Speaker A You? Well, we leave some unresolved issues no seriously around that one perhaps let me just take another five minutes and then just have a break and then decide what I'll do afterwards. Can I just continue the call compensation thing for one moment? Because in fact we've been into this area of incentives and motivation and so on and I don't know if there's any discussion worth having. Any of you have the viewer like to discuss the possibility of possible values in so called incentive schemes, bonus schemes, peacework schemes, that kind of thing. I mean, I indicated a view there. I never found them to be anything other than disruptive. But maybe there could be values there.
Speaker B The individual contributing to you think really best way to protect how would you think about ranking the incentives? And we tell you about a conversation with an entrepreneur who was trying to figure out how to set up this incentive system. We didn't know but this is what emerged in a conversation with him was trying to balance risk with fair pay levels. So given fair pay levels, if an entrepreneur is going to assume upon themselves all the risk of a considerable amount of risk for selling something or buying a franchise and running it or leveraging stuff, we were trying to figure out if there was a way to take and maybe double welfare pay level or something like that. Inside an organization there's a lot less risk that one assumes personal the success of the enterprise as a whole in an entrepreneurial situation or individual incentive situation, you're it. So we came up with something I have no idea if it's right or not. I was wondering if you had any sense of that in setting up an incentive. You can set it up where a person doing level two selling can make half a million dollars in probably the company that still makes money or you can set it up so they make 100,000. Is there a point at which the sense of felt fairness of the incentive system and the potential that a person can make is reached and to pay.
Speaker A Them more is literally well, I wasn't quite clear. Were you talking about entrepreneurs inside employee who are employees?
Speaker B No.
Speaker A Well, I wouldn't put them on salary. My whole point would be I'm not.
Speaker B Talking about on salary. I'm saying if you set it up so they sell the products of the company or the services, whatever and receive a certain commission. How would you set the commission up though?
Speaker A Oh, you mean what percentage commission is it reasonable to pay to an agent.
Speaker B Experience in those kinds of jobs?
Speaker A Well, my hunch there would be that you're talking about entrepreneurial roles, right? And there are no felt fair. There are no fair pay levels for entrepreneurs. That is there's no pay. Entrepreneurs don't get pay wages and salaries are numbers of dollars that are earned by employees in accountability hierarchies and nobody else. And that's why we get screwed up when we start talking about the salaries of Congressmen and think of them as salaries they're not they're stipends or honoraria these are not employees or when we talk about the salaries of clergy these are not these are not employees. And Jillian knows this all too well the difficulties in England because the language for clergy has gone over to salary these days from the language that used to be perfectly good that is the clergyman's living yeah, absolutely what living.
Speaker B Well.
Speaker A Earlier was living, wasn't it? And then stipend oh it's that plus stipend thanks.
Speaker B What should we say we're paying teachers.
Speaker A Oh teachers are employees but not tenured teaching staff in universities. They're not employees, they're members of the university and they should not be thought of in terms of salaries. They're not wage and salariat shoot.
Speaker C The difference between being paid in order that you may pay your mortgage, school fee, whatever it may be and you're restricted to that whereas the whole point of is that you are paid in order that you may not need to worry about completely different startups.
Speaker A Did everybody hear that? I think it's enormously important point. See, when we're talking about Congressmen, we're not talking about employees of the nation. We hope that it's a service orientation. Serve your country is the way sometimes it even gets talked about. Now look you know I'm not joking about this deadly serious issue require yeah that's the point.
Speaker C That'S right when religious.
Speaker A Institution yeah this six it was in.
Speaker B That context that I thought of teachers as, you know traditional one room schoolhouse was a role the community called together.
Speaker A Very similar. That's right. That was a service conception. This is churches.
Speaker B Of the central. Yeah, but that role and the teacher, the other one, your government roles, your pastor, those were called roles. Community.
Speaker A Yeah, that's right. And we bring this pay notion in and we talk about salaries, and the conception of service just gets destroyed. It changes our whole orientation. And you get the whole business of Congressman's Pay argued in terms of civil service pay. Got to put a cap on because the whole civil service pay structure would then go up. And you relate our representatives in service to the nation as carrying out the same functions as our civil servants who are employed to serve those servants of the country.
Speaker B Some congestion research I think you did a long time ago suggested hypothesis that an individual's capacity might be related to their self fair consumption.
Speaker A Sorry I ever wrote it. Thank you, Jillian. It's a bit late in the day to tell me. Sorry. Doug. That's the one. Thank you for reminding me, yet again. Next point. Well, can I just come back to that now? Because I reserve the language of wages and salaries exclusively for employment roles in accountability. Hierarchies. And outside that, want to talk about stipends or honoraria partners? Have a language for this. It's called the draw, right? When partners start paying themselves salaries out of the partnership, that's an entirely different situation. You got employees because the essence of a wage or salary is that you do not get the resources that pay the thing. You expect something called the employing institution to provide it. It's a totally different conception. We had a hellacious effect on our universities. I really believe this. In the 1960s, we learned to think about academic departments and universities and employment hierarchies and our teaching staff as employees. I'm sorry. It just does things to people. We lose, lose, lose, hands down in society. Now, coming back to the entrepreneurial one, you're out in the marketplace. Entrepreneurs incomes are what entrepreneurs happen to be able to earn. That's why you don't want to compare pop stars with employees. Pure pop stars earn 7 million a year if they can get it doesn't.
Speaker B Fashion it because you're right.
Speaker A You bargain it in terms of what you have to pay to get who you want.
Speaker B Okay. What this person was trying to think through and trying to help Martin, I think to do so was in dividing up the US geographically into what he was calling super licensees. Who would have the right to then license people in municipalities to run these shops. He was trying to figure out the level of the work of a superlice and the level of the work of one of these people that was going to manage several stores and what kind of a design incentive process or licensing process would give them reasonably, if they were effective enough income to be interested in doing this stuff. That's positioning, questionable marketplace issue. But he's going out and he's got to present something after a year.
Speaker A Nobody's going to do it for that. So you have to up the ante in different places where you start in the physician. I just think I opt out of that one. At this stage of the game, it feels to me like no, like choosing a doctor because you're ill. You can get a doctor whose fees will be, umpteen hundred or umpteen, thousand. It depends how sick you're feeling and how much you value yourself and so on as to what you opt into. It honestly has that kind of feel to me, George, and it's awfully difficult at the point when you're making the choice. This is not a serious I just think there's a good problem there in what you're talking about. But I really would want to look at it in terms of straight entrepreneurship, which has to do exclusively with market values.
Speaker B People such things as Bill Fair status.
Speaker A Jillian help.
Speaker C When your traffic, you raise your expenses and then you send a web password, and then you lay guilt of that on the congregation which you use to discuss.
Speaker B And you found there is the psychological experience within a server serving person. There are differences between small congregations and large congregations.
