Time Span of Discretion and Levels of Work

Speaker A Just to say a word or two about the relationship between time spent of discretion and, if I can call them, the billis robotom work levels. As somebody at Blesser Institute in management, of course, I got deeply into time span theory and time span measurement. It's an extremely recondite area. I think at that time there were perhaps six people in the world beyond Ali Jacks who could make some claim to be time span endless. The trouble was, we never agreed with the answers one to another. I'm second to nobody in my admiration and my valuation of Elliot Jackson's discovery of the time element in work. I think it's a great long term significance in social science. But time span of discretion as a tool for job evaluation, I think, just doesn't work. I remember a colleague of mine, John Evans, in a fairly abstract discussion about measurement, pointing out that measurements had developed historically to settle disagreements between people who couldn't agree. Things like, does that log fit across that river or not? Or are they as much weight of potatoes as you promised for all that honey I gave you? And scales and rules were developed. And after they were developed, all intelligent people or educated or half educated people had to say, yes, that's what the rule says. Time span in my time span measurement, in my experience, is not like that at all. It's highly controversial. Different people will counter different answers. And as Elliot points out in his own writing, sometimes it's like trying to measure cotton wool or a length of a piece of twisted string. You had to go and ask the manager to make a decision, but he never went further and thought of the question. Decisions aren't measurements, and time span measurements have not been used widely, as far as I'm aware, for job evaluation. The other use, of course, for time span has been in establishing work levels and describing the levels of work that you want people to do. I think it has some use, certainly, as reinforcing doubts about work levels you may be looking at. But it really can't work as a description, can it? You don't go to a manager who's puzzled and say, and as his or her super manager say, well, I want you to work as an 18 month time span. Dune far better, in my view, to go along and say, what I'm expecting you to do is to look not just at the individual problems and cases, but I want you to set up Jim a system to keep the whole thing under control. Jim knows now what sort of thing he must do. So what am I saying? I'm saying that the discovery or the unveiling of the time element in work is of great significance, and I think we'll just need to go on understanding more and more of that significance. But as a practical tool in organizational design or job evaluation, my own experience has made me very doubtful that it works. Whereas the work level descriptions which David, Billis and I developed seem to be able to be understood very quickly and used very quickly.