On the Nature of Requisite Organization as a Discipline

Speaker A Found from the beginning of my work with Requisite that there would be get challenges either from my clients or from other colleagues. I'm looking back on it. One of the characteristics of these differences were questions about whether something made sense, whether something was true, whether something was useful. And looking back, I realized those three terms were bandied about as though they were the same. And I had to start digging, digging in to say when I would recommend a particular method to a client, and they'd say they'd ask me to justify it, I would say, you've got someone at Stratum Four, managing someone at Stratum Two. And it wasn't clear to me from the training I had had, from the reading I did strictly of Elliot's work and my conversations with him. Was I talking about what made sense, what was true, what was right? Is it bad that you have someone managing for managing someone? And I needed to dig down and find out what was the what are the aspects of what's called requisite organization that are true? What what's useful? What is it that that makes sense? It it started it took a number of years to get clear on this. And what I began to realize was that requisite organization, like any other applied discipline, medicine, civil engineering, et cetera, comprises three levels. And I have found it really useful in my work with clients and also in disputes with colleagues to distinguish the three levels. I started working very early on in understanding the nature of requisite organization as a discipline. One of the clues to it came from Elliot, who at one point know, I realize engineering, meaning things like civil engineering, isn't a science. It's an art grounded in a science. I don't know if that was his definition, but I found it a very clarifying comment and started separating what in what we call requisite organization is science from that, which is what I now call engineering. And within science, having been a student of Thomas Kuhn, his book Structure of Scientific Revolutions, began to realize that within what we call science, there are really two levels. So I want to lay out these three levels of requisite organization, what I call Conceptual Framework Science and engineering. And it's the same three levels that any such discipline has medicine, Civil engineering, and so forth. They all have those three levels. But I'll skip with requisite organization because I find it a statement within the field. Requisite organization, if you're not clear on whether that's a statement of Conceptual Framework Science or engineering, debates about it are going to be very muddied. Start at the top. Conceptual framework. This is a conceptual aspect of what Krum called a paradigm. The conceptual framework is the system of concepts that we use to understand the phenomena that we study. The phenomena we study are people at work. That's what records organization is concerned. Now, if we look at people, there are many ways of looking at people. I mean, some people do it astrologically. They want to know how is the Leo getting on with the scorpio? The behaviorists have their own framework which is devoid of mental concepts. Elliott, in his work on human beings and the workplace, in part came up with his own framework. For example, the Requisite concept of human capability as comprising the absence of absence of minus T, so the absence of personal dysfunction along with cognitive capacity, skills, and knowledge and valuing the work on the role, those four components, that's a model that comes from the conceptual framework. When we look at human beings, we're not looking at a whole array of competencies, of 150 competencies. We're looking through a lens that says there's cognitive capacity, skills and knowledge value work in the role and the absence of personal dysfunction. What the conceptual framework does for us is it helps us make sense of the data that we collect. And it may be useful here to contrast this with other writings in management. When you look at, for example, Jim Collins'Good to Great, he very explicitly says there's no theory here. And in my terms that would be to say there's no conceptual framework. What he's saying is I just collect all the data I can think of and then we try to sort through and see what data turned out to be most important. He was quite explicit in saying he was proud of it. I mean, he boasts of it in the introduction to the book and makes several references afterwards. There's nothing theoretical about this. Now, it's interesting to me that when he has data that show that a CEO who talks about and talks up his organization seems to produce a higher functioning organization than one produced by a CEO who talks about and talks up himself. There are many ways we could look at this and we could say, for example, what's the board of directors doing here? Is the board of Directors holding the CEO accountable for acting and talking in certain ways. He talks about this as being level five leadership, which he doesn't use the term I probably recall correctly, doesn't talk about it explicitly as a personality variable. But it comes off as that. And to me, that's because his conceptual framework, his way of understanding human behavior is through the personality. You see no reference in the book to cognitive capacity or anything like it. You see, I don't recall any reference to accountability and all of this simply to say he has a conceptual framework that he's not being explicit about. Elliot was explicit about his, and so he's very explicit about his model, about his theory, about his concepts, and considered it very important to give unifical definitions to all of the terms. So we have terms like cognitive capacity, terms like strathm that are unique to Elliott's conceptual framework. Kuhn says repeatedly in Structured Scientific Revolution that a paradigm is not directly testable against the data in the way in which a scientific law is. And the reason is that your conceptual framework is your very way of making sense of the data that you receive. Your conceptual framework assimilates the data gives meaning to them. When I debated my colleague about whether you could line human beings up from least to most, lowest to highest in cognitive capacity, if I were to do that, she would assimilate those same data as saying, oh, there are particular areas of skills and knowledge you're interested in her, and that's how you're lining those people up. And she'd assimilate those data to that. If you think that data can actually change a conceptual framework in any straightforward manner, find someone who takes a different point of view from yours in relation to evolution and creation. Conversations I've had with creationists, any data might give them about evolution. They assimilate to their creationist point of view, just as I do the same with their data. You change your conceptual framework only in terms of crisis and only in times of crisis. You change your conceptual framework when the overwhelming weight of what you have to assimilate to your conceptual framework, it just doesn't feel like it fits anymore. But as Kumi said, the history of revolutions in science is the history of people finally saying what used to seem like an unimportant exception, a datum that doesn't quite fit into my conceptual framework, becomes more and more salient. It becomes more and more bothersome. A new candidate appears on the scene that explains phenomena and maybe predicts phenomena that couldn't be understood previously. Then there is this. So, you know, when we look at the move in history of science from Aristotle, who know the reason why an arrow falls to the ground is because of the four elements earth, air, fire and water. It's made primarily of earth. It wants to get to the ground. That's the natural place of Earth. And he said the reason why a heavier object falls faster than a lighter object is there's more Earth to it. Therefore, this greater desire for it to get to the ground, give or take. 2000 years later, galileo never invented an intentionometer to find out whether arrows really have an intention of hitting it ramp and comparing arrows to living beings. When he eliminated the reference to desire, when he simply described here's how an object falls, it was a change of conceptual framework. And what he was saying was, doesn't make sense to me that arrow an arrow isn't the kind of thing that would have a desire. Doesn't make sense to me that an arrow would want to get to the ground. So that's the whole conceptual framework area. And again, I think the sticking point. There are some people out there who really think that we are all created equal and that's a very important lens for them. And if they believe that cognitive capacity as a dimension is a myth. My experience is that's an argument you're not going to get very far with. You're not going to get any further than you're going to get with an evolutionist with Hamilton creationist. So to me, that's a sticking point. I think we have some conceptual framework issues within our field. How we define this notion of minus T, I think we can clear that up. I don't think we're actually at great ODS with each other, so that's the conceptual framework and its role within the discipline is to help us make sense of the data we collect through our senses.