Speaker A That's right.
Speaker C If a church doesn't be individual, I would prefer to serve in a small community and therefore I'm willing to accept living conditions that are somewhat different than if I were to accept a position or a role with a larger congregation or whatever.
Speaker B What's actually happening in Protestant denominations of the United States is clergy are forming a kind of trade union setting, what they are calling a minimum salary, which is the mean felt fair pay clergy person in any congregation, which means the smaller ones can't afford anybody and the larger ones are not that different from middle sized ones. But this makes it quite a real issue belt fair work in the service sector.
Speaker A Let's not mix this up with something else that's called the service sector, okay? This is service to the community. This isn't the services sector, let me put it that way. Or what would ordinarily be called the services sector. This isn't banking and insurance and so on.
Speaker B There might be a sense of felt fairness around for the entrepreneur salesperson in the sense of some relationship that they would make and seem to make between the complexity of the sale and the product and the length of the sales cycle. And what is a fair commission for that? Based on what they would bargain from position they would bargain from in terms of well, that feels fair enough for that. And they relate it to something.
Speaker A Not my experience. Others have had experience, it's not my experience. My experience of salespeople is the kinds of salespeople I was talking about in house sales, whom you want in house because commission selling is a very different kind of relationship with your clients than in house selling and on commission selling. Salespeople want the opportunity to sell what they can sell. I've never been aware that ideas of fairness come in. You build your clientele and you figure ways of developing it and so on. And if you can knock down your million and a half, why more power to you? Sort of thing. Which is very different from in house salesmen which one can measure time span wise very readily in terms of scale of project and developing clients and so on. And the felt fair pay stuff comes through very clearly, clear as a bell and it's buggered about with as soon as you start putting that gang on commission they change the quality of their relationship with clients. It's a deadly thing. Leave it like that. I have no evidence that incentive schemes inside accountability hierarchies have anything other than deleterious effects. I've left one reference to the possibility of bonus schemes in requisite organization. It's got a disclaimer on it. I've said that I am aware, I am, that in many companies the idea of salary brackets at stratum five, six and seven of the order of order 250 to 300,300 to 600,000 something I think those are the figures. Something like that. Anyhow in the 200 and 5500 six, seven 8900,000 a year and a million a year plus bracket is unacceptable to boards. It's felt to be unacceptable publicly it seems to be less unacceptable if instead of paying me 400,000 you pay me 200,100% bonus. No, I'm not joking about this. This is stated also deferred comp in non Canada and then you get that kind of stuff coming in and the thing that's interested me is the extent to which these machinations lead to something that looks like around Equitable levels anyhow for the level of work do you.
Speaker B Include profit sharing plans with incentive systems? Do you proof all those together?
Speaker A Yeah, I don't know what profit sharing does for people and particularly I mean that's just massive group bonus. The one thing about a profit sharing system is you can do nothing about it. So how it can be incentive, I don't know I'm not joking about that. I'm deadly serious profit sharing if you want to pay me some more money, fine. I've never seen any evidence that it does anything and very infrequently goes along with loss sharing.
Speaker B That's the difficulty guy, there is an aspect of gain productivity sharing scan and plan that does attract me some and I'm curious where you see that.
Speaker A Well, I'm only familiar with Scanlon plan in England, not in this country but I'm familiar with Lincoln Electric and outfits like that in this country and that's different. I've not been impressed with the scandal plan in England as doing anything more than again, giving my experience with the effect there is it tended to give people greater opportunity to work at levels of capability to the extent that it does that I mean, that's terrific. I want to go for that one directly and that's what the Lincoln Electric thing does. I've been in there and in some of these other places where they pay so called very high levels of pay as incentive to manual operators like Lincoln Electric. I think they average 45,000 a year now for their manual, literally. But you go in and take a look at it, it's good stratum Two level of work their so called managers at Stratum Two are assistants kind of thing and they're true managers operating clearly at three and that's what they get in. And the new Logan thing, I don't know if you know it out in Kentucky exactly the same thing. I've been inside it. So a lot of these things where they talk about high pay, you never get any statement about the level of work that this high pay is being given for. But by God, they select their people extraordinarily carefully. They cream the top of the market off, they great pains and they're clearly employing in buying in good, solid people capable of operating at two. So there are a lot of things that float around in here anyhow, perhaps we can just leave it open. Could I make a suggestion? It's a quarter to three that I don't know. The discussion seems to have some vitality in it one way or another. We could either stop here or break for a quarter of an hour and go on till quarter to three. Say 4430, something like that.
Speaker B Take a little break. This we got.
Speaker A Should we just go on down through the agenda? Are there other points you'd like to go on with from before the break?
Speaker B I'm wondering whether what you were saying about salaries and all of that stuff can be segued into the non bureaucratic structure question of role and role relationship. What you can have in a hybrid organization that will pass for management in a bureaucratic structure. And the kind of organization I'm thinking of in particular is, say, a university. And I'm wondering from my observation of a client that I'm working with right now the organization is a combination of a collegium and a bureaucratic structure to serve that collegium. And within the bureaucratic structure, as I read it, there are people who are allowed quasi collegial roles by the members of the collegium themselves. People who are on tenure stream, for example, or people who are called Kwars.
Speaker A Which this is that's a new one.
Speaker B Contractual appointment without annual review. These are people are any of those jobs available? These are people who raise so much grant money that they're basically granted the equivalent of tenure for as long as their grant money lasts. And because they are some of the most innovative people in the organization.
Speaker A You'd agree that Jillian, wouldn't you? And Stephen right sometimes, aren't they? Sometimes. Matter of fact, I was speaking to Jillian yesterday and I gather some of them are at the moment.
Speaker B The question in my mind is how to define relationships which in terms of requisite organization the book would be described, I guess, as collateral relationships from bureaucratic point of view. I'm trying to summarize the basic problems that people have working together within this hybrid structure. One of them, obviously revolves around resource allocation and the question of who has claims on resources and how those resources.
Speaker A Are deployed and whether anybody is supposed to be accountable for stop jelly and can't stand it for another minute back there. Should I stop? So serious.
Speaker C I run a self financing academic.
Speaker B Give me some tools to heal somebody else.
Speaker A But she didn't know she was a Kwar. No, go ahead, Alan. This is very serious stuff.
Speaker B And who carries the camp of misallocation of resources? Or alternatively, is there any concept of efficiency worth the name in an organization with this kind of structure.
Speaker C As the generation of deployment services? That's really what major issue from our point of view is that if we do, if you are able by working carefully with grant contracts such and such generated services is it violent access to that service and then download access. Or is it? Well, you actually won the battle generating.
