Speaker A What I would like to do this morning is talk very generally about the results of the leadership research and practice in the army to identify what I think are the central reasons why that research and practice is a failure. To specify as a result of that why Stratified systems theory has been rejected as a possibility for work in the United States Army. And then from that we may be able to wade a little bit further into the swamp that we have created thus far this morning. First, I need to say very clearly that no organization in the world is more concerned about leadership than the US. Army. All of the major leadership theories which have been developed in this country have been financed by Department of Defense work. Our officers who are concerned about these issues study with the leading academic researchers in the country. The United States Army has one of the finest training school systems in America, which I can attest to, having graduated from that system and attended a number of other school systems in America. Furthermore, the officers who are familiar with leadership and leadership practices in the army once they retire, are sought by industries. And we only need look within this room at the work at Wallaby medals that Steve has done. Now that said, some other adjectives come to mind when we talk about the status of leadership and leadership training in the army. Faulty, inadequate, inefficient, disappointing, ineffectual, frittering along with fads and fashions. First MBO and then Theory X and Peter Drucker and Elliot Jacks. Now, I say these with some personal anguish. As a serving officer, having graduated from the system, I can think of not a single thing that I learned. When my sergeants go to our courses, I ask what did they learn? And they learned to buff floors and to make beds. Steve's joke is not funny to me because I live in an organization in which I know of captain who kicked a soldier in the presence of his sergeants, later denied it and was promoted. So it's with some personal anguish that I reach this conclusion. And we need to ask why?
Speaker B Why?
Speaker A How is this possible when we have the best that we can do so poorly? And I think the explanation lies in a variable we have not introduced in our discussions thus far, and that is culture. American culture. Go back to the Churchill aphorimism of two great peoples separated by a common language. Leadership in the British Army I do not think is the same as leadership in the American Army. I think the fundamental fallacy is in the assumption that all group process is best understood by examining the motives, beliefs, behaviors of the leader. In America, we invest enormous, enormous explanatory power in individual psychology. Now, we can mock pigeon psychology, but damn it, in America there is nothing but the individual. The individual reigns supreme. And the key to understanding anything is to pursue the psyche of the individual. Now, this is despite the research, the millions, possibly billions of dollars that have been spent on research that leads those of us who have looked at the literature to conclude that in our heads we know that trait theory is wrong. It's just wrong. It doesn't predict anything. But in our hearts, living in a culture that where status is determined in some ways by merit, in our hearts we believe that our selection is to a position of leadership, is evidence of our election to the congregation of the saved. And therefore, in our hearts, leadership training is for those who do not think, act, believe, as I do right now. In this context of rampant individualism, it's totally impossible for us to really come to grips in any meaningful way with the kind of social context that my brother officer from the UK has tried to convey. Leadership is always expressed in a social context, but culturally very difficult for us to hear that a leader is a leader is a leader. Because leadership inheres in the individual. Despite the fact that leadership that worked in Vietnam in 66 did not work in Vietnam in 69. Despite the fact in our history that we have seen individuals who have been very successful as military officers and very bad as politicians, we've seen very good politicians become very poor military officers. And yet we hang on to a leader is a leader is a leader. Now this is despite all the research and the practical evidence to the contrary, to give credence to the power of a group to attempt to perceive or to appreciate what's going on in the minds of individuals of a group is, frankly, rod, unamerican, right, pink, possibly red, certainly yellow, which would explain the success of the Japanese. Now, consequently, we arrive at wrong assumptions, wrong notions as to the nature of leadership, which, as Steve has elaborated, is not a personality trait. It's not an attribute of the personality. I'm not sure that it's a role. I don't think it is. I see it as a transaction between the incumbents of a designated role and the group members. Leadership, in my way of thinking, consistent with the literature that I choose to.
Speaker C Read.
Speaker A Is a set of behaviors, a toolkit which the leader can take and use as time, situations and social contexts would dictate, but always have to be adapted to various groups and situations. I'm reminded of that wonderful little passage in the book of William Manchester who was describing his experiences in the Pacific in World War II. And they have come on the beach and they are hunkered down, waiting for the artillery to suppress the Japanese fire. They have a new lieutenant who has just come into the unit and the new lieutenant takes the tenets of his teaching and says, Follow me, gives a signal, stands up on the parapet and is shot immediately. Troops who had been there waited until the artillery had suppressed the fire and had moved ahead, doing what had to be done. I am thinking of a system sometimes we get it right of the drill sergeants in the army at the present time who adapt their behavior to the situation. You've all seen the Jack Webb film The Drill Instructor or some of the other things. He's a fairly stereotypical character in American movies. But now there's an explicit change. We teach our drill sergeants this way for the first two, three weeks, you can behave in the classic Jack Webb fashion with lots of screaming and shouting and face on face and drop and give me 20. And then it changes when you go from the red cycle to the white cycle, a drill sergeant is expected to lead by his technical competence and needs to know every weapon and every maneuver. And the drill sergeants are told explicitly that they're shifting what they're doing, how they're doing it. The trainees know that, too. So drill sergeants who don't catch on get feedback from their group that, hey, drill sergeant, that's inappropriate. Then in the blue cycle, behavior switches again, and the leader ship is not on the basis of technical confidence, but the object is for this individual to become the mentor, the big brother who sits down on the bed and talks about what the real army is going to be about and how it's different from basic training. All right, here's where I must disagree with Steve, because the army has said, this is not your personal right to behave as you goddamn please with these trainees. This is the task. This is how you will perform it. And if you are not within these tolerances, we have officers who have the responsibility now for monitoring the execution of the training tasks. Okay, sometimes we can get it right, but too often we invest that leadership within a single individual who comes into the organization, establishes his authority or her authority by making radical changes and creating great misery in the process.
Speaker B All right?
Speaker A Now, to specify the required outcomes, to set limits on behaviors to achieve them, that's in America believed to be a limit to individual discretion or freedom, if you will, a constraint that we reject is absolutely unamerican. We insist on keeping leadership as a personality attribute. A second reason that we are confused about leadership in the army and in our society, I would am arguing, is that the research is seldom very helpful either. Now, probably because it's derived from the same culture, based on the same cultural assumptions done by good psychologists like myself who didn't examine those assumptions when they planned their research. So we have known for at least 25 years, and all the money that the army spent on leadership that the key lies in a person by situation interaction, if you read the research literature. And yet in 25 years, we've made no progress whatsoever in getting a taxonomy of situations. We can work our equations. An organization is an organization is an organization and a military is the same as an industrial is the same as a medical and a leader is a leader is a leader. We have some notions of stages of group development but the models that we have developed from the academic literature are good for the university but not very practical. I'm thinking of a wonderful dissertation done by John Blades who is the commander of the Army Research Institute who manipulates ten variables and he's got individual variables and he's got group variables and he's got task variables in there and he goes one by pairing them all the way through. And this dissertation came out just like all of us wished ours did with hypotheses confirmed. And yet he's absolutely right. It's a brilliant dissertation. But any leader who tries to apply that the battlefield will be buried in thought as to where am I? Where is the group and in which stage are we at this point? All right, I'm sorry, but that's where it happened. So now we come to Stratified Systems Theory excitement and the promise the excitement and the promise of Stratified Systems Theory is that for the first time it offers a new taxonomy of organizations, talks about bureaucratic hierarchies and separates them from other kinds of hierarchies. And this is an absolutely crucial distinction. Second exciting thing about Stratified systems theories it talks about strata of work which implies behavioral sequences that are different at different strata. If we could specify the behaviors that be required at different strata, which is unamerican. So now you can appreciate why Stratified Systems theory has been rejected by and large, by the United States Army. Because from what you heard this morning, from what Steve was talking about a theory that puts the locus of leadership in organizational structure we can't comprehend.
Speaker C A.
Speaker A Theory that specifies leadership is behavior, not an inherent property of individuals. It talks about specificity of behaviors with limits and tolerances that requires a specification of what the hell it is you want done is seen as taking freedom from the individual. And even more frightening about Stratified Systems Theory and some of the things that have been developed at CRA with task specification. If we had a requisite organization and if we had it right, leadership itself could become a superfluous concept because it then reduces to the style, the manner in which an individual runs off the tasks which are specified for him or her. Well, when you confront such key cultural assumptions this does not make ready acceptance as Elliot could attest. If he could just show his back where he has been flogged at various points in saying this, I repeat that no organization cares more about leadership than the United States Army. It's the largest organization on record to even give Stratified Systems Theory a hearing. It's digesting the insights of Stratified Systems Theory as quickly as possible. But it's culturally determined that we have to take very small bites and chew very, very thoroughly to digest such an unpatable patable concoction of unfamiliar concepts.
Speaker D Thanks, Larry. And Rod. I was struck, as Rod was talking, by a couple of things. It's very interesting. I talked with Carl about that. It's not UN peculiar. I guess that we have concluded that the next module that we're teaching at CRA, which is the leadership module we've just about done with the design of it, must be followed by a module on understanding the nature of human nature and understanding cultures and that it's fundamental that people understand the dynamics of how other people react and respond to different things. And so I was encouraged by that. I think that's absolutely fundamental to do that. I think Larry's comments are good observation about the Army's approach. The army is tinkering with competencies. And if you dig back into the competencies, what you will find is that the competencies reflect what Ellie and I are now calling good requisite practices. That's what's behind the competencies. It's just that somehow we don't have those requisite practices in place. And so we're going to teach people to be better, quote communicators, better, team builders better, decision makers better. There's a dimension competency of ethics. And it's interesting because behind those competencies are the requisite practices. Now we've only alluded to those today and what we said, let me wrap it up so we can go to dinner what we've said is that leadership is an accountability. Leadership accountability that goes with a role where you're accountable for the output of others. And that accountability consists of a series of requisite practices. For example, selection, induction, performance, personal effectiveness, appraisal, task assignment, coaching, training, recognition and penalties. Those are all categories of requisite practices, each of which has a series of discrete ones within it. We haven't had time to talk about those. And that it's the manner in which you carry those out that will release that natural enthusiasm. And we're holding the leader, the manager, accountable for that. We're not going to tell him how to do it. That's a matter of his own. Let him be himself in doing that. That in addition to the fact that certain roles are executive organizational roles where.
Speaker C The.
Speaker D Organizational leader has a relationship of one to many, such as the managing director or the CEO. And the requisite practices at Stratum Seven are very interesting. Shouldn't surprise you. To create a culture is to set values, set direction for the organization, a series of practices that go along with doing that. And at Stratum Five, it's create a climate, a particular climate, so that's a different focus on that and that if one wants to get this full release, one has to have those in place at all stratum at all levels.
Speaker C Ten two.
Speaker D Is that when we're supposed to stop?
Speaker B Yeah.
Speaker D Okay. It's been quick.
Speaker A Fast.
Speaker B Any questions?
Speaker A Comments?
Speaker B I have one that struck me. You said for 21 years now, remember 21 years ago. I think I understood you correctly. What was before that, I don't know, because I was in the army then. I was really literally just talking from my own experience, I said, but there was a major change at that point. I honestly don't know. I see what you mean in your 21 years.
Speaker D Yes. Worries when you're talking about the requisite.
Speaker B Role on records, are these the necessary or are they the deficient condition for requisite necessary or are they deficient?
Speaker D They're required. Absolutely required. This is what you must teach your people to be proficient in doing. These are the practices they must do.
Speaker B If you teach them, that doesn't necessarily ensure you'll get the result. It just means that if you don't.
Speaker D Teach them if you don't teach them may not get it. If you teach them you that's right. Because there will be a variation in what people do, whether or not they earn win that authority from the followers. Not everybody will do that will be able to do that, but they're accountable.
Speaker B It sounds like you're almost saying if they do do all those things, then.
Speaker E Whatever other personality characteristics they have and.
Speaker B Quirks and behaviors or whatever won't matter. That by doing that which is requisite, that is not only necessary but sufficient to define effective leadership.
Speaker D The proposition is that there won't be anything else required in terms of if you do those. No. Would you comment on that, Elliot?
Speaker B This is definitely very useful to me. I just like to revise something I said earlier and pick up, I think, a way Jillian would prefer to formulate things, which I'm trying to learn from her, as she knows, over these last twelve years or so. If one just picks up this is a possible formulation if one picks up the question as to whether of two individuals for a given role, one might exercise more effective, might discharge leadership accounts only more effective than another. I think the answer must be yes, it is necessary conditions, but not sufficient. And you actually said that, Steve, you said the individual is on his own when it comes to earning personal authority, and different individuals will do that differently. I just make one point first isn't a matter of whether you gain it's an either or. It isn't an either or. Whether you gain perseverance authority or you don't gain it. It's rather a matter of whether you're operating in such a way as to work toward to continue gaining and earning or going in the other direction of losing. I think that's how am I doing, Jillian?
Speaker F It takes time.
Speaker B That's a more effective way of looking at the thing. And because then I would order what I said earlier. If you have individuals who consistently operate in such a way as to push things into the and I use more technical language in the confusing mode, then you're dealing with some problems of personality. But on the other hand, if you take individuals, a wide range of individuals who can do the necessary work to keep on earning the person with getting personally earned authority, different individuals are going to be able to do that more or less successfully. We're not all going to be the same but I think the proposition is that one doesn't look for specific personality characteristics or competencies. In assessing that, you're looking at all people and you'll get senses of differences. And therefore you don't try and say leadership training is teaching how to communicate or teaching how to do this or teaching this or that other kind of competency, but you get your conditions right and then individuals in that sense, I think very effective demonstration of what talking about that personality can be allowed to come through and people are going to differ. Some will earn more and some will earn less but the effective person I think just pick up Rod point he had but four effective subordinates, is that right? In that condition? That's correct. They were all bloody good, some were better than others, none were putting the cap on and discouraging initiative from their gang so none of them were operating in that direction. In confusing moment they were all enhancing and some were enhancing more than others. So you get differences. On the positive side I think that's the kind of confusion that's going into discussion. How many of you account in which a person brings with them from their environment certain qualities that others in the group identify very strongly? When one wants to introduce a corporate policy such as equal employment opportunities or something like that, one asks these people to talk it up to demonstrate for the broader numbers that they in fact are practicing and it might be that they've been a football hero or something and all sorts of other model their behavior after those. How does that for you accept work? It lasts about three weeks. On every occasion the music of the organization get right down in the Dutch and ask what happened? People see through it's. Not a lot of bullshit. Yeah, I'm not saying that one wouldn't do the rest of the thing. I'm saying that in addition to that enable the implementation more quickly of policies that might be antagonistic to the culture by having role models demonstrate you may have seen successes what I have seen uniform failure literature might be the way to achieve greater in driving frontier motors and 150 ton trucks back in the early 70s was to say thou shalt.
Speaker F Yeah.
Speaker B Everything else father besides that shelf managerial position.
Speaker D All right, thank you very much.
Speaker F Of that area and I think the computing area because of its impact throughout the corporation as you start stratifying information system it drives change elsewhere.
Speaker B That was an accidental discovery but we may be knocking on the wrong door. Knocking on the wrong door. Information services and SST through computing planning is much more powerful as a lever.
Speaker F Can we tell one more story about your secretary's thing? Because it was so funny after all this. Dan and one of the application development managers who was responsible for that, he and she had done all this work. She handled the computing side and some of the organization design side, and he had done the organization design consulting. And that's really what did it for this thing. It was really interesting. One of the other people in the Stratum Four role was in a meeting when the head of the telecommunications department, they were talking about all the wonderful things going on in the secretaries and said, oh, well, it was because of telecommunications. We gave them a new phone system and everybody was claiming credit. But the one for the new phone.
Speaker B System making all the difference, I thought, yeah, that's right. I want to come back to that later. There are two important issues related to consulting which when we're going to get to our next agenda item. One of them is the relationship between inside and outside. That our friendship has grown and our ability to work together continues to grow is rather miraculous because a qualified outside person is a real pain in the butt for an internal person, and extraordinary stress is associated with that job. We've come to realize you need them both, and it really works better when you got them both. The second lesson is when you do this work really, really correctly, nobody knows. And that telephone story was the illustration. The accounting people claimed secretaries. Human resources claimed secretaries for all that force reduction and their retirements and redeployment data processing claimed it have nothing to do with structure. They claimed it for the better use of their systems. Four different departments included the improvement in the secretary's department on their annual productivity gain report, and no one, literally no one even asked what role SST worked in. And in one ways that's the best project I've ever done because absolute ownership right down the line. But it's also a little bit, just a little bit frustrated about. Let's take our break. We're going to reconvene in a.
Speaker E Okay, I think we should go ahead and get started in our usual punctual way from session to session. The focus of the discussion this afternoon is really on consulting practice for the next couple of hours or until we burn out, one or the other. There are four of us who have sort of moved into what became a bit of a void in terms of the panel. Stephen and I were to be on the panel and are dan is also a member of the panel, though he's decided to sit over there and Elliot has seemed to be ensconced in his spot there for a while. Well, when the first really tough question comes and I direct it your way, then you'll know, so what we want to talk about are some of the various dimensions of doing this work. And this work is a very broad category, as is represented by the work that all of the people in this room do. And that's as broad and probably broader, possibly as the phrase is intended to imply. What we thought we would do first is taking Elliot's lead from the other day rather than us drawing up the agenda of what we will talk about regarding consulting. Or rather than us doing it alone, at least to engage you in what issues you would like to see over the next couple of hours discussed with regards to the broad range of things from how to to various designs and practices to ethics to social analysis versus expert consulting. Whatever kinds of things that may be issues for you are of interest.
Speaker B When he was talking earlier, external consultants are pain and above. I won't see that issue address. In other words, the relationship between the external consultant and the internal organization. Okay. Another point Tam has made previously, which is what he calls the country doctor role. Daniel, tell us. But my understanding is that the country doctor role is you have a patient with appendicitis and you might not have the equipment to deal with it, but it's a patient after all, and there's no help around. What can you in all conscience do? Good. You have to eat the whole thing.
Speaker E Meaning?
Speaker B Can you introduce heat of a new performance appraisal system this year, and can we sign off a little restructuring next year or do you have to really take the whole organization good.
Speaker E Okay.
Speaker B Others along that line to be working in one piece of the system that isn't necessarily the top of the system and even maybe doing that without the system even knowing that it's happening, getting out before I can throw you out. There's some wisdom to that. Yeah. How wise is that? How do you bring into this larger system? How do you deal with it if the larger system finds out? Even if you do have to eat the whole thing, how many ways are to slice the whole thing? Because you have to go in at least in steps as far as time is concerned. What are the slices and what's the sequence of slices? Something about the composition of a consulting team. What kind of specialization is required? Numbers of people like this for you? Responsibility of all of us to feed back into body, acknowledge what additional experience or insight from smaller companies. How for me would be how do we manage not getting into the trap that already exists in a lot of organizations about labeling of people? I think because of just the nature of how you have to use things to describe the concepts, there's that potential that it gets taken or heard as a labeling of a person in a way that is anti the humane organization.
Speaker E That we're trying to build suspicion building.
Speaker B Rather than trust building.
Speaker C Yes.
Speaker B Okay, good.
Speaker E Any others that come to mind right.
Speaker B Now the question of the representative working capacity is of organization design consultant that.
Speaker E You wanted to make sure we're up.
Speaker B Here but just in connection with those things, particularly if these questions could be looked at in terms or in stratum specific terms going to be different if it's a five dealing with strategy. Five, six or three deals to me.
Speaker G That I think the issues are falling into five different groups, if I'm not mistaken. There's, first of all, issues of role and organization of the consultant, researcher, internal external capability questions and so on. Social analysis, where does that come in? Secondly, issues of scope. Do you have to take the whole thing? How much can you handle? And so on. Thirdly, issues of technique. The question of how do you actually work. The business of labeling I'd like to chuck in the problems about the use of language and difficulties over precision as part of that.
Speaker B Do you call it technique? Yeah.
Speaker G I think there's also issues of timescale and intention that's to say the can't hear.
Speaker B Sorry.
Speaker G I think fourthly, there's issues of timescale and intention. In other words, what's it realistic to actually try and do given 100% antirequisite organization and questions about whether in the end it is realistic to try and change antirequisite organizations other than in very particular circumstances. And then fifthly, there's the development of this field, the feedback from experience, the whole question of how a group like this develops its practices and its interactions. I think the issues fall into one or other of those so far anyway.
Speaker H There may be more.
Speaker E Just a reasonable taxonomy to tackle this stuff.
Speaker B Got his issue not yet fit in there somewhere.
Speaker E Okay, let's have a run at that. The design of the afternoon is loose, meaning we didn't know exactly what you'd come up with. We have tried to anticipate and think a bit about some of the issues and so forth. And the four people selected are in part selected for their lack of shyness, I think, in expressing their viewpoints on the issues. Not intended to be the definitive answers necessarily. I recall sometime in the last year a person who'd done a lot of work in ethics saying that their view after 30 or 40 years of working in the field is that the sign of an ethical person is not always evident in what they do or what their rationale was for doing what they did, but that they always kept ethics paramount in their discussion and consciousness and thinking process. And ethical people talk about ethics in a sense and struggle with the issue. I think probably competent consultants do the same about the practice of consulting. I don't know that there are right and wrong answers necessarily for things but there are certainly dilemmas built into the practice. And I think if we can. Air those and explore those, we'll all be better in terms of our consciousness at the end of the afternoon. In order, chief, why not boss? Where does that fit?
Speaker B Carl.
Speaker E Boss of or boss comma okay role in organization of consulting. Let me maybe lead off on that. In terms of a group practice, so called, which context seven sort of is, someone had requested that I explain how context seven works in a sense. How is it structured. There are three principles and partners of the overall organization, and that's Kay and Rosemary and myself. And we are the full time contingent, if you will, in New York early on, sort of borrowing from a consulting firm that I was an associate in, meaning I was working full time in exxon as an internal consultant, as Dan is in Southern California Edison. But I did occasional external work. I was an associate of this consulting firm. And any work that I did outside of my main employment, I did through that organization. We have four three, four something associates in the New York area who have full time, other commitments full time, but have some flexibility and want to do other consulting work, want to do this kind of work in particular, and who do any work that they do outside of their full time job in a consulting capacity. As of the 1 December, we have a new office that's opened up in Toronto. Don is the head of that office, and it is his full time commitment and livelihood and whatever. He has a part time partner that is with him, and they're the only people who have an equity position in the thing. There are then a group of other associates. Now, the Toronto associates are somewhat different in that all the Toronto associates are full time consultants in their own work. They don't have other jobs and other employment, but they're interested in this work. And inasmuch as they do this work, and increasingly that kind of seeps into their practice every place, they do that through context seven in Toronto. So they're a mixture of some people who are full time, committed, and in a sense, dependent for their bread and butter on what context seven does for them in terms of billings and work, and a group of people who have other from fairly close to further out kinds of relationships. So it's a loose, tight kind of federation, if you will. There are many other ways, obviously, to set up consulting practices. The pluses that we see for us in that kind of a system are, from a crude sense, workload balancing. As long as we got enough work to keep the full time people going, then that provides an opportunity to take on projects that may require extra resources and pull in other people whose mouths do not have to be fed out of the common coffer every month kind of thing. Other advantages are really the ones that we did it for, though, and that's the colleagueship that numbers of us have experienced here over the last week. I know that I'm one of the few I don't know how many of us there are left, jillian, we've been to all of the conferences, the Sal's conferences, the four that we've had. But one of the common themes that has existed in most of those conferences has been this is one of the few places that we can come to and speak a language that, as imprecise as it may be, carries. With it some emerging shared meanings and not be looked at as if we're crazy and in fact get some feedback and bounce and other perspectives and learn and grow. So we wanted to create that not only on an every 18 month basis, in a sense, in our lives, but to create that on a regular basis in our lives. Another advantage that we have experienced from the group thing is the learnings that we are able to get by having people with different expertise, different particular levels of competence. One of the questions that was asked was around what kind of a team might one put together? Well, we found it I found it speak personally, very useful to have on our team somebody who understands information systems, because I don't I couldn't define any of those words that you used a pinch ago. So I found it very useful, obviously, to have somebody on the team who really does understand that part of an organization's business. That's an advantage of having a group of people go in rather than one person on the thing. Another kind of thing that we thought would happen but hasn't is around new product or new process or new idea generation. In fact, it's happened, but it's happened as a result of the need of the work, not because, and someday we may be big enough to afford a group of people who full time do that R and D work, if you will. But as you were articulating a moment yesterday around the development of differentiation as you go up through the strata, what's happened with us is exactly as you described it's really in the P work, the production work. At this point, that development resides and it resides out of particular consulting needs that we have with clients. So those are things I would say.
Speaker C About that particular one. Stephen.
Speaker G I just wondered if that raised questions that anybody wants to pursue or discuss.
Speaker B Is this the area where the question of the work capacity of the consultant is supposed to be? Where the page was flipped over? I'm not sure where on the fire? Yes, it is.
Speaker A Is it?
