Concerns Regarding the Use of Requisite Organization Based Concepts and Tools

Speaker A If we contrast that. One of some of the things that really worry me about the use of what's called requisite organization is, first of all, because I think there's an incomplete set of tools and a lot of people don't understand the tools. That are available, not just from people like Carl Cage and myself, but other people contributing, whether that's with Warren Kinston or a range of people who are developing those ideas. But also because there's a sense in which my concern is that if you don't understand about mythologies, about the way people see the world, particularly if you don't understand about symbolism and other aspects, which I particularly go into now. But the relationship between authority and power, then all of those terms, all of those tools of requisite organization can be used in a power context. And I've seen that happen time and time again whereby, for example, particularly with the levels of work instead of which is their intention this is clearly not criticism of the theoretical constructs. Instead of them being enabling, they are restricting. And that is symbolized in language such as levels. You're a level one, I'm only a level one. And in fact, that was demonstrated to me in one organization where we were doing a team leadership exercise. It was actually on a beachfront and it was a raft building exercise and there were two characters walking along the beach and they were big guys, beards, leathers and they had pit bull walking along the beach. There was, of course, managers in the organization. The rafts were just falling apart. It was just dreadful. Anyway, they're walking along and I was videotaping this and they walked up to me and they said looking at this chaos and they just said, Use from the Smelter said, yeah. And then he says, the other one says, Use. Managers said, yeah, that managers. And then he grinned with his pit bulls. And he says, We's just level ones. Just walked off. That was just using it the other way around. But the number of times I've seen that language creep into the organization and it being used to box people, constrain people to limit their authority. And that's of great concern to me that this work and this material can be used constructively, creatively and in conjunction with a lot of other tools not just the ones I've talked about but Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma Dupont safety approaches an awful lot of things out there that to me are very complementary to this. Or it can be used in a very restrictive to use the theory itself I think in a three complexity linear way. In fact, produce the opposite result.