Speaker A Tell you I don't know if you think it's a good idea or not. Would you like just to jot down one sentence what you mean by performance in performance appraisal, which we all agree is extraordinarily important, and tell me as a practicing manager what this performance is that I'm to appraise. Meaning just a very simple point. What do I look for? This isn't the purpose of getting a definition out, but just to see if there is just a clear cut agreement among all of you, which would be very interesting. We have three offers.
Speaker B Playing a role.
Speaker A Sorry? Playing a role. Playing a role. Right. Mother.
Speaker B The nearness of fit of an accomplishment to a preconceived standard.
Speaker A Right. Which would be very much the same.
Speaker B The way a person handles the task situation.
Speaker A That's different, I think, isn't it? Yeah.
Speaker B Conviction past.
Speaker A Now tell you the reason I bring this out. The definitions that are most common are in fact the common definitions of performance. They have an enormous impact in organizations you play right into. Except for Dan's definition. What managers find easiest now recognize we talk about performance appraisal. Is that right? I think I made myself clear what's the performance and performance appraisal mean. The general approach that we encourage managers to take is what do you mean by performance appraisal? What you do is you have your objectives set right and then you see how near your subordinate got to meeting those objectives. Is that right? If he met the objectives or she met the objectives, that's good performance, presumably. And that's performance appraisal, it's objective and you count. And I think you missed the whole ballgame in doing so. And this has got some interesting consequences unless you do what Dan was suggesting. That is, judge not in terms of whether or not I achieved the output, but the implication what you were saying, your judgment of how well I did or didn't in doing so, that's a very different game. If you take that game, that means that one individual who did not achieve the stated objectives had better performance in your sense than another one who did. Is that right? The main point I want to make is that there are two different things. We're using the same term. Do you get the two different things? One, whether or not I achieved the output. Two, how well in your judgment, I did in doing so. Two different concepts. Seriously? They agree. One term feels rife. It's either one term for range of concepts or a range of terms for the same kind of thing and you never quite know which. And these all have effects on real managers. And the common use of performance, which is the one that was most commonly brought out here this morning, is the one that encourages managers to believe that their task ends when they've decided whether or not their subordinates have made their objectives. And whole performance appraisal schemes are based on that Steve just working on one. The Army's Officer Effectiveness Reporting System requires that you write out the objectives at the beginning of the year and then you write down whether they were achieved. And everybody believes it's a far school exercise. Now, I'm going to move on to the main point I want to make about all this just before we break for coffee. That what we're into, I believe at least are issues of the nature of social reality and getting our hands on it in terms of what exists out there that we really can define and that raises some real problems. And in getting back into some of the problems in the development of the natural sciences as we know them at the present time and they had exactly, I believe the same kinds of problems we've got and we can learn a great deal from their experience. For example, heat material is hot. Why? General assumption heat is a liquid called caloric that flows from one substance to another. Nobody has seen it yet, but that's the standard working assumption. This is factual and matter of fact. The early chemists like Boyle were still working with that conception of heat when he formulated Boyle's Law and things like that. These were the early days of chemistry. Now how would you know? This is nature reality. That's their problem. How would you know? Because the assumption now is that heat is a property of materials. Is that right? Property having to do with the rate of impacting, rate of molecular activity. How do you know?
Speaker C Design an experiment which provides a test of the concept. In other words, that you were talking about the philosopher's term earlier. The important thing about that term presumably is the philosopher's emphasis. It's an imaginary, it's an idea. The question of naming a phenomenon and then having the term twinned with the phenomenon rather than being a free floating concept anymore and then starting to count those things to establish the dimensions of that now operationalized concept. And my reading of what you were saying to us earlier about being on the edge of alchemy on trailing edge of alchemy is that we have a lot of words floating around that are not particularly well shared as concept. And we need to reach the point where we can put our finger on phenomena to attach the words to, but then start and then the definition of the word is in the phenomenon, not in dictionary.