Speaker B But this is a case where you have a distinct institute in relation to the university structure. I must tell everybody I've told various people I'm speaking of this is the Faculty of Health Sciences of McMaster University and they were invented 25 years ago on the basis of Pedagogical model which involved very high teacher student ratio. The way in which they sustained this high teacher student ratio which they couldn't if they followed the normal governmental financial support guideline is to have all these people who raise grant money in other ways and therefore are around the place to teach students as well as do the research. So the people who are Kwars are chief, by jowl with all the other tenured types doing the same kind of work. The only distinction is that some of them are tenured proper and others aren't. So here's a situation where if one looked at the things strictly in terms of authorities one could say well, there's this set of people who are tenure who are the collegium and then there are all these other bodies who are strictly hired help. I'm not sure whether they're employees. I think they are certainly hired help of some kind. So what is the appropriate authority relationship among those people? Are there, from an organization design point of view, two classes and then there's all the dependent people, the people who do the ado for all these and how are they supposed to be related to the structure given that the support people are strictly employees and therefore are to be managed by somebody in this structure?
Speaker A You're talking about the administrative support people or research assistants, that kind of thing?
Speaker B Both lab technicians. I mean, a whole bunch of people who are deployed in various kinds of place. It looks to me like a jungle. And certainly from the way in which my clients are acting it feels to them like an apple. And I'm not able to take requisite organization and just superimpose it on that structure without doing violence or all kinds of things including my own sensitive. So I wanted to put that on the table as one example of an extension of what we've been talking about so far because it does include a bureaucratic component, but one that isn't a nice pyramid as far as I can tell because so many elements of that bureaucratic component have to be scattered out and related to members of the collegiate and greati members of the collegiate. Maybe I should stop talking for a moment and see if there's any reaction to that. Much of.
Speaker C Citizens normally situations where pressure is not in fact law has now changed so that academics and it would be difficult to end. So that more and more other aspects of university are being huge not only about, but more importantly way about how.
Speaker A Knowledge about how knowledge will be generous.
Speaker B Ten years abolished.
Speaker A Well, it's it's very funny business.
Speaker B When.
Speaker C You gather it today. Presumably Kenya was there. One could teach unpopular idea that the other is the possibility that if self financing academic institutions are able to get their resources and their services properly organized then they're also in a position, if you'd like, to generate services of knowledge and deal with them in a free way so that it can protect because they have.
Speaker B But do you then as BIOS for example institute some kind of constitution which gives the freedoms of tenure to the people who adhere to BIOS? In other words, can you tolerate intolerable people within BIOS now as the university used to have to?
Speaker A I was going to say no problem at all. Jilly and Ian are laughing because they know they've been tolerated for some time.
Speaker C They have all constitutional rights. Depends on whether.
Speaker A There is an answer to Ellen's question there that if you have become a member of BIOS and can you can continue as a member of BIOS. That's constitutional right.
Speaker C Teaching heresy.
Speaker B Jillian, does that extend into the normal academic departments economics, Psychology, Education and so on? Are those faculty under the same basic conditions now they can generate.
Speaker C Yes they will be no longer ten years and faculties now have become that famous English buzword cost.
Speaker A This is the psychology department next door. You realize that.
Speaker B Looks pretty expensive to me. But you're evolving then you're developing an entrepreneurial academic environment.
Speaker C Soliciting students pay their fees being paid by the government, coming.
Speaker B From other countries recruitments and all those forces start to then be a part.
Speaker C Of yes, we now have administrators who come to the States looking for students.
Speaker A Think universities are interesting, to put it mildly institutions? No, I think they're even less clearly defined and definable than hospitals and health services, which are complex enough. And I've been interested we had to get out of constitution for biosign went into the university when it first became a university and we set up the School of Social Sciences one got deeply involved was involved in the writing of the charter for the university, in fact and the serious problems for me. Some of you probably know that during the 1960s in the United States there was this commission on University organization terrific, great numbers of items tolkiet Parsons was the convener of the Working Party on Organizational Structure. There were a number of studies england's interesting from this point of view because at Oxford and Cambridge up until the Second World War, you had something that still looked like what used to be called a university. And that was before they were, in effect, if I put it in emotive terms, taken over by the government, that up until that point, Oxford and Cambridge were largely self financing. They had their own funds and resources. After the second world War it became more difficult resources began to run out they came increasingly to get sorry they came to get a larger and larger proportion of their income from the so called university grants committee in the country. I'm only going over the English experience here because I think at least it's a way into the problems you're talking about. Alan and that is of the basic financing of universities out of government grant with an intermediate body called the University Grants Committee, which was given the resources by the government and then distributed the resources to the universities. Oxford, Cambridge, must be over 60, 70% UGC support, I would think. Now, Jillian, do you know the recent figures, it's something of that order. But the point is that university used to have a particular kind of meaning, and one doesn't see that much of that meaning around anymore. And what we seem to have done is turn what used to be called universities in terms of the up to undergraduate completion level, up to BA level, into what I would think of as tertiary educational institutions, primary, secondary. Tertiary with large numbers of students coming in and getting a higher degree education, which isn't what they used to be like or what we're supposed to be about. And the tendency with the increasing numbers of students and increasing teaching loads and increasing conception of the university not as a center of knowledge and creating of knowledge, that kind of emphasis, but the communicating of existing knowledge and the financing of large scale teaching and the financing of what one would think of as thoughtful knowledge constructing teaching in connection with developmental thinking that's increasingly difficult to find and certainly less of a tendency to find support for that kind of thing, that sort of activity. But if one goes back that in the early stages of universities always was self financing. These were the original colleges of your self financing teachers whose students came to them. And I'm only mentioning this because one gets the sense of all kinds of conflicting currents running into each other in terms of assumptions about what universities are and what they're for, how much I mean, these days they ought to be contributing to industrial development and balancing of the national debt. This kind I'm not being sardonic here, but you know, the first thing I mean, and processing large numbers of students, the proportion of students processed in the UK is very small as compared to the United States. It's what? Five, six, seven percentage against 18, 19% here. And one runs into all these things, which is why we started laughing as you were raising these issues, because we bumped into all of them. The reason for setting up BIOS in the first place was that one had the opportunity to get freedom from universities as they had become, that is, from teaching based institutions with little enough time or concern for opportunities for knowledge development, which we gain by setting up an entirely independent institution that the university tolerates and sometimes gets to like because it's no trouble. In effect. Now, another difficulty is that universities get derided because everything, you know, that story in this country all the time. You have to get a committee of 17 together to discuss the color of the toilet paper, this sort of thing that's the old saw that runs around. And that sort of attitude is a failure to appreciate the nature of what I would think of as true university staff. And again, we talk about salaries and university staff, teaching unions, that sort of thing. And we've got the whole thing into the employment frame of reference. So the teaching staff of universities, as you all know, are employees like everybody else, in good, soft, secure jobs because they got tenure and sort of development of resentment, in fact, from large sections of the community and a failure to appreciate that, in fact, your teaching staff are members of the university and not employees of the university or ought requisitely to be. So. And that means committee structures. These are association mechanisms, political association, small p political association, the substitute for manager. Well, this is the whole point about the associations is they are not managerial systems. Gillian developed this phrase we had to for the church work. Clergy are not employees of the church when they become treated, think of themselves employees and indeed introduce managerial training, as they did in 1972 and 73, so bishops could learn proper manager, subordinate relationships with their clergies or with the deans. A lot goes out the window. And to my knowledge, this big American study during the 1960s never came anywhere near these problems, but nowhere near them.
Speaker B Isn't there a kind of oil and water problem here in the sense that the community of scholar sense of a university is still part of the mythology of, say, the organization I'm working for. But they have 1200 faculty of whom 500 OD are full time. And of course, they have this enormous throughput of students. They're a factory for producing students tuned to certain standards.
Speaker A That's what I mean by tertiary education. Tertiary education do.
Speaker B But they have another at least many of the people who are involved in that factory process also have this other community of scholars happen. So it's a very high minded academic so on and so on. And the problem I'm having, probably my client has the problem even worse is that there's a kind of bleeding between these two parts of the structure and of collegial membership amongst the vast number of people who are shoveling students. So that the question of having committees, you say 17, these guys committees of 150, because everybody wants to be on.
Speaker A Because that's not the community of scholars part you see in England, which you have here as well, we have tertiary educational institutions, used to be called technical colleges. Are they still community colleges? Well, I think they're not quite community colleges, no, they degree granting, but they're more like vocational universities. The polytechnics, sorry? Yeah, I mean, the polytechnics, they like to think of themselves as communities of scholars as well. And I. Mean, there are some scholars, but I think your oil and water analogy here is right. And I just find it difficult. We all found it difficult to address problems that you're talking about. Because one sense is that there's something unreal in the nature of the institutions and the aspirations and how many institutions perhaps are being forced together that may not fit together, don't know that something's gone wrong. Because with these larger universities talking about communities of scholars doesn't work anymore. They're much too large in scale. And so these problems continue to flop around.
Speaker B Carter sliced through this. Wilson's familiar with, I'm sure, which is for the Faculty of so called Health Sciences, they're not only training physicians, they're trained physiotherapists. And there's a question of what kind of pedagogical philosophy one can invent that is suitable to all of those categories of students.
Speaker A Well, I've actually been in around that area in this country, and again, it seems to me you get sillies floating around the place and for all kinds of understandable reasons, whereas Wilson we were just talking about that. Yeah. And we suffer our own pains. We don't deal with properly with status of nurses, for example. And Wilson was just describing this one's familiar with it. Stephen knows it all too well. You start granting status on the basis of educational qualifications, get BA, and your pay goes up because you're now more highly qualified, and you get your master's and goes up still higher. Nurses with doctorates are really at a premium. Has the nursing changed? Has the level of work changed? Well, not all that noticeably so we're not dealing with our professions adequately backing it up, putting in these educational qualifications and again one's getting backwash into the universities and you take a look at these nurse training schools in the universities as far as I'm concerned, one sees it as pure tertiary education and you get into awful stuff. I mean, I just makes you feel sad every once in a while. Because in order to appear to be a university, you've got to have research going on. You've got to have something called nursing research. And I have yet to see what, seriously, one could call programs of nursing research in a very large national health service and in three nursing teaching institutions in this country. It's just a lot of unreality floating around at base here that somehow to be cleared out. Not quite sure it's an issue of organizational structuring at this stage of the game, but trying to discover for society to rediscover discover now afresh in terms of becoming situation what it's looking for and the institutions it wants.
Speaker C What it also does is take the people then away from the kind of work focusing on.
Speaker B Well, yeah. The extent to which these are professional schools as well as academic institutions bears upon this, because I don't know what it's like in States or in Britain, but in Canada there's an enormous amount of wrenching going on in the health services field that is partly being imposed by resource constraints where the profession itself is in question. All the health professions are in question because the current structure of health professions is predicated on a delivery system. And if the delivery system either has or ought to change in order to provide the care, that's going to have.
Speaker A A sharper articulations of what one looks at in people, whether in a CPA situation or in these ad. Hoc situations in which does seem possible to make judgments with high degree of iterator consistency watching individuals or dealing with individuals in interview or working situations. How does one tease out what one sees in the individual at the present time in terms of the current state of maturation and functioning? And how, if at all, does one see the future in that individual and how do you discriminate between them? I think it's a real problem. I don't know. I haven't had a chance to speak to Jillian. I don't know if she'd got any further with it. But I think there's a real issue here and I just wanted to be worthwhile discussing it just a bit. Is the problem clear? That's why I brought up the point about maturation. I think there are many people who have been working with this stuff who believe that they really can get the sense of future potential, higher potential showing at the present managers seem to know it. It's very interesting the way your managers who are working at six will pick out their subordinates who are potential sixes working at three and feel a kind of affinity with them. One sees phenomena of that kind when some sense is there's something that is being seen. How do you get your hands on seeing the future adult in the less matured state as opposed to the current state of maturity? I thought, as I say, it might be useful just to chuck a problem into the discussion.
Speaker B I'd be interested. Is there general agreement, ascent to the notion that it is maturation which is being observed as opposed to metamorphosis, where you really don't, at least in any sense of casual observation see what this thing is going to MetaMorph into, metamorphos change into over time unless you know that Chris's Assist become butterfly. And I think it is my sense is yes, somehow you can see it, experience it, feel it, hear it. We got to the very scientific point last fall of saying, well, it's probably in their eyes, some of you that are doing CPA, when you say you see an experience, what is it that you hear? I have an intuition that there's something.
Speaker C More out there, some more capacity out.
Speaker B There talking to someone. They can envelop what I'm saying. I still, when I do the CPA, ask the individual pretty early on by trying to contaminate what's going on, what would your annual earnings be in a job that fully employed your capabilities for which you were being paid? Because that question is followed by the next question. Take the same situation five years down the line what would your annual earnings be for the same situation?
Speaker A You're still asking that? That's interesting. That's right. I used to ask that question consistently and that's part of where these curves came from. That's right. The homeless stuff. Absolutely.
Speaker B That was part of the regularity and predictability in those data points that you gave me that those projections within the individual of statement now of annual earnings for fully employed and fairly paid and then five years down the line at the same point showed that high level of predictability on a very simple minded way of thinking. There's evidence that there's some glimpse into potential by the regularity and the predictability of those statements.
Speaker A You understand the point that's being made if you ask an individual now take a position that would be just right for you that you think you'd like to do that would engage you full out, what do you think would be fair current total pay for that? Take a position that you think of in five years time that you feel will be just right for you then, and assuming that economic conditions are constant, what do you think would be a fair total emolument for that? And if you get a point here for the first five years later you get a point up here individuals literally just look up these curves. Is that right, Tom? And there was a systematic doctoral research done on this at Harvard, as a matter of fact by Dr. Homa, Edna Homa and people just do and the reasons they give it's in the individual's awareness and sense without you.
