our HR technology or fantasy football line-ups. I'll admit it. I've used it throughout the season to help with line-up decisions. I created comprehensive prompts making sure to include context such as my league scoring rules and available players. I told it to act as a leading fantasy football analyst. I asked it to interview me to gain additional insight into how I make line-up decisions and was clear with the task I needed it to do. I even made sure it checked its sources and didn't make up any statistics to reduce the potential for hallucination. Sometimes it helped. Other times it didn't.
Whether it's leveraging AI to make HR Technology decisions or using the AI enabled features within our HR tech solutions, we need to be vigilant when applying AI-style logic. Just as AI can sound convincing when telling me who to start or sit, HR tech enabled AI can be equally convincing when providing insights and recommendations for your organization and about your workforce. The reasoning sounds airtight but still fails come game time. AI recommendations in HR tech can miss context and ignore organizational nuance. In a time when we're all still working to figure out how best to apply AI in our personal and professional lives, we can't forget it's more critical than ever to keep the human-in-the-loop. Judgement, empathy, experience and intuition still matter, not only when making your line-up decisions but especially when it comes to people-centric systems.
So, how'd my season end you ask? I made it to the playoffs in both my leagues and recouped most of my entry fees. I lost in the first round in one league and advanced to the semis in the other. Unfortunately, one bad decision cost me a shot at the finals. My 2025 fantasy football season is over (much more to Wife's delight, than mine). The stakes are equally as high when making your HR technology decisions. A single, ill-advised platform decision can result in low employee adoption, burned-out leaders and HR teams, and years of technical debt.
What lessons did my fantasy football line-up decisions teach me about HR tech decisions? Use data, but ultimately own the call. As practitioners and leaders, we must remain accountable, even when the tools are smart. Trust your gut and experience, even if it conflicts a little with the math, expert analysis and peer recommendations. Pressure test the logic against your specific scenarios and do what's best for your organization. Finally, use a blend of all the tools available to you. From analyst research, AI insights, peer recommendations, and your own experience and reality. Remember, the best decisions happen when technology augments and accelerates decisions, not replaces it.
I'm curious how you all did in your fantasy leagues this year. Did you make the playoffs? How do you balance AI and human judgement when making your line-up and HR technology decisions? And if anyone is interested, here was my line-up for the semifinals:
