Crucial Professional Path Change: Meeting with Elliott Jaques

Speaker A Well, I'm Warren Kinston. I'm based in London, although I travel a lot these days. But the most of the work that I did was actually done in London, in England. I was invited by Elliot to join him at the Brunell Institute of Organization and Social Studies in 1978 or 1979. At that time I'd finished, I was qualified fully in terms of my being a psychiatrist and being a psychoanalyst and I had been involved in the family therapy movement and I was interested in work and it was quite clear that my life would have to move into some sort of new path. In fact, I was at that time involved in a very big research project which I'd been raised money for and was directing in psychosomatic medicine. When I came to Bias, I came primarily because I'd read General Theory of Bureaucracy and it was a truly impressive book. I believe it is the best book that Elliot wrote. It was a culmination of everything that had come before. I think it was superior to anything that came afterwards. I think it was my admiration for the book which I openly expressed Elliot that led him to invite me to join him. And he put me into one of the groups that was working with Health Services and shortly after started his departure and he came back for the last part of his life to America and Canada. I learnt about levels of work specifically besides any reading I did from Ray Frobottom. Rafe Robotom was very deeply into, had been very deeply involved, involved in Glacier, and he'd written books about it, he'd written books about the method and he had a very deep understanding and I was very fortunate. He was happy to work with me on various projects. He actually retired around 85 80 and was happy for me to find the projects and then the two of us would work on them. And we worked on expanding levels of work to take in more that existed in organizations. But he was really my mentor in regard to really getting to grips with it, both the way he thought about it and his experience. But also he understood Elliot very well. And Elliot's thought the other person I should mention is Jimmy Algie. Jimmy was very opposed to Elliot's hierarchical approach and often the way he was opposed. He wasn't against accountability, but he didn't like the way Elliot talked about it, which was always at the extreme, who was accountable, whereas organizations didn't run in that fashion. But he'd done work on decision making and together we worked through the literature and ran seminars and worked with managers to identify seven distinct ways of deciding. And here was the paradigm again in a different way. On the one hand, the way of deciding was a mentality. It existed inside an individual's mind and a person might be described, for example, as a pragmatist or as an empiricist. And at the same time it existed in the psychosocial realm in the sense of an approach to problems which you could actually, for example, take people through and you can write down on a bit of paper the steps that had to be followed in order to come to a decision. So you had an approach that could be taught, for example, hence existing in the psychosocial realm inside a textbook and it also existed as a mentality.