Speaker A The thing that struck me about it to do experiments you've got to have some instruments and you haven't got a thermometer and that gets difficult. In fact, this got sorted out. I think this is historically correct with the development of thermometer and the discovery that the room seemed to be going up and down, getting hotter and colder at the same rate as certain kinds of liquids went up and down. And I was amused because the other day doing some reading that look, I'm just going to describe this for a second. The original thermometers were standardized. What they noted was that if you took a test tube and put it in a flat vessel of water, that you catch a little air thing inside, and the water comes up a bit, and that if you warm it, this goes down. If you cool the air in it, this goes up. You get this up and down movement with hotter and colder. And the materials they used were body temperature at the time. They would hold the thermoscope, as it was called, and as it warmed, this would go down and then cooled it with an ice salt mixture, which was the coldest material they had at the time. And then it would come up. And Fahrenheit graduated the thing by saying, okay, I'm going to call this .0 with ice mixture, and I'm going to call this with body temperature, 100. And that's how the Fahrenheit thermometer was graduated in the first place. And that's why water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212, those inconvenient levels. And I've always laughed. I said, yeah, I think Dr. Fahrenheit must have had flu the day. He's reading a lovely book the other day. Cooper a physicist, and apparently I was wrong. He thinks that Fahrenheit used his wife and that his wife had flute. Now, once you start getting measuring instruments, you move into a different world. And let me just throw one last proposition to you for the moment before we break that this, that somewhere around the way. If we're going to develop a social science and make this proposition that just as the natural scientists have had to do, we have to learn to distinguish between things and properties of things. And for me, this is what definition is all about. Is heat an entity? Is it a fluid? Or in the language that we would now use, is it a property of entities? It's not always easy to tell cognitive complexity in an individual. Is that an entity? Is that a thing? Is that a property of a human being? Or in psychology, where we have problems that the physicists don't have, is it somehow a rating or a judgment? The kinds of data we get with questionnaires is the question clear? What is it? It is what would you go out and look for? And I gather a number of you are not uninterested in that topic in terms of what came up last night. How do you recognize potential, current potential, future potential? Is potential a thing? Is it a property of people? Or is it some kind of thing that you get with Keshina ratings? And how would you know? Is motion? This is Newton, the, so called Newtonian revolution. Is motion inherent in the object? Or do objects move only and so long as they are pushed? Modern physics started with the redefinition of that one. The assumption up to new time was that objects moved only if pushed. Remove the application of force and they stop. And he comes along and says, no, things will continue to move unless they are caused by a force to slow down or speed up or change direction and so on. These are major shifts and these issues are crucial. And I think getting them right somehow is essential to learning how to look for things and develop adequate theories. And the proposition I want to put to you is this, and that is proposition about three different kinds of definition that I think we have to get under our belts. One, and you can take a look at it in quantitative terms. There's a problem here when we think of social entities, social things, I don't know if you think that way easily or not. Our problem is that our entities are all processes. They're all events that all have duration. And so you can't just look at them all at once the way you can that you got to look at them by seeing something start somewhere where you decided it was starting and then see it move and shift across. You can't look at them in the material sense, which is where the natural science started. So entities are things that you ought to be able to look at somehow and see. And the quantification issue, I think, is the useful one here. You quantify by counting processes. Psychologists these days unashamedly call everything measurement, and they will even talk about measuring the size of a football crowd. Most people would say you count it's. So if you can count them, that is, there's one and there's another and there's another, then you got yourself an entity. Entities have properties, and we define entities by boundary definition. That is, you said boundaries. Here's the definition of the set. And anything that will fit within these boundaries is a member of the set. It's categorization properties. And the attempt in physics to get clear on what they meant by properties led to their description of the so called process of measurement. I'm going to call it measurement. I couldn't argue that point. I just want different language. And the mode of definition is operational definition, which I think has been abused in the social sciences. It means explicitly a description of the instrument that you would use and how to use it for measuring the particular phenomenon. That is, you measure temperature in terms of a description of how you build and use a thermometer. You measure electrical resistance by a description of how you build an ometer and operate it. And that's standard. And to my surprise, at least one learned that there aren't properties all over the place. The natural sciences have got something of the order of 95 properties now identified. That is 95 measuring instruments. They're not infinite by a long shot. And up until the 16th century, when alchemy shifted into the modern natural sciences, there were, what, four you could measure mass, you could measure length, you could sort of measure time and specific gravity. That was about it. Then I like to think of attributes. Attributes, and you get at attributes. Those are individual judgments about entities. And that's the basic, almost unique mode of measurement in the human sciences at the present time. This is Keshinaire techniques. And what you get are judgments individually. They're idiosyncratic and not shareable. They're shareable in the sense that you can state, yeah, I would rate him or her three on a scale of zero to ten, liberal to conservative, political outlook, that kind of thing. And what you get are individual ratings. And we've been inclined to call this measurement and are going to argue that it won't do, and that what we really have to do is to get into this area where we can begin to identify properties, to develop measuring instruments for doing so. And a major one the present time, I would think of as trying to develop a measuring instrument for getting at cognitive power in the individual. Cognitive power in the individual. Let me just illustrate that, and I'll stop here for a moment. Yeah, I would argue that this is where we are, as far as we call it competence. Cognitive competence or cognitive capability in the individual. That what have been described, and I wish to hell now I hadn't written it. I had the courage of my convictions in writing the book, and I'd gone over to the language of cognitive categories, because that's what I've described finn and I call them cognitive levels, I think level one, level two, level three, and got into those dreadful problems. But all the stuff on cognitive capability, at least in requisite organization, has to do with the description of state, the assumption that an individual