Speaker B What about the other way? What is it that you see in John that suggests to you that John is going to be able to handle the work that you're doing right now? Isn't it having to do with something with you're working on a problem right now that has a certain amount of complexity, rate of change, number of variables, et cetera? Isn't it something in John's capacity to handle portions of that that you see that would suggest to you that he's going to mature to your level at some future days?
Speaker A You see that's a proposition could handle portions of it.
Speaker B When I watch the Four Stars, I say why did you pick this guy? They pick him to do a piece of their work. They give him a piece of their work. He doesn't do it all. He just does a piece. He brings it back and they put it all together. And so I think the reason they're doing that is that they see in him the capacity to do a piece of their work which is more complex than the current level that they're operating at. Is that possible? That's a different perspective. Asking the individual where he's going to where he sees himself. What do you see in the subordinate? Because they do see it. They pick up.
Speaker C When the organization has allowed themselves to fall into that trap and it then actually needs people of extended capability. It still continues to look down, back those tracks. It's very, very hard. The way to think about potential is how awkward is. The more awkward they are from one dead perception, the further away their notice.
Speaker B Yesterday, Ian, you mentioned the kinds of things people say when they talk to others and the responses of the others match or higher ability or low ability. That's a piece of that same thing. This person answered responses in a way that was so strange as to be hard to understand. That the characteristic reaction of someone whose ability might be higher than your own. That's delinquent language thing. We make judgments based on how they talk. It's probably relativistic statements.
Speaker A Yeah.
Speaker B But people do sense that they are relativistic in the sense people are judging differences.
Speaker A They are seeing difference.
Speaker C Between the way people may construct reality language and the way they construct reality.
Speaker B Julie, is there any pattern in that? Do people construct work at lower levels than they construct language to describe?
Speaker C But I mean, I do think that the real language, the chances are that people will be able to may well.
Speaker B Be able to construct.
Speaker C Prompt purely.
Speaker B The discussions yesterday talked about patterns in the language that were reflective of the modes or the stratum. And in that sense, is it our language that forecasts while our behavior is still in a preceding mode? Does QB four language but QA four behavior? See, what I'm trying to say is it the language that gives us our future prediction, but the behavior which gives us our current capability?
Speaker C I think it is, I sure can't verbalize a lot of this, but I think it is, as Elliot has said, an order of thought and language and that we're picking up on distinct differences in temperature, if you will. That there is a distinct difference in QB language and Q and that we just it's something one of those things that we sort of know. And the only reason why I say.
Speaker A That.
Speaker C Still don't know quite how to verbalize better than this is that in one company, 30 people were divided into two groups high potential and pyto. That was wine, and I matched their list right down the line. Anybody want to guess what Hypotension meant? What mode? It meant Korean. That is change in order of language. I'm sorry. Mode six. Yeah, that's the old completely blind study. I had no idea who they thought had plateaued. I knew nothing about these people, but every one of their high potential was.
Speaker A Minus this or higher.
Speaker C Even if they hadn't gotten five yet, they were plateaus. There is that. There's something there. That's all I'm saying.
Speaker B See that's? That's the warfare and hypothesis. Without the language. You can't have the thought. The language gives precursor to the thought. That's what he was really saying when he made that proposition. And that the language gives you an indication of the thought process.
Speaker C But it's not but there still is and can be a major pivot between the thoughts and the action. There is a clear Greek concept for it, which is the notion of apostia, which simply means to be without rule of oneself. And 1 may think something should obviously don't ethical what actually ends up doing something. And that that I think is while it's enormously useful indicator, is very, very skill.
Speaker B You know, that trying to get some of these concepts across, working with a group of 20 persons who are currently held in four positions very rapidly see quite marked differences in capability handling the concepts. And these are people who are working. My assessment is that they're hanging in there as a student about as hard as they can go. And I regularly saw persons who were very articulate but who were as thick as a breach and people who were not that articulate and yet, if you gave them time, were showing very powerful thinking processes. And so I would say be cautious of language and beware of the stone.
Speaker C In the empty tip. Carlos language, meaning actual word. It's the ability to use it's the ability to do that thinking that you were talking.
Speaker A Carlos I think that the greatest that.
Speaker B I've had is that before I ever attempted to ever do one career, make a judgment based upon whether the individual actually do work. I did a whole lot of individuals well being. I was doing face to learning jillian where I feed information back to them, see the response. I was negative to them. What I thought that they thought was low, what was high. I was very high. So I did about hundreds of us. But in the meantime, working with you, I had a chance to do interviews all the way from an NCO. Knowing your theory, what I was able to do is take the information that I gained from those interviews. Extending model organizational structure. Regular work model played a tight into the individual. What he was saying about work and I knowing what work was going to be at that level, I have a very good idea what that takes over. He was going to use very much what is record at work and whether that individual can articulate. I agree. Wholeheartedly big criticism that I've had about CPA is that language liberal arts major can use language better than engineering. And so one can be one of the things that can be fooled by it. And so I've been asked, I've done that. I've gone back through and looked at those people who went through it very carefully. The experience that I gained over the years literally changed my mind about some of these individuals. Because although they could not articulate what it is that they were going to do, in fact, they could demonstrated they could do it, and you had to take that into consideration. That might be a great, great thinker. But if you put him in a situation where he has to come in like put him in a situation where he has to do it so one has to be very careful as one interprets one's capability. But one has to look at, I think, directly organizational structure, point of view, work required, work point of view with the demonstrated capability. I have a very good knowledge all the time.
Speaker C I didn't mean baffle and an order of thought and language did not mean articulate. Perhaps I want to make that clear. The whole point of the CPA is that you don't accept it.
Speaker A They.
Speaker C Get some understanding of how they comprehend their world, how they talk when we say how they talk about the test, not really how they talk about the test, your understanding of what they mean. It's really about meaning. Because we do I think there is a difficulty here what people say without exploring with them what they mean by I haven't seen it linked with articulation. I think a lot of people who have been traditionally considered very inartic teenagers, people who are thought not to use that, traditionally have been labeled as being non. And yet somehow something about the dialogue in the CPA and the probing and getting concrete illustrations for abstract things to talk abstractly, all help to make judgments. And I don't think there's one thing. It's a matter of gathering in a variety of data from the CPA as well as the kind of bellwether, something that happens in breast structure now that we ought to explore further because different modes than what.
Speaker B Going back to Maurice's question, which I think is a very good one, those who experience these difference, what is it we experience? It almost sounds as if it's the best collection. We take all these data points, we get all these different pieces of experience, and we fit them together into the best collection we can. And if that most approximates what we think six is, we call them a six. If it most approximates what four is, is it a waiting process in which we are all intuitively waiting different samples of experience we have about a person against our model.
