Major Contributions to the Field: Organisational Design The Work-Levels Approach

Speaker A That book and the spinoffs has been enormously influential but in ways of which we can perhaps discuss but would like to say a few words about why we actually wrote it. Because you get to the heart of, if you like, problems that were accounted with Elliot's work. If you say Elliot plus Wilfred's work and the unanswered questions and issues that hit their work left, if I sort of speak for a second or so on mean basically what Elliot and it took me some years to sort of really understand what was going on. But basically what Elliot and Wilfred did was produce a wonderful set of tools whereby you could take an organization and strip it down to the minimum number of levels. And I often in lectures talk about you are presented with a high rise tar block of apparent tar block and then you use the tools of Wilfred and Elliot and you bring it down to four or five layers. And so we had this in itself was probably an enormous weapon against bureaucracy. Elliot was often wrongly accused of being a bureaucrat and somebody was in favor of and in fact, he was very anti bureaucratic in this sense because you could tame the bureaucracy. But what we ended up with were buildings but we didn't know what was on each floor. So you knew you had a first floor, second floor, third floor with managers of different ranks but you had no way of knowing what the different work was being done at each level. And that was one major problem. The second major problem was that with the best will in the world and we were devoted students of Elliot's we couldn't make time span work in a way in which could be readily used. We tried desperately and Rafe and I reluctantly came after many years to conclusion that the clients weren't buying or the clients might buy it, but we couldn't actually implement. It was just too complicated, too difficult. And so I think I propose that we move away from time span and that we adopt a system of trying to identify the collection of distinctive activities that took place at each level and also move away from time span for another reason. Because Elliot's work focuses on the role of the individual and individual development of individual capability I was much more interested in the way in which you can construct organizations to deliver objectives and that's taking his work, taking a totally different stance. You start with the question about how do you construct an organization to do X, Y and Z, their social services organization? And to answer that question, time span itself won't help you, nor will the notion of manager Iran. What you need is a set of words and descriptions tightly conceptualized which will say, well, do you want a work level three, four, five or six organization? And here is how the organization will look, not what sort of individual need to fit into it. And that comes later. So I think I stood the thing completely on its head and moved into that path and.