is using primary sets or serial sets or so on. And if stuff is right, one gets a particular cognitive category between something called three months in a year, let's say, or two years, and one is assuming particular kinds of cognitive capability to handle levels of work or role complexity of this order. There still remains the problem of how you measure points within that working assumption. Cognitive power is a property of the individual human being and ought to be measurable, not an entity problem. Find a measuring instrument for measuring cognitive power. Well, at least you're a step forward if you can ask the question, because you can begin to look. And that's what a lot of us are doing at the present time, busy looking. And this is the problem the natural scientists have had forever. They still got the damn problem with hardness. They know hardness is a property of materials. At least that's certainly the working assumption. But how do you measure it? Get kind of rough rating stuff at the time moment, but not effective measurement. So I think there are a lot of problems here, and that's why the emphasis on definition. I think if we don't get some kind of agreement even on our starting entities that it becomes awfully difficult to do work and awfully difficult to share experience. I've been raising a lot of issues here for the moment. Can we take a break there and see what comes up afterwards? Hoping you don't find this perhaps a bit too esoteric like you gather. I don't think it is and I don't think it is in this particular sense. I don't believe that it will be possible to get substantial total organizational change unless the issues I'm raising are clarified and understood and that without it we will not understand what we're asking people, for example in industry and commerce and so on in bureaucratic hierarchies to do. If I'm right, we're asking them to change their whole outlook to the nature of the world, nothing less than that and at your peril do that. So I think what we get into is little opportunities open up a bit of performance appraisal. Can't you help us develop that here or could you help us with our compensation scheme there or a bit of organizational structuring in another place and so on. And that as you get into that and the implications of what you're doing begin to become clear projects for some reason or they tend to shut down. Now, that's a not uncommon experience. I happen to believe that it's because the scale of what we're asking people to do is more apparent to them than it is to us. Now, I happen to believe that is a very very practical issue that I've just stated and I don't think we can just get by. We got picked up every damn time. Olga brought out a beauty. Does anybody have a copy of Requisite Organization? I could kick myself on that into some discussion, boys and so on. Do you see here's a lovely definition? Yeah. Any task this is on page 16 has both a what to be accomplished and a by when. What I didn't read you is what was in the parenthesis that follows that good clear stuff. Any task has both a what to be accomplished parenthesis the output or the goal or the objective. And if you think that little bit stuff doesn't lead to confusion I can give you chapter and verse. I had this thrown back. What the hell do you mean? Well, actually I did define output later on as the answer and it's not the what. No, sorry. The output is defined as the what is the output, the what by when is the goal and objectives are something else altogether. When you're talking managers about work and you've got things like that floating around they will raise them with you every time because they expect to be able to read something and they entitled to expect it and for things to say what you mean? And they got enough confusion on their own hands distinguishing between outputs, goals, objectives, functions and so on. Have you been through these discussions with managers and they ask you for help and you come along and say, oh well, it's a goal and objective output. You know what I mean? And that doesn't help anybody and they know it doesn't help and we will not get away with it, thank goodness. These are the practicalities of what I'm talking about. As I say, I think there is a total shift in the view of the nature of social reality that's involved here. It starts with the view that it is possible to see social things. For me, a stratum is what? Is that an entity? An organizational stratum? Is that an entity? Is that a property of an entity or is that a rating? I'm going to argue it is a thing and that you can go out and see one, but you've got to learn how to see it. And this is probably the most basic point I'd like to make is this that these concepts that we have literally well, you know, this, this is old stuff. It's just that damn it all, it comes home and hits you in the gut when you realize you're in the middle of it and that your concepts influence the way you think and what you see. Everybody's always known that that's us. And what you don't see is potential. Is that an entity? Can you see one? If so, some of you probably not uninterested in the question how do you go out and see one? Is that right? It's that practical question what do you look for? Now if you start out with the conception that well, I think it's a thing do you see a social thing, a psychological thing? If you start out with the assumption that these things are continuous, which is the genuine gen general assumption in the human sciences it's called a normal distribution curve. We don't get changes in state. We do not have a change of state conception. By and large there's a bit in Piaget in developmental psychology, but the assumption about IQ for example, is some people rate higher and some lower but it's continuous. If that's your assumption, that's what you will look for and that's all you'll be able to see. If you start with a different assumption that it's likely to be discontinuous, which is the assumption that our good old alchemists and metal founders always took for granted, you actually will look for something else. Now, I don't know if I'm making a point here. I mean this deadly seriously the impact of a theory. My hunch is probably that most of you think that when you see a snowflake land and it turns to water that you think you see that snowflake change to water. Is that right? That hadn't dawned on you? That that's just your theory? Depends on your theory. A more primitive actual conception is that there's something curious about snowflakes when they land, they tend to disappear. And curiously, every time a snowflake disappears very often let me put it this way. I don't think they did statistical analyses, but very often a drop of water condenses in its place. And who were you? Sophisticates to say that snow and water a snowflake and water are the same thing? That's a very sophisticated theory. It's what you see, it's what you think you see. It's not a bad observation. It turns out to be a better theory than the other. Particularly when the chemists learn to analyze snow and find it's the same H 20 content as water and that steam is the same H 20 because then they're able to make the statement that H 20 comes in different states without knowing about H 20. Do you realize you can't make a statement is it water that comes in crystal state as well as liquid state, or is it ice that comes in liquid state? What's the substance? Argue, just talking with Ian and Flyn, that this will come up this afternoon like nobody's business. When you're trying to judge potential, is there any way of getting a better grip on what you see? And I think all of us have had the experience of what a testing issue that is when you're trying to look at it, is that right? And you don't know quite all that clearly what you're looking for. Anybody ever had that experience?