Speaker C The opportunity to test out what you suggested, what is hypothesis? You can actually lay it on the table and say to the person, look, how do you feel about this? What do you feel comfortable doing? It's one of the few techniques we have where the feedback isn't just saying here, this is what I take of you. But when you actually turn to the individual and say how do you respond to what you're saying?
Speaker B Over to Jillian Too on that same kind of point. If we make a distinction between current work capability, the capability for really performing a role or task or construing a real world from what people can put into words. How do you then predict the future? Since there is no task, you can't create the future's task. You can't take a 30 year old person and give them a CDO cell in order to get a sample. How do we make the prediction then? Is that a matter of just using the curves and forecasting?
Speaker C People do offer appreciation of mode, which is what he would pick up first, rather than rather than sort of focusing in on current work capabilities, others might take the other route capability.
Speaker B The problem is the CPA that most people familiar with. The actual task that you give somebody which doesn't require any dialogue in terms of constant interaction is less four tasks. How they respond to a task of that complexity. Jillianism, if you have opportunities to see people in action and you understand the nature of complexity of those tasks, you can talk with them, you can observe them. Handling those tasks. I think important thing is not to get hooked up on language is the same thing as trying to say yesterday there's some sort of use of vocabulary. And I regard that three month old children use language and you see mothers and fathers talking to babies. They're certainly not articulate, but there's some in that sense language and dialogue with Shiva said going on between them and children make themselves understood. Now, all I was saying yesterday was the extent was picking up at that point. What is it that gives you the sense of the tasks to come and handling those? In both of those descriptions, there is an assumption of some reasonably deep, sustained relationship. This is not casual judgment that we try to make, but rather one that we take the time to really know the person and maybe even follow them from hours at a time into several days or weeks or months. Because in our group's discussion yesterday, we talked about the issue potential that was raised and so forth with the tapes that we saw. And in thinking of the woman who let off on the thing, I think Lamar made a comment of, well, given her age and what I know about the curves, I don't think she has any potential. And we pursued that a little bit and said, well, what if we closed our eyes and we didn't have any idea? How old did we hear potential? And unanimously, people said, no, we didn't hear potential. And that was hardly an input. It was a very brief little thing. Let's go back to that question. We all honestly are not attractively, are not responding to her age. And I want to go back to the time question. Are we making intuitive judgments about the pace of change or the timing when a very young person does something versus a very old person doing something? Roughly the same behavior we attribute to the young person more capability because they can do it earlier in their life. Are we making, in fact, a judgment not just about language, but about the age of which they're doing it? Is this a time sense of what's the right word, a sense of the pace of their growth? Is that what we're looking at?
Speaker A I think it's more than that. See, one of the things I think that reinforces in my mind the notion this discussion does, and that is, I mean, if you just listen to the discussion and tends to look at potential catherine does, jillian tends to look at current potential. If that's the case, and we can take that, is that correct? Oh, against fine. That's even sharper. The two. There are two things, and there are data about two things. I think this is clear. So that in a sense, the future potential is there in a form, and the current potential is there in a form. I'm now taking that as a given. I think that's just true. Sorry. Let me put it this way. For me, that would be the strong working proposition. And what I mean by that is worth going and looking for.
Speaker C Conversations so far has been around the use of the CPA. Like, I don't do CPAs, but I can pick up potential when I'm doing an interview with someone about their work or the nature of becomes I just finished two weeks of interviewing in Europe, and certain people just sparkled. If you want to. I mean, it became very clear as to how they made meaning around the current work that they were doing. The interpretation of current work as compared to the interpretation of, say, their manager, and what they saw as an evolution of the work that they were currently doing. I was talking to them particularly about their work. I was talking to them about the work of their subordinates, but there was so much of their own energy in the way they described the work of their subordinates because it was much grander, much larger, used Flyn's language. A much bigger chunk that they were working with in terms of how they interpreted the work or perceived the work that they were doing, became very clear.
Speaker A Well, I was going to chuck some data into that kind. As a matter of fact, because Steve and Carlos are here. Four of us had the opportunity to interview some two stars, three stars and four star generals. And we did most of those interviews in pairs. We did some of them three, and some key ones, all four. And we would go out after the interview and mark down current. Our judgments of current and future potential in terms of a five point breakdown, that is, border seven, six, high six, mid six, low six, border six, five in terms of current and in terms of future. And the interrater reliability for both future and current was almost exact. Now you can't get interrater reliability of that kind unless you're actually seeing something, unless there's something there to be seen. It didn't mean that we could articulate what we thought we were seeing. As you can gather that would have been reported and published a long time ago. But that is in the equivalent of a heavy work situation where there is discursive work going on. I think the critical issue here is that the individual has to be seen in some kind of actual work. I was struck by the interviews on the Flynn staff yesterday and the individuals didn't seem to me to be engrossed in the way that the individuals in the Euthanasia discussion I think were really engrossed. So that's one part we saw these generals certainly in engrossed discussion. I can look to Steve and Carlos on that one in no uncertain fashion. Secondly, the whole business of use of language is a matter of distinguishing between the use of hollow language and language. It's got actual working conceptual content and I've been watching a lot of discussions since Ian I put these films together in Australia, on television, in meetings and so on. That is individuals in what one thinks of or seems to be genuinely engrossed discussion and one is struck by the fact that individuals who come into discussions like that with hollow concepts sort of high sounding, highly apparently articulate language are simply disregarded by the rest of the meeting or the rest of the group in the discussion. It's recognized and seen through just like that as so called hollow words. I don't think it's all that difficult to judge when individuals are engaged in a work situation, including in gross discussion between individuals who are actually using.
Speaker B More.
Speaker A Abstract rather than less abstract language in work making connections and actually working in order to drive forward a discussion. And individuals who were just chucking world wars and whatnot, as that nice lady did on the television thing. And nothing is being I mean, these higher sounding terms are not being used to forward the argument of the work. And I say hunch is that it will not turn out to be all that difficult in listening to individuals in engrossed discussions to judge when what's coming through is thinking work. Let's put it this way at higher levels as against mere language, the CPA thing is a highly engrossed work situation and one's getting the same kind of thing.
Speaker B If you're talking to a person who's working at their full potential you're going to get a certain flavor of message. If you get a person however who's not at that potential you're going to get at least some frustration and some other kind of noise and you may be reading current frustration as a house of future aspirations.
