A Different Interpretation of Elliott Jacques\' Levels of Work

Speaker A We did come out with some ideas that slightly differed from some of Elliot's original formulations. And I guess perhaps I could now create dissension and mercy. Elliot thought there were seven levels. Now, he had a notion about quintaves and successive quintaves. We were never able to see a lot of evidence of that. There is a very fine senior researcher, Fisher, who's done a lot of work on developmental stages, and he has come out with seven levels, which are for all the world, like Elliot's seven levels. But he didn't come out with another quintave here. He didn't come out with another quintave down there. He came out with seven levels. So what we have sort of come to is that with Elliott's seven levels and thinking about Stroiford's complexity theory, there probably aren't seven levels of conceptual complexity. What we think is that there probably are three broadbands. What you'll have is one broadband down here where individuals either are moving through or they're plateaued and they're dealing with the real world. Down here. They're dealing with objects they can touch, objects they can manipulate with work products that require hands on. So this would be, I think, where leaders learn how to live with and interact with other people. So I think a lot of social intelligence learning occurs down at this first level. To compare that to the army, that would be the level, I think, of the company and maybe up to the battalion. So this is where leaders are learning teamwork. They're learning how to create teams, they're learning how to structure situations so that teams can learn. And maybe like in the special operations community where teams become learning organizations, little mini learning organizations all by themselves. So this is a kind of social systems learning that I think is absolutely crucial. As we go further and further into the information age, the logic of a pure command and control organization is going to be increasingly difficult to make work. Organizations that are tall organizations, hierarchically structured for up and down information flow and approval of decisions. These organizations are slow, they're ponderous, they're not very agile, and they aren't going to have a great deal of competitive advantage in this new age that we're dealing with. So the notion of pushing down decisions to the point at which enough information can be brought together with the right policy for decision, this is a business of a new kind of leadership which is shared, which is problem solving oriented and which is strongly developmental oriented. Heifet speaks about this a little bit in some of his books. So this is basically how we see that first level. It's learning how to lead people and to make teams work and to create the context in which a team can be very powerfully, self directed, but mission focused. The second broad level, we think, is the mid level it's brigade and division in the old army structure. We think that this level requires strong abstraction capability. We think this level is very analytically oriented. It's a resources allocation kind of level. So at that level, your leadership is looking at the resources available to do the job, the mission, the various missions that must be done, and the policy context within which those missions must be accomplished. And that's where those functions come together. And battalions are missioned to do the job. But the work at Brigade and Division is largely abstract. It requires a mental model of the battlefield or what's going on, and that mental model is then used as a way of missioning those units that will do the actual work. We think the third level up, and this is tied in with Elliot's notion of time horizon. If you ask someone at Division level or Brigade level for the time horizon of their work, they will probably give you a short time horizon, one or two years. As a matter of fact, I had a corps commander once give me a time horizon of two years. But what they're thinking about there is largely their command tenure and how long they have to do a specific training job. And training cycles in the army historically were about two years long. So I think that culturally conditioned, that kind of response. But if you ask a division commander about his resources flow and what he's planning to do with his resources flow, he'll tell you a much longer time frame that'll correspond to the Ppbes cycle of five to seven years. Because he's responsible for being sure that the right paperwork gets in to reserve funds for longer term tasks that he's responsible for putting funds in for. My Corps commander, who gave me a two year time horizon, insisted on it until I asked him about the infrastructure at the installation where he commanded. And at that point in time, I got something like a 15 year time horizon. So the time horizon is tied in with resources flow and with the management of resources according to priorities and established projects. So that goes on very strongly at that mid level. I think the third level up has a time horizon that exceeds what's possible to plan for now. It has to be concepts. And there was a concept development process in the army some years ago that had an outlook of about twelve to 15 years, and that was managed to the higher levels. So your lieutenant generals and generals need to be able to envision what needs to be. And that's an integrative process that goes beyond concrete planning for the expenditure of resources into a sense of what research and development needs to be done by when in order to enable this to start. By when? And oh, by the way, when do I need to start getting resources put into place so that this can be made to happen at that point in time? And then, of course, beyond that, oh, by the way, if I make this decision right now. What are my opportunity costs and what's the duration of my opportunity costs? And of course, that's a key kind of way of looking at what's possible way downstream. So just as a pure example on that, an aircraft carrier, if I'm the Chief of Naval Operations and I want another aircraft carrier so I can put my captain on it, I'll know that that's going to incur opportunity costs for me over the next 40 to 45 years. In the Air Force, probably most B 52 heavy bombers are older than their pilots, another 40 to 50 year operational life and 40 to 50 years of opportunity costs. So at the executive level, it's necessary for the individual to have the capacity to look forward that long, to ask, can I afford opportunity costs that will run over that length of time? Well, that's sort of a rough look at some of the thinking that we've done about Stratified systems theory, about time horizons and about the broad levels that we came out thinking about derivative from, but not quite the same as Elliott's 17.