Speaker E Okay, well, then let me comment on that. Let me comment on that. That's also an advantage to it, to having a group in the sense at least the way we've structured the work that we do. And that is heavily dependent on going into an organization and as a part of the initial getting to know who they are and what they do, we do job leveling is what we call it, which is assessing the level of complexity of the roles in the managerial hierarchy of the organization. Our experience is that this is a hypothesis we floated just last night, or night before last, that if we look at our experience thus far, it appears that someone can effectively, confidently, whether accurately, you never know. But confidently and effectively assess the level of a role or even gather the data so that it can be assessed by somebody else for a job. One below them and down. Equivalent level gets a little fuzzy, and higher levels get quite fuzzy in terms of the practitioner trying to gather the data. So that's a kind of working hypothesis that we have at this point. When you get to level two jobs in most organizations, there are a hell of a lot of them there, and there are even some jobs they may call manager that are level one, high level one job, or stratum one job. The sheer numbers mean that it's clearly an advantage if you take somebody with less experience than me and pay them less than I may want to make for a day's work in an organization and are able to employ them to do that. And on a project. That the one that I talked about in the case study. We had a graduate student who we employed over the summer, which was during the time of that project, and he was actively involved as a part of the consulting team and in gathering data at what we thought would be level one, level two kinds of jobs.
Speaker B What about the relationship that's with the client? In other words, what should be the work capacity of the consultants in relation to the work capacity of the client individual?
Speaker E My experience is that it seems to work best if it's equivalent, not even higher consultant, lower client, because I find myself getting bored with the issues if there's that kind of a gap. Now, we had a discussion six or eight years ago in the ISIS office one time about that, and at that time we were looking at internals. And I think what we sort of agreed intuitively would work is the internal could be, say, at Stratum four with the client at five, and that that would work out fine. As an external, it seems to me anecdotally I'd be interested in anybody's experience here that the client looks for a peer, they look for someone that they can really share worldviews with in some ways, but who has enough of a different perspective on that worldview that they really bring an added value. Anybody see that differently?
Speaker B I think on a client basis, I would agree with what you said. I think the internal external consultant thing is not always that way. So I think there's a difference there sometimes the pain in the ass thing that you were talking about Dan is maybe because of that difference. Again. For me, though, it's how it's treated, perhaps in the sense of the value of the internal person around the intimacy within the system that you're dealing with and that connection they can provide to the system around some of the nuanceful things language, politics, history, those kinds of things that the external will take a long time to ever pick up on their own. The other contract around what can internal learn from working with the external in terms of making that a real collaborative contract to do the work but as well as a learning contract around the development and the training of the internal person? My experience has been when you've had that conversation and that very clear contract, that that's what the relationship is about is to help the internal move up some scale of their development, where that seemed to be a possibility by the internal. Not that imposing that on the internal, but that the internal says, gee, there's a chance for me to learn some new things or some new approaches or some new ideas or whatever. And if that contract is real clear and that's what you're working on, pay attention to it, and you spend time with that, that it's not just doing the work, that you spend time separate from that around that, it works pretty well. And I prefer to have always an internal person. I think my colleagues will share that this kind of things came in thought I'll speak to myself. We have been faced in situations in which the discussion about adding a consultant or bringing in a consultant or even recommending to one of the managers in the department that they should get a specialist to help them on one. Sometimes what a client manager needs is the missing manager they don't have because the organization isn't requisite. And they really have a need for someone at one straight of higher capability to not necessarily tell them what to do, but to assist them with those coaching types of exchanges and help them develop that sense of the broader perspective and so on. In which case that consultant has got to be one straight up, at least higher than themselves. Other times they know what they want. I brought up against this they don't want to be helped to discover what they want. They are confident that they know what they want and what they want is they want to want straight up lower capability, subordinate being effective short term contracts or solicitors, a pair of hands for what they do both of which are legitimate kinds of roles but quite different. And I'll advance the toss it out the notion of modal capacity. Sometimes it's occurred to me that the best consultant may be lower or maybe higher as long as they're on the same mode as the client and if they need somebody of higher ability they want the same mode, an older person than that. If they want labor, they want the same mode, a lower or younger person than that. Does that make any sense?
Speaker G Yes, very much.
Speaker B Which is very interesting because what that means is that each of us, if we have a realistic sense of our own capability and development, have a narrow band of people to whom we could propose to be a resource. I think some of it is related to if there's sort of those three fundamental roles there's an expert role and that parahans role and a process kind of role that partner equivalent.