Speaker A Well, something else comes through. So the third point I want to make that I think the following phenomenon is not uncommon, and it goes back to Steve's point, and that is that you will get senior executives, so called mentoring, who will reach down into organizations they're encouraged to do so and find younger people of imagination and do something called give them opportunities to work with them. And you get it in large corporations, in the military and so on. And they somehow reach down and pick out the higher potential individuals. Not always successfully, but when they do, I just try and describe something, just throw it into the discussion. Not clear about it. But what I think I've seen is this. I think I've experienced it with students, as a matter of fact, with doctoral students and so on, that they couldn't formulate a problem in the way the general, the Four Star has formulated a problem and they couldn't encompass the wholeness of a particular problem. But I think, if I'm not mistaken, Stephen, I haven't talked about this. It's what he's talking about that they can be given taskers to help the higher level executive with his larger task. And it feels as though they use a level of capability higher than their I don't know their whole level of capability, that is, the level at which they can currently operate, in effect, on their own. I'm just looking for words here. And something else comes through because, as I say, you just see the difference between individuals who turn out to have lower potential, who can't quite cope. They're called not imaginative enough, this sort of thing. And there's the possibility, at least I thought, of that process in terms of a highly scientific conception called speculation theory. And I don't think you've heard about speculation. I didn't mean speculation speculation. And it's a way of expressing a sense and I sort of vacillate on this one. And that is that from time to time you see spicules of the higher levels of potential that stick up through. And I think you see it in small children. Funny you know, these funny things, these bright sayings of small children. They suddenly come out with these extraordinary bloody statements and one gets these feelings of flashes of something literally coming up through. That, for me, was the significance of Catherine's point. Another working proposition is that higher potential individuals, that is, your, let's say, potential QC individuals when they're still operating at QA in young age, will show evidence of being able to use second order complexity constructs. And you will get examples of funny uses of language in these youngsters. And I don't just mean talking, I mean at work, if you see what I mean in discussions. I don't think you'll see third order concepts. I mean, I don't think they'll be talking about the international labor situation or something of that kind. But I think you'll see the second order stuff. And another crude proposition is that you will see, I think Catherine was seeing in these high potentials the early on capability of your QC population, again operating at two, that they would bring into working. Situations and able actually to use third order complexity concepts. Sorry this is just additional bits and pieces chucked into the discussion and sorry Jillian, go ahead.
Speaker C Share the level approach to the problem.
Speaker A Oh really children ranging from.
Speaker C What'S absolutely.
Speaker A Fascinating about data.
Speaker C 2000 if you were to take population in terms of model these twelve year olds vary in terms of twelve years so that there are.
Speaker A Some twelve year olds operating and he.
Speaker C Has very, very clear data. Problem is where our data goes back gathering data back to about 16 his data is up to about his main data.
Speaker A Twelve goes but I haven't got enough.
Speaker C Quite enough data to do the bridging but we can literally show quite clearly his data doing nothing and our data goes back with just a bit of a gap in the middle.
Speaker A Of at some of these so called change points you mean?
Speaker C Well with a population of twelve year.
Speaker A Olds.
Speaker B That'S like experiencing people in organizations experience children, adolescents 15 year old is twelve going on 22.
Speaker A Yeah, that's right. Just make one point on that. That probably fits in with what I learned from an analyst, French analyst who worked with Piaget for twelve years, and that it was Mrs. Inhalder who took the developmental data and squeezed them down so that there were developmental changes at two, at four, and so on, because otherwise you couldn't sell the stuff in United States and compete with the Gaselle stuff. Now crudely put it she did it he didn't care that sorry, you were going to say sorry catherine, have you.
Speaker C Looked at that creation of where I wondered I don't know what you find get in set theory at all but that's what we would be looking for. But in the kind but you haven't done that yet.
Speaker B What strikes me out at about that is that remember the plotting we did at the colonels at the war college when there was a war, how fast they rose, how they broke out that we call them Chinese war.
Speaker A Oh yeah, exactly the same thing.
Speaker B They're all there, they're all there doing the same work, but all of a sudden when there's a war they go right up to Warsaw right away. Yeah.
Speaker A We developed the concept of what's called the Human Resources Pompcus. What does Pompcus stand for?
Speaker B Preposition?
Speaker A Well there's an acronym in the military called the Pomcus. The letters for which the meaning of the letters for which escapes the military gang. Do you know what the Pompcus is? Crohn. But it's an acronym for equipment that's kept in readiness during peacetime to be used in war. It's this great excess of equipment. It's the three mile long roadway of tanks and so on down at Fort Hood and whatnot. Well, this was the concept of the human resources pomcus. That is all of these lieutenant colonels and colonels in the army that is status wise at stratum high three and low four. But currently with seven, with the capability to work at seven and eight, I mean, demonstrated. Marshall, General Marshall was a colonel, 48 year old colonel. War came one year later he was a four star general. Then another six months he was a five star general, Eisenhower lieutenant colonel and same history. And in fact that's where the population of generals comes from. You get this starburst thing and comes a war and they all just go shooting on up. There's a whole reserve, if you like, of talent. Why they stay in the army, these are big questions, but again, the potential in them is certainly known in peacetime.
Speaker B Sorry, if you had put them on one of the curves that shows them over, where would they have been?
Speaker A I mean, is that a sustained no, the higher level potential in them stuck out like a sore, sticks out like sore thumbs. You can see them in effect and they're on much higher modes.
Speaker B They're being ordinary course of events, they were just being.
Speaker A Enormously underutilized.
Speaker C Getting potential. What do you see most of what you have described? I've seen that in one or another, so it's not consistent for me. But one thing that we did mention that has happened a couple of times that people have told me that they have detention someone currently in a particular role and comfortable and capable in that role and describing what they might want to be doing or using a phrase card to start a conversation about something. And then they might describe the work that they would be doing and also describe what they would be able to do in another five years. I would think that I would be able to do this and make this kind of contribution. So at times I've had people who identified that they had potential, that they knew where they were, that they would be growing into doing a higher level of work and could describe it.
Speaker A Well, I just like just chuck in one last piece of experience with this. It puts two things mean this was a bit of a mess yesterday in terms of Flyn's presentation. I'm sorry, he's not here. I've discussed it with him. I think he was even misleading as far as his thesis was concerned. He brought complexity in that's, not in the thesis itself. His criteria are much simpler than he described. I believe now that there is evidence that it is possible and you had just a bit of a taste of at least the possibility yesterday, although obviously not clinching. I self believe that there is sufficient evidence for me at least to take seriously that it is possible to watch people engrossed in work. And I'm particularly interested in engrossed discussion then discussion that can go on long enough. So even for the less articulate, if you like, individuals opportunity to become involved in the discussion. But the condition is that the individuals must have become involved in engrossed discussion. And if they don't, well, you don't have anything to get your hands on if they do. And I don't think it's difficult to see when people are heavily engrossed in a discussion. I think it is possible, without too much difficulty to learn to listen to the way in which they are mustering arguments as it comes through in language. This is the point. And to get hold in the first place of the extent to which they are using able to use in work, let me say third order constructs expressed in third order language. I think Burke was doing some of that. I've seen the whole thing. If you listen to that longer, you will see the way he puts general constructs and puts them together in particular way. And it's not to do with the fact that he's used to television broadcasting, as I say. Any of you like listening to hockey broadcasts or football or whatnot. Those broadcasters are not using third order constructs and putting them together in order to explain what is going on except, wait a minute, wait a second. You get some sports writers and broadcasters who do and they become famous and outstanding and so on. They're well recognized and everybody knows them and they're a different order. So it's not just the broadcasting experience that does it. You can see the other stuff come through and some of them become great essayists. I mean, particularly in England your outstanding sports writers are recognized as really great sports essayists, in fact. So I don't think it's an experiential thing. I think it will turn out, I think, not to be difficult, at least to move in on the broad order of complexity at which people are working in terms of the adult population we've been using, I think in terms of child populations as well, that is, broadly the quintave A or quintave B or quintave C type of order. Ian's very interesting with his metal handicap gang and if you watch it in small children, the first order kind of language where the object has to be physically present in order for the words to be used. Gross things of this kind. Secondly, I think that in fact it is possible to do systematically, without too much trouble, something that you just had a glint of glimpse of yesterday, and that is to spot whether the individuals and I now go to the task complexity formulations are formulating the task problems in the Engrossed discussion in terms of a sort of high level first order. It's kind of like, isn't it, that kind of argumentative formulation, you know what I'm saying? As against individuals who really do start mustering data in terms of diagnostic accumulation, distinctly different. You didn't have a chance to see enough material yesterday. But the serial processing stuff comes through very, very clearly. I think readily distinguishable from the non serial that arguments are progressed in terms of serial description arguments are progressed in terms of something started here and been going along to here and therefore and they just naturally engages in the discussion in that way and is consistent in the course of an hour, two hour long discussion. If you listen to the different contributions the parallel processing stuff I think comes through equally clearly. Flyn didn't even do justice to his own data in describing him yesterday when we went through his clippings. The parallel processing stuff just sits there. They will talk about this kind of process goes on. He didn't show you a doctor in that euthanasia discussion who just literally said well, you see, if you go down the euthanasia path you're going to have to face these and these kinds of consequences and he just literally took you down the path of what would happen if you go down the euthanasia path. But if you go down the path of being opposed to Euthanasia, you're going to have to face these problems and these consequences. And he just ambled down into the future like that. And having set up the two pathways, showed possible connections and they talked like that. My hunch is that it may turn out that processes are probably as distinguishable as that. That's one thing that I think will turn out to be the case over the next months. That still leaves a question and you get the same thing when you get up into the third order construct. I was interested listening to Kissinger in a very violent argument a very engrossed argument about European strategy and so on and I believe one literally saw him operating at seven in terms of strategic alternatives, alternative pathways but third order level constructs because he was just driving the stuff out and showing the effects of different strategies, alternative strategies. I think the stuff is visible in that sense. That still leaves, even if that turns out to be the case, leaves two very basic problems. And one of which both of which, in a sense, we've aired today. One is that even in engrossed discussion and even over a period of time can one make the assumption that if the highest level of complexity that one sees somebody using an argument is second order serial processing? Is that giving the same sort of picture of that individual? Is this what one's seeing in terms of what one's raw judgments about current potential or the kinds of judgments one might make in the systematic setting, for example, of a CPA? So there's that kind of problem. The other on which the score I think is nil nil for the moment is this question of getting our hands on how one separates out current from future. I think the discussion today makes it clear that it's worthwhile going after. I just believe this discussion is real. There are differences and they are observable and they are observed in fact. But as I say, the decision is not yet. I was just looking at the time.
Speaker B Yesterday about the practicality issue in terms of what's this in aid of, which, I mean, I think on the one hand, there's probably rationale to be somewhat real scientific about it in terms of having something. But in the ada thing of looking at managers is that what I experienced early on around, they have responsibility. Managers at varying levels have responsibilities to make these judgments. So how do we help them make that exercise that responsibility more effectively? And that if we can give something that over periods of time, I get a problem like it's with a one shot kind of thing as opposed to working in organizations and living in them where I think managers took that responsibility fairly seriously and wanted, both on behalf of the individual and the organization, to make that judgment as well as they could, and needing to find in what goes on in their world, those interactions over time that would give them the things to look for. If we could do that, I think that would be very helpful.
Speaker A Well, this obviously is the problem. I think it's perfectly clear that in a serious, professional CPA type situation that it is possible to make serious and valid clinical judgments about individuals and their current and future potential. As far as I'm concerned, that one's home and dry hey, that's an enormous step forward. And I say Jillian's putting together of her result is just very, very impressive. I have some copies here if any of you want to see it. I know Jillian won't want to loan hers out at this stage. That's all right, Jillian, isn't it? I brought a couple of extras around in case any of you want to see it. It's a tour de force. I think in terms of bringing a lot of stuff together, that's that development. A number of people are putting it to very serious professional use, and clearly I think valid assessments are being made. It still leaves us with the problem of is it possible to get hold of what skilled people are able to do in, let me call it a clinical setting with good clinical judgment and get hold of what it is or what are the things that are being observed? Because these judgments don't come from nowhere. That's what managers are asking for. And as I say, my own bet is that that ought to become possible. It's got problems in it as well. That means enhancing judgment of ordinary people in non clinical situations about the potential of other people. Is that a good thing, a bad thing, if it could be done? I don't find difficulty ethically myself on it because the judgments are being made one way or the other, willy nilly. And I think it's extremely important that we really learn what's going on in these situations where people of experience, in fact, are clearly making accurate, invalid judgments.
Speaker B Not to forget that part of carrying out career path appreciation. They're looking at the relationship there between the interviewer and the person. There are certain ways of behaving that allow those opportunities to occur and certainly in discussing with managers how they are viewing potential in somebody else I don't think we should leave out the behavior of manager and the way that they would approach it, question their own what they're doing as well as what they're seeing.
Speaker A I think the other thing is reassuring I think from my point of view and essential and that is that we're not just talking about divorce CPA somewhere up in up in the air it's serious work done in conjunction with organizational development stuff and that's absolutely crucial that that's where the control comes from.
Speaker C I wouldn't.
Speaker A There are serious issues here. It gave me cause to put point in the book that put some noses out of joint in the organizational field in this country among a lot of the psychologists who are engaged in so called personality work in industry. And it's at least a point of view. Perhaps just leave you with this thought that I do not believe that employing institutions are entitled to bring in specialists to do assessments of any kind on individuals inside the organization. Other than to provide the individuals with an opportunity to see that specialist if he or she wants to, and be the recipient of whatever information comes and to share it with the employing organization if they see fit. I mean since we got onto this whole thing today I think this takes us right back to the ethics and value issues and as I say, I want to reassured that the work that's being discussed is going on in organizational situations where the stuff can be kept under control. Otherwise I think we're just in for real trouble. Sorry you mean by that's?