Speaker C There's an additional problem potential, which is you're looking at the snowflake and anticipating the drop of water.
Speaker A Well, who is in potential? I don't think you're looking at anything for the time being. I think we're having difficulty seeing a damn thing. It's why we use clinical teaching methods, apprenticeship teaching sort of thing, use examples. Some few people clearly become quite good at seeing, but the difficulty getting through to articulations and other problems, I happen to believe I think this is a testing time. See what you think this afternoon. We've been talking a lot about this. I think it might well be that during this coming year, based on Jillian's Painstaking work, 14 years, Jillian, something like that, time goes by. Just reading something I wrote in 1961, which was an initial attempt to try and describe what discontinuity might be about, I was very touched. There were some formulations called level one perceptual concrete, level two, not stratum or anything in those days, the imagine imaginary concrete and you can get those difference. Very easy to see. And level three, the conceptual concrete and level four concept formation and level five theory formation. You know, all those theories that the fives generate as an attempt. What we're fighting for is what to look for. That's where we are. What do you look at? The whole point about getting through to a formulation is a it allows you better to know what you're looking for and what you actually might be seeing without knowing it. Because we're certainly seeing something. I think the present stage is that what we've got this is by way of illustration, is the ability of some trained people to distinguish, I'm going to call use the term category here categories of cognitive complexity. And I think we can distinguish categories of task complexity, but we don't know how to measure level. The point about that is that that's a good feeling because at least you can identify something that you'd like to try to do because unless you identify it, you'll never look. In other words, I don't think we know if we can identify somebody currently operating in, say, category or three months to a year. Category two. The question of how to measure the level of complexity or level of cognitive power. Let me put that the individual within that category we haven't got yet. That is, I can recognize water and watery states, and I can distinguish between hot water, medium tepid water and cold water that is high three, medium middle three, and low three. But I don't know how to measure degrees of temperature. Don't have a measuring instrument yet. But there's a proposition here, and that is that it is a property of a human being. And if it is a property of a human being, ought to be measurable. Actually, some of us been using the term for the measure time horizon of the individual, so got at least a statement of the unit without knowing how to measure it. But that's a step forward. I wouldn't even know what term to look for. If I'm talking about task complexity, and I talk about this as a category two task, that is, a task requiring diagnostic accumulation. In order to solve that's categorization, I find my mind just closes down when I think what could a possible unit of measurement be that would give you level of task complexity within category two state? You with me to expand on that a little bit.
Speaker B Are you saying that the time span of the task assignment is not then the measure you're looking at?
Speaker A Time span is a term that I use for measuring the level of work in a role. I use the phrase target completion time for the target time for a task, and target completion time of a task will give you a measure of the minimum level of complexity of that task, but will not place it more accurately than that. In other words, a target task with a two year target completion time will be at least two year level of complexity, but might be much more. So I want to make a this is the language thing again. I make a sharp distinction between task target completion time and time span measurement. But you see the kind of discussion we can get into without some agreement just on simple language.
Speaker B You think that it's going to be time, a time related measure. Sorry, you said that your mind goes blank, but that's hard to imagine. Could you start with do you think it's going to be related to time span in some way?
Speaker A I don't know. My gut feel says no. And that the discussion we were just having in coffee break and that we're dealing with somehow measurable units of information processing, complexity, numbers of variables floating around and so on. Perhaps more around in that neighborhood, but it's all right. It's a nice feeling to be unclear, if you see what I mean. There's nothing more encouraging than an empty feeling to send you seeking something. But these are the kinds of issues and it'd be quite useful if we could get some agreement on where we are, if you see what I mean, and sort of step on off from there. These are very, very practical problems and as I say, the major issue for me is what one meets in the field. Unless you have conditions which are very rare and difficult to obtain, where you can have what I would call a full scale social analytic relationship with a company, that is, the CEO is in on it and all the senior executives are in on it and so on. And they recognize that this is a developmental field and they're not buying a management consultancy package and they don't necessarily want stuff delivered overnight. You know, that common situation that we meet in the field and where you can sit back and think with people under those conditions, people are willing to take stuff like this in their stride after a period of time. Carl right. So there we are, as I say, your HR, your personnel people and so on, smell this stuff a mile away. And for good reason, just on that. I've been looking very carefully for the last couple of years now, systematically, just to have a look at current HR personnel training organization development practices. And not necessarily for discussion, no, but I'd be interested in your observations on this. I have not found any that after a honeymoon gain period in the very short term that are not in the mid and long term counterproductive, that is, you're worse off as a result of using them. If that's correct. That's a very serious issue. It's a shift from that, you see, maybe to something else, goodness only knows, but that what's going on won't do. So that's why talking, I thought, might be useful to share some of these you'll gather concerns. You realize I'm sort of thinking out loud this morning. I hope that's evident. If you take the existing HR training personnel practices that exist in industry and in kinds of organizations we're talking about, civil service, the whole gamut that I haven't been able to find any whose use is not counterproductive, that is that you're worse off for using them than you would have been if you didn't. Sorry. It's called human resourcing is the popular phrase in this country now. And that's why we. Keep changing all the time. Things don't work, and then you change something else, and you get the seven year cycle stuff. And this keeps going. I think it's accumulating and trouble accumulating. Okay, let me just scuttle on here in the remaining time, and if think about some of this stuff, I'd really be glad to have your comments. And there's other stuff that I'd like to raise tomorrow afternoon, but certainly it'll go back to some of the general points I've been making, and I think you'll find other others in the group and presentations this week coming back to issues of this kind. Now, um, just quickly, I'm putting a lot of emphasis on the measurement issue, as you can gather, because I think that's the missing one. And it's absolutely extraordinary. Again, that mid 16th century, mid 17th century development in the sciences is a very moving period, I find. Anyhow, it is literally the case that chemistry and scientific metallurgy emerged from alchemy in under 50 years after the development of the thermometer just changed totally. Because you could now take a look at change in state, which is what you're doing in melting, and you can begin to understand certain things are happening at the same temperature and different mixes and alloys melt at different temperatures and so on. And you can begin looking at chemical reactions, have to do with the application of heat to materials and watching change, and you just get a whole different grip. And within 50 years, I say they had stopped looking, running around looking for calor or caloric. It just changes. And one way of looking at the history of the natural sciences since then is in looking at the development of measuring instruments. I say now, 96 measuring instruments is against four. So that's 92 measuring instruments or thereabouts in 250 years. They don't come all that easily. And if you're dr, ohm, and you're trying to get some way of getting hold of the electrical resistance of materials, which was a critical issue with the development of electricity, how do you do it? Do you see? How do you do it? And lo and behold, he thinks up the om meter. I mean, that really is terrific stuff. And wham development then goes on again and so on. Now then, I'm distinguishing measurement from rating, because again, we use quantification as putting numbers on things as a sign of objectivity, and it ain't. You can put numbers on all kinds of things, like in job evaluation schemes, which are objective, because you use numbers. The numbers are what I'm calling ratings attributes. You get a number of people sit together and they all pass opinions, and then you somehow get them to put their opinions in terms of numbers, and you say you've quantified it and made it objective. What happens? You've got numbers on opinions. And so level of work measurement in terms of time span gets called a single factor job evaluation method. But it's not a rating. I think it's true measurement. And just a couple of criteria of true measurement in the sense in which I want to use it as distinguished from ratings or attributes like beauty and job evaluation and so on, are that the numbers are interesting. When you're into measurement, the scale ends at zero. There are no negative numbers. You don't have a minus two inch rod. You can easily get minus ratings on questionnaire. As a matter of fact, minus five to plus five is a popular way of setting up questionnaires, because you're talking about properties of entities. No property, no entity, no temperature, no entity. Goodness knows what happens at absolute zero. Is that right, Carl? What do they got down to? I'm sorry? I use Carl as my science mentor here. When I'm over there, down about minus, I think zero something or other. Is that right? And it's very, very close, but it ain't there. So you've got a scale that starts at real zero and then goes on up to infinity, and it's the scale on which you get that unusual circumstance where two times two equals four. That's the very special case. Two times two rarely equals four. Is that familiar stuff or not? Well, where you have attributes, two times two doesn't equal four. When you got ratings using Keshe Nairs and rating scales and so on, you can't say something is twice as big as something else. It's only when you've got a true scale of zero rating. Now, what I'm saying is that I certainly think in terms of trying to get scaling, measurement scaling for the property of cognitive complexity or cognitive power in the individual, where zero cognitive power means no person. Well, you laugh about that. Have you ever thought what zero means in an IQ scale? Any idea what it means? It don't mean nothing. He gets down to 40 IQs of 40, and it gets very dicey when you get down below that. Is that right, Anne? What that's the phrase? Is it non testable? Now, this is what we're used to.
Speaker B Death as all your rates going to zero.
Speaker A Sorry? Skinner used to define death as all your rates going to zero. Which rates? All of them. The psychological ones. It's all very well, he means the physiological ones. Is that right? The psychological ones? If so, which? And I don't think he had any that I know of. Any of you know of any psychological properties that Skinner had got hold of? I don't want to bash Skinner much, sorry. These are basic issues. I thought at least draw your attention to them. Now then, let me get back to a couple of other things quite quickly. I've talked about requisiteness, and I think that really, honestly, is something just going to need tons of clarification that takes us full tilt into the whole value issue of values. And that's right. So it ought I mean, we really are dealing with human values here and coming to grips with what we would value and what we think human beings are capable of. It puts it all out on the table for looking at and to be clear on what you mean. And I've tried to indicate some of the assumptions that I would use in looking at requisite. There's a basic underlying one that at least I would put out for discussion, and that is this where Dan Miller and I got to, at least so far, that requisite institutions are institutions that enable you to get your work done. Get the work done that's connected with the mission of the association. That is a people who've got together in common effort and which allows the full expression of so called normal personality functioning. And by normal personality functioning I would mean at functioning in a person in interpersonal relationships in which there is a capability for generating trust in the relationship. I don't think the people you were talking about down can do that. My experience is they're lousy at it. In fact, I'm going to propose that relationships of trust or of suspicion are deeper lying than love and hate in human psychology. And that ability to love is a special case of the ability to generate and take part in trust inducing relationships. That's a working assumption I've been using and I therefore talk about paranoiagenic institutions, that is institutions that induce or require behavior in individuals which create suspicion in others and there's plenty of that around. I think there's something very deep seated in human beings that goes right back to earliest infancy that has to do with the capability to engender trust in interaction. Dan Miller has very interesting stuff. He's been doing videos of established so called schizophrenics in mental hospital and the feature is very interesting to see this material in slow motion, that common is general characteristic and it's fascinating to watch that your so called institutionalized schizophrenic does everything to break relationships. They break, they smash social interaction, all kinds of techniques for doing so, asynchronous in interaction, body language, stance, everything. And checking that out, going to the so called extreme, if you like, of so called abnormality. And the proposition here is that what we're talking about has to do with effective social relationships. Effective social relationships being ones in which individuals actually can trust each other. An extraordinarily constructive human feeling reason for putting it this way, that if that proposition is useful valid, it is possible to take a look at our social institutions, the way in which we establish our role relationships. This is set limits for conduct, the way in which we structure them, the way in which we develop processes by which we run them. And I think it's possible to take a look at the process that structure and say okay, let's examine this. Does this kind of structure increase trust or does it diminish? There's no neutral position and for example. Jim, do you want to define trust tomorrow afternoon? I come to that.
Speaker D I think it's really important because I think that question sometimes gets asked, and it's really amazing at the variety of definitions that people give to the world. Trust.
Speaker A That's interesting. I hadn't got there yet. No. I suddenly realized, as you asked the question, I've got a negative definition in my mind. It's non suspicion inducing. That really won't do. I don't know. Anybody like to have a shot.
Speaker E That somehow you can love?
Speaker A What about predictability that you know he or she is going to do something harmful to you?
Speaker E Well, I think it's probably a difficult kind of trust. It's different than the unpredictability, which is much more chaotic than, if you like this immediation, at least the individual understand what is going to happen to them. So it.
Speaker B Existentialist. Psychologists define trust one time into choosing to act with the hope that the other person would act in a predictive way, but not the requirement that they would act that way. The condition of the relationship continued.
Speaker D To me that at least. It's come to my mind today after hearing you talk, that for me, as I sit here talking or listening to you, that has something to do with knowing that the other person or institution is going to allow me to express normal behavior. They're going to allow me to move freely into within whatever there are certain constraints, but within that, that there is going to be more freedom that I trust them to allow me that, and that I will have some more freedom to engage in a wider range of behaviors, to do whatever it is I need to do. And that will be allowed, not punished.
Speaker A I'll tell you what I had in mind, but there's a problem that goes with it is that if you want to use trust to talk about predictability, I'm going to have to find a different term for trust. That's not what I mean.
Speaker C The term I use, Sheila's concept, is reliable.
Speaker B I'm reliable, but not trustworthy.
Speaker A Because this business that you can rely on somebody to be punitive and destructive is not the concept that I'd want to be getting at by what I'm talking about is trust. I mean that's suspicion inducing in no uncertain fashion.
Speaker B I find that trust is an issue that every organization I work in, that people respond with great enthusiasm. And the way we talk about it is the ability to rely, but to rely on person's honesty, integrity and sense of justice.
Speaker A Well, again, I think it's more than that. No, what I'm trying to get at is and I say there's a problem that goes with it because it becomes quite general. It's this that I think it has to do with the feeling of being able to rely on the other person to engage in a relationship with you that is mutually enhancing. But you can then say yeah, but that means people can be in trusting relationship against the rest of the world. And so I'd want to tack on to that not only mutually enhancing, but increases the amount of trust in the world, let me put it that way. By however little that is, it will have that resonating effect. It's a conception of that kind that I think I'm trying to get. At definition, trust would be something in which you would feel that the other person would be able to act in.
Speaker B The interest of others.
Speaker E Or more specifically, the interest of the role or the.
