Developing the Values at Work -Seven-Level Hierarchical Processes

Speaker A On the principle there's nothing better than a good theory. Rather than doing it the way it happened to me, which is sort of working it out painfully over years and practical situations and so on, I'm going to jump to the theory and start with the theory, which will sound a bit abstract because once you know the theory, in fact, you don't have to spend years and years and years and years So when you look at things closely, you tend to find there's a seven level hierarchy called process. You just take this as given for the moment. In the 6th level you find that there are seven what I call identity types which are formed by reflection on each of the seven levels. Now, what do I mean by an identity type? An identity type I mean something which exists as what one might call a mentality. I wouldn't call it a personality, right? It's a mentality, a way of thinking a person has. And of course the way my work started was first being pushed against particular mentalities and the mentalities when they're not in people, when they're in the actual social situation appear as theories or approaches to things. In fact people of a particular mentality tend to have the view that everybody should think like they think and the way they articulate, the way they go about problems and they say that is the approach to problems. So this is this duality for those who've heard me talk before where I sort of say that the experiential realm, the psychosocial realm within which we operate exists simultaneously inside a person and also as a social product or interpersonal entity. Once you've got your identity types within a particular domain you have to plot these. You plot them on a two by two diagram, the standard two by two diagram and by convention the y axis is always personal or internal or self based. The x axis is always social or non self or external. I'm going to give you examples of all this but just wanted to get you the general feeling and actually there may be more than one option is what I found. In other words, you take the mentality and you decide we'll apply it approach, we're going to apply this to the whole of society. It'll have a different axis if we apply this to a person or we apply this to an organization. As you could imagine the spiral of growth or the stages of development inside a person is going to be different to the stages of development of an organization. So you have more than one option then an interesting thing happens because what you've got is a plotting of these seven things which are discrete and different and they have to be turned into a process and stages, a set of stages. And what happens is you move from the content being or doing to a context which is shaping or influencing, being or doing so that one approach might shape or influence and be a context for another approach. Whereas we're very resistant in ourselves to changing our approach. We're not so resistant to having our approach being applied in different contexts. And the key principle and assumptions are then what defines the stages? Now, why should there be a spiral of growth? Why should there be a move through these things? Well, this is absolutely fundamental. The thinking work that you do to develop this, you have to clarify what is driving this. Now, there's a little bonus, right, which is that the spiral itself turns into an interlinked seven level hierarchy. And if you apply the requisite duality, you get amazing guidance. So I'm going to demonstrate this in a particular case where I put a lot of work in, but you get the sort of feel of a sort of just speak a little bit about.

Speaker B What you mean by represent duality.

Speaker A Well, the spiral, you convert the spiral, which is because you've started with seven, you've ended up with seven things in a particular order. And you call the first one level one, the second one level two, the third one level three. Okay? And then you think about that and it becomes clear that there's a duality. Let me give you an example of other situation. In an organization, there's always a duality between what is organizational, what is official, what is authorized, what is impersonal, and the personal, what is professional, what is individual, what is distinctive, what exists outside the organization. So that's something, for example, in organizational life that you have to manage that duality. You can't pretend organizational life is completely impersonal. It's not, but nor is it totally personal. Do you follow what I mean?

Speaker B Official, unofficial duality.