Speaker E Right?
Speaker B Then I think there's some differences around the choice of the match in terms of work capacity.
Speaker E Having said that, it may be that you have to combine both current ability and mode but in working directly with the client as opposed to working with an internal consultant, some senses is the client but with the line manager client for the thing. It may be the convergence of both is really what works best. Both six mode, both five capability, current capability or something. But it seems that current capability to me wasn't thinking about mode a minute ago. But it seems to me that in terms of the client fit current capability is very important.
Speaker B Discussion is very interesting to me in particular point of view makes one think back and then realize that something new is going on. In fact in the discussion of consulting work we were talking about this earlier and this is where I perhaps bring in possible confusion around the meaning of social analysis and whether something called social analysis is the be all and end all. What strikes me is that what's emerging in the discussion is what in medical practice would be referred to as the distinction between clinical work on the one hand and clinical research work on the other. And it's both clinical work, it's clinical work going on in clinical departments and they're recognized as different and the practitioners are recognized as different. And looking back, what has happened is that this is going way back literally in the late 40s on the basis this is going back over to into London out of tapestock and the developments around there at the time, that all of the work at that time was straight clinical research work. It was all developmental made. In effect, one started with no knowledge. There was literally no knowledge base. The only knowledge base that existed was what turned out to be an incorrect one anyhow around group dynamics and stuff on authoritarian personalities and Lacey Fair leadership and so on. But that was it. And that the object then in setting up so called social analytic method was to tackle the problem of gaining access in depth to phenomena characteristic of work in institutions and secondly, as a means of developing relationships with an. Institution or people in an institution in which they were willing to act in collaboration, recognizing that knowledge, adequate knowledge, did not exist and were willing to put effort into collaborating in the development of knowledge per se. Now that's a very special kind of situation. That's not what one would ordinarily think of as consulting work, not fact. And that's how one's gone working for a goodly many years. And there talks about independent relationship and all of the safeguards that go along with one might call full scale social analytic work. I've been made aware. I know there are numbers of people who think that really they're not doing right somehow if they're not developing a full scale, social, analytic relationship with clients. And if you want to live and eat, I would discourage that. The numbers of opportunities that arise and develop full scale, social, unlimited work relationships with institutions are very few and far between. Try hard and every once in a while opportunities come along. When they do, you can't afford a good long term relationship with an institution. But not all companies are really in the business of concern about developing organizations there and so on and they really do feel they have perfume rightly to fry. And what one recognizes is that the discussion shifted over to discussion about consulting work. And if I just came over to what I would think of as consultancy work now, which would be clinical practice, if one continues to use the medical analog, that circumstance where one assumed that there is a certain body of knowledge available in certain processes. And it is possible, as a country doctor to diagnose appendicitis or something like that and by and large know what ought to be done about it. There is an existing body of knowledge to be applied and where you have something actually possibly to offer clients. This kind of consulting work however, has got an interesting twist to it that I think one should note. And that is that the work that was described today consists of consulting work where the client himself under the circumstances sets up its own internal working resource of quite substantial kind. And it isn't a matter of buying in your consultants, bringing in the package in effect. And I think that's probably a characteristic of and this is what I meant by stratum specific that that probably is a characteristic of consulting work of this kind at higher levels and it doesn't mean that there aren't possibilities for consulting work at stratum three, stratum four maybe stratum two sort of thing. I don't think much of that has been plumbed as yet. I don't think the knowledge really exists long enough and certainly there's enough knowledge and feeling about that sort of possibility but you're differentiating sort of a consultant driven package of stuff from I can't avoid accountability for bringing in my best judgment about what's the appropriate body of knowledge to use to guide our decision making. It's not quite the same as the package but it's not innocent either. No, I guess what I was teasing out was what did you mean by that sort of package of stuff just now? You mean just three, two sort of thing? No. Did I say?
Speaker F Package?
Speaker C Yes.
Speaker B I take it back. I take it back because there is what hit me is there is a package and it's a good one and we're seeing some evidence in several cases here that it works. Well, I think if I'm hearing you correctly, it's like part of my rationale for coming was to when I switched careers and got into the organization in your work, I started to realize pretty soon I had to sort out what seems to be known versus what's debated. In other words, what's the body of knowledge that we seem to count on in this work of saying some concepts and principles that