Speaker D Relationship that you're in.
Speaker E If you're together.
Speaker D Presumably you're interacting for.
Speaker E The purpose of accomplishing those goals and.
Speaker A The mission of that organization.
Speaker D You can rely on the other person.
Speaker A No, this is the problem you're well aware of it's the problem of the Golden Rule or what the county and categorical imperative, moral imperative. And that somewhere around, I think, there has to be be able to be relied on for behavior, conduct that, as I say, not only enhances immediate relationships, but adds that kind of plus to the world.
Speaker B The negative definition wasn't good enough. Trust, the absence of any ulterior intent relationship you're getting into if the other organization or person doesn't have agendas or definite take something away from maybe even definition. What strikes me curious is that without push identification it strikes me that trust is something that occurs basis issues like reliability and other things are trust inducing, inducing of the phenomenon but not part of the phenomenon. In fact, the real character of trust is that at the moment process and is responded to.
Speaker A Like this for the moment. The opposite of that. No, because here, I mean, one gets into some of the basic issues in psychoanalytic theory and theories that go along with Melanie Klein in the UK, and that the most deep seated impulses and conflicts in early infancy have to do with what he calls persecutory anxiety. And there's deep, deep stuff here stirred in people and the sense of mistrust suspicion about the other people really does stir up very very primitive anxieties indeed and the sense of trust has to do with perscuterian anxiety having to do with fear of being harmed, injured, damaged by the other. It's why I use the term somehow one's life enhanced and a general enhancement of relationships. I was going to leave that with a comma on the table there. These are major issues again I wanted to raise for resolution. I think they've got the necessary answer somewhere around the place to the question of normality. One of the things that Dan and I were impressed by when we were reading a literature on psychological normality was not only the similarity but the near identity between the descriptions of the so called normal person. As you get it in psychology there isn't much in the literature but they're bits and pieces to the so called ethical person of the religions and moral systems to the so called reasonable man in law. And the same man, the same woman keeps turning up and it's very interesting and the descriptions are all uniformly dull. There's something missing around here. That's the one I'm talking about. Leave that I say in the background here. If you want to ask what's this all about and what kinds of institutions you think you're trying to grow, I think these are questions that just honestly need answering. And again, I want to come down to the practicalities of this. Managers really start working with them, eventually come to the point when they say, okay, it's all very well, but what's this in aid of cuts? Is that right? This is cutting numbers of people, is that correct? Getting more efficiency. Well, what's it for? What if there's a conflict between efficiency on the one hand and something else on the other? Oh, I see. You just want to make people feel good. That it. You don't care about efficiency. You've been involved in these discussions and I think I'm arguing really somewhere along the way in the next few years, we'll probably have to do better and get something better than exists at the present time. The issue, I think, needs to be up in the forefront because again, that I think is the game that we're in. We're going to talk about developing effective institutions. It'd be quite useful to have a pretty clear picture in mind of what you mean and how would you know if you had one.
Speaker C As you were talking, I was wondering whether you were implying either degrees of requisiteness or whether we ought to be making some distinction between.
Speaker A Perhaps a flaw.
Speaker C And then some sense of optimization. We've talked earlier, various people talked about living in with non requisite organizations so that we imagine two categories, nonrequisite and requisite. But as you were talking earlier about measurement, it seemed to me that it would be nice if we could somehow measure, perhaps on the assess the level of an organization on that scale and say that an organization is requisite because it meets certain criteria, and then it is better than requisite, or it has reached a higher level of requisiteness. Because I'm bothered with the difference between reliability and trust in the following sense. It seems to me that if requisiteness is a threshold, then you can imagine dealing with these non negative definitions and saying, well, at least it's x, at least it's an absence of distrust. Whereas if you have a conception of a desirable organization, something to which one has positive response rather than merely observing that it works, then one's striving for trust above mere reliability.
Speaker A Yeah. Don't know. I have an immediate reaction to the question. I understand you clearly enough. My comment would be this, that I think that there are certain structures and processes that in themselves can be deemed to be requisite, but their use doesn't necessarily give you full requisiteness that you're talking about. In other words, I think it's requisite that one has manager and subordinates in adjacent strata and I don't know any in between on that one. Just because you've got them in adjacent strata doesn't necessarily mean the thing is going to operate at optimum level. They're going to be personal differences come in and so on. That's an immediate reaction. I'm glad you raised the question. I say my hunch is I think we're talking about requisite design characteristics and that is givens that give you your best chance of getting what will function as a requisite outfit. Put a question mark at the end of that one.
Speaker C But it doesn't deal with the kind of relationship I guess, Dan was talking about where the person on the top is thoroughly nasty character and is beating.
Speaker A Around the person though they are separated.
Speaker C So it's requisite but highly undesirable.