Speaker A Yeah, official and unofficial. You have to articulate it. But the point is you look at this thing and you realize, no, we can never eradicate one half of this. And you become aware that a lot of the debates and difficulties center around people who imagine that you can abolish one half of the duality. Dualities are very, very important in the way the mind engages with the world. Okay, so I don't think there's anything else. No, no. It's a little thing. One of my early work was with Jimmy Algie. We worked in decision making. We're not going to be doing a two day workshop on decision making, but Jimmy and I worked with managers. We looked at the literature and it became clear that there were seven ways that decisions are made, only seven. And we've given them names and we've plotted them. So I'm doing all the work for you, but you can ask questions about this. And I hope the names are reasonably how can I get this on? Okay, can you see that I can make this a little bigger? I think that's good. Okay, now you can't see the axis. You've got to see the axis. Okay, so the decision making methods just to run through very very quickly the Pragmatic method you just do what's easy and expedient and just do it structuralist method you get the structure right and you put the right person in the right job and give him the authority and resource and let him get on with it. That's how you decide dialectic you compromise, find compromises between opposing views, the rationalist where the most important thing is to set your goals and set your objectives and develop a plan and so on. That's the rationalist, the empiricist well you've really got to face the problem, you got to get the information, you got to analyze the information and in fact the solution drops out of your analysis. It's obvious what to do because the facts speak for themselves. The imaginist you use intuition, imagination to enter into the spirit of the situation which then allows the resolution to emerge the systemicist you identify the factors in the system, how that system is evolving, what the key feedbacks are, the trigger points and what you can change to allow the thing to evolve. So they're the seven ways of making decisions although I shot through them and very quickly I would assume that everybody more or less has a sense of these seven they won't all be yours because part of the nature of it is that you tend to really like one way rather than another way. Now, this diagram itself has fascinating properties. We're not going to go through that. But you notice the axes, the focus on the person. So the methods that are higher up demand a greater sense of the person and an orientation to the person and their needs, both the decision maker and those about them. And here is you got to focus on task output so that you have greater focus on task output and you have this interesting phenomenon that the Pragmatism can operate in a very incrementalist way that doesn't have much of a focus on task outputs and tends to adapt to people and so on. So it's up to the left there or it can be very hard and driving and absolutely task and output focused and ignores how people feel and leads to cultures of stress dynamism right down the bottom. Okay? So there is your typology, your typology you have to convert that topology to something else a stage in the growth of management culture I think we can go up to 55, wasn't it? So when you're trying to strengthen the management culture what you do is you systematically introduce values you don't try and turn everybody first their Pragmatists, then turn them into structuralists, then turn them into dufollow but you allow people to decide in their own way but you try to alter the context by introducing principles and assumptions. So for example from the Pragmatism which is where the base level people have to do things in organizations the first step is to introduce structuralist assumptions. And of course this is what we all do when we bring in levels of work. And this is why levels of work is so powerful because it is the first stage in strengthening a culture. It's the first stage in organization development because the first thing you have to do is you've got to clarify roles, you've got to clarify teams, you've got to clarify accountabilities. So irrespective of whether you yourself are a rationalist or empiricist or whatever, you will benefit for an organization where the roles and accountabilities are clear. That's our position, isn't it? We all think that now the same thing occurs. That in the dialectic phase you're not trying to undermine or remove the assumptions that you've accepted in the structuralist phase. The assumptions of imports of hierarchy, accountability, teamwork, professional expertise and so on. But what JUSU is saying is that people have to be ready to compromise. People have to be able to see the perspectives of others. Because if that doesn't have you have empire building, you have people working in silos. It becomes very difficult to move things on. The next phase, of course, is for the organization to get a sense of its values and its goals. People can't work together on plans and goals if they're fighting each other. So you've have to have gone through the dialectic phase in order to be able to have an organization with a rationalist culture which means capable of actually having goals and meaning them, sharing values and meaning it. Once you have reached that, then pragmatism becomes a stronger thing. It becomes like a logical opportunism as opposed to a mindless opportunism because you take opportunities because the pragmatic values are still there. Do what's easy. So if you've got a plan or a value or a policy and the opportunity comes up, you grab it. But you don't have to work to do that because the pragmatist values are already there and so on. The next three values about three cultural phases about progressively increasing the culture to permit effectiveness and to provide knowledge. Not much knowledge is provided in stages two, three and four. But the essence of the empiricist culture is that you try to investigate and understand in terms of facts, empirical realities. In the imaginist phase you move beyond that to actually understand how people are feeling and what their aspirations are. These things don't actually come up in the same way before. And finally, in the systemicist phase you've got the flow. Organizations then adapt to social forces in society, society adapts to organizations. There's feedback, there's feedback inside the organization. And so a new set of values has to be developed. This process to push an organization through this. Well, why should an organization do it? We all know, don't we, how difficult it is to move from this disjointed incrementalism to a structuralist culture, don't we? We know. And it's not all that easy. You have to actually work at it. So you remember I was saying a moment ago that you have to understand the drivers should include the dialectic in.

Speaker B The sense that doesn't the dialectic also include the role relationships?

Speaker A No, the dialectic is the essence of a dialectic phase is that you come to suboptimal results which actually are better than people fighting in their own silos and denigrating other people. Now, the dialectic phase is where I.

Speaker B Understand your perspective rather than coming from.

Speaker A My perspective, I understand the other person's perspective. That's right. But when you create functional roles, roles for people, it's within a particular area of expertise, isn't it? They're It people or they are going to be in the finance department or they're going to be in marketing or whatever. And there is a considerable sort of cohesion that comes from people who share the similar values that are required to discharge that particular discipline, that domain of functioning. Okay, I think if we look at this next one, what happens one of the drivers is that is intrinsic, right? So first of all, the pressures for change are because you want always more achievement. That is the pressure in this system. The pressure may come from outside, like competitors or political forces or things like that, but a common pressure is inside. This is the point here that any particular culture tends to deteriorate because in the beginning there are the easy wins. You're a pragmatic manager. You go into a sleepy Pragmatic culture. Well, you can immediately say, let's do that. I'm going to get rid of that. We're going to change this. You get a lot of very easy wins, but at a certain point you've had those. You keep trying to be pragmatic and of course the thing starts becoming chaotic, it starts becoming firefighting, it starts becoming ultra short term. You start getting tripping over the decisions you made before. Exactly the same thing happens with levels of work on the structuralist phase, that you get a lot of early wins. You may get wins for two, three years, four years. But at some point what happens is or what often happens I'm not saying it always happens, and I'm not saying you have to have this complete development. It depends upon the achievement. It depends upon the pressures. But what commonly happens is you start getting empires, you start getting people working in silos, you start getting denigration between the people in the production sort of denigrate the salespeople, the people in the doctors denigrate the it people. You have this sort of mutual denigration that is a degeneration of the use of structuralist approaches. So the degeneration and limitations at a particular phase is a pressure for change. But in many organizations, they stick with it. And if the company's profitable, which it might be, that's just life in that organization. Everybody knows it. The company gets a reputation. Another pressure can be leader focused. Fire in the belly. I've met a CEO here I would say tends to have fire in the belly, wants things to be better, wants things to push on, doesn't have to wait for things to degenerate, to say look, we've achieved that. Now let's move on to the next thing because I think we can do much better. And amazingly or interestingly it can be managers and professionals themselves working within the organization. Can say look, we've got to do something different, we've got to move on, we got to overcome this. Say they've reached the dialect here we all get on with each other but we have no plans. We never seem to be able to work on goals. We can never or we're in the rashless phase. Nobody uses information here, we never investigate a problem, nobody checks what the results of the plans are. Okay? Now I told you, if you remember that there's a bonus that you get at the end of this. If you've got this right and you understand it, there's a bonus. And this bonus in this case is you get a structure that helps you work with your client in terms of helping them think about how to create organizational objectives and values, what to aim for. So what you see here in the center of this is the shared values and organization objectives which are a product of the rationalist phase. In the center there you've got the systemic the organization society coevolution social forces are going to change the organization. The organization cannot avoid responding to social forces or social trends they're sometimes called. But it's much better to see it as social force, a trend that's not a force you can ignore but if the trend is a force you can't ignore it. Society is changing. You must change and as you change you'll also be enabling society to change. That's a critical driver in actually getting values and objectives into an organization that otherwise people might not want to pursue or might not realize they pursue. Here we see the imaginous ones that you can get those objectives, organizational objectives much more alive if you can activate group energy, shared aspirations and also personal aspirations. The duality, who asked about the duality? The duality here as you can see is between what's shared and what's individual, what's group and what's individual. Okay? So organization society is simultaneously group and individual. There's no such thing as a group response to that. There's distinctive individual response to that. But in terms of aspirations and potential there is a difference between the aspirations that are shared in an organization and the aspirations that a particular individual in an organization may have. And you have to actually this is where empowerment comes in. So suddenly you have a structure that helps you see where a lot of the things that people talk about in working with organizations to get them to produce results and do what has to be done down the bottom fits. Here. We have our accountability. We never lost accountability. It's absolutely fundamental. It sits above all immediate, necessary action. But you notice that it can be bypassed when issues have to be resolved due to group differences and pressures. What? I wanted to show. Here is how. A staged process, by understanding it properly, it gives insight into something which is this isn't a staged process at all. Wherever the organization happens to be, we have got ourselves a framework. And a model for how any organization at any stage has to determine its values and objectives. So I'm just trying to explain the Power of getting the modeling correct. So we got the decision making topology correct. We got the axes correct. That gave us the spiral. The analysis of the spiral enabled us to construct this. So the spiral is about growth. Decision making is about decision making. Totally separate to growth. Growth of the organization is something separate again. And here we've got something separate again, but it is the power. And of course, we see this with levels of work. You get levels of work, right? It gets you onto compensation, it gets you onto this you get one thing absolutely you get the form right incredible creativity and power is released but this is a frame work for any management decision that affects the whole organization and wherever the organization happens to be.