Speaker A Well, it's not fully requisite in my terms either, which is another matter. No, because if you've got that and then one comes into the values thing here I would want to argue now I've put a lot more emphasis on the manager once removed role than I used to. I'd want to make statements about requisiteness in there and that a requisite function in this role is that a shall oversee the quality of the managerial leadership relationship between B and C. And given what you're describing going on I would say that's antirequisite in the sense of counter to what I haven't discussed yet. Values, particular kinds of value. I want to come on to that.
Speaker B Would you care to requisite arrangement.
Speaker A Which.
Speaker B Has probability of enabling trust in the.
Speaker A Relationship that provides at least the conditions for it and makes it difficult to get outside it outside these minimum conditions in sense that you just described. I think I'd like just leave that one on the table.
Speaker B The introduction of the issue of trust seemingly equally important dimension as the structure makes this ball game seem to be so much different than established economic theory. Makes no assumption at all of just behavior.
Speaker A Yeah.
Speaker B And the question I raise is if all of those other theories are so bad how come they have promulgated so widely and are so deeply rooted on him? They got to work.
Speaker A Yeah. They've got a what?
Speaker B They're working.
Speaker A Yeah, that's right. Well, they're going on you got to.
Speaker B Be crazy when people say they're working but companies are making record profits.
Speaker A That's right. That's right. That's the best we can do for the time being.
Speaker B Yeah. The feeling is one of it really.
Speaker A Is the best we can do. And can I just make two additional points? However, as far as I'm concerned I think I probably am more optimistic about the nature of human nature than anybody I know because what Dan's just described for me is the most powerful testament you could have to the constructiveness of human nature. Well, that we get along together as well as we do, despite the theories that we're using. And the procedures that we use is.
Speaker B That then the main work that will.
Speaker A Display fullest potential, this is what one would be looking for.
Speaker B I've talked to people who are on.
Speaker A The verge of fire from an extremely.
Speaker B Non runner, express enormous pride and satisfaction in having survived.
Speaker A Done the best they could. Yeah, absolutely. So what we're looking for, just looking for human institutions, social institutions that can support that side of human nature rather than mean that you have to cut against it, cut against it? Cut against it all the time.
Speaker E Depends on criteria. Because if you look at the waste of human alcoholism, stress related disorders, drug problems, most people can say that the breakup of their marriages as a result of work related issues suggest that there's a human cost, that is, human costs that are being used.
Speaker B It raises the question of the level.
Speaker A Of waste of capability and how and can we do better. I mean, that's really all that's what it's about, in effect. Now then, I just leave that on the table as well. That those are prime issues. I just want to throw in two others and and, you know, this is the business. Sorry. No, I don't want to stop this morning without going over at least these two issues because they're germane to, I think, the discussion this afternoon. And that's why I'd like just to chuck them in this morning and we can get on with some of this stuff tomorrow afternoon. And that is first of all, I just want to comment on there's a drawing in the book near the end. It talked about five dimensional world. I put a little quip on it and I said, this is the most important drawing in the book. I don't know if any of you noticed it, and I put that down there because I happened to believe it. And so I thought I'd just like to comment on that if I could, and what's involved, because it's a rather cryptic note and it's described in more detail in a book called The Form of Time, but I couldn't get it in. But I just wanted at least to mention it. And I want to take a look at maturation and concepts of maturation in terms of growth of individual potential. Now then, on this five dimensional world thing, it I think you'll be surprised to hear that I got interested in the problem of time and the nature of time. And it's a lot of fun when you get into it. And it's a very interesting and dicey area. And the physicists go bonkers over it. They go crazy, literally. It's very interesting. And you get it in relativity theory, for example, in quantum mechanics, that your physicist will talk about space as a very general positional construct within which you order entities and position them in relation to each other. And they will distinguish space general concept of space from measurement of length, length measurement. And they will talk about the length of an object. They do not talk about the space of an object. And in relativity theory, it will talk about the fact that as an object moves away from you towards the speed of light, that it appears to shorten in length. And they will use that kind of language. The big step, however, came with the notion that in addition to that, things will appear to be shorter in time. They don't talk about length of time, and they say time shortens. They don't say space shortens, they say the length of objects shortens, but time shortens. There's a reification of time. And they believe that time flows. I don't know if any of you believe that time flows like a river. And they get into these lovely arguments about whether it's unidirectional flow or whether it's a bi directional flow. I don't know if any of you read Hawking's book, the Brief History of Time. Read the chapter on time. Again, in the light of this discussion, he talks about three directional tri directional time flows. The fact is that time doesn't flow at all. The next thing is that by taking a look at flows, they talk about time flowing into the future. Question can you reverse it so that time flows into the past? And Hawking has great fun with this. He says he can envisage a situation in which the future will predate the past. He describes this. Read it. It's nuts. Now I'll tell you why it's nuts. I think it's maybe a bit presumptuous to say so, but I really mean it. They argue like bloody hell about this stuff. They put minus T into an equation and say they reverse time. This is deadly serious. It's called time reversal. Reason I'm making these points, this that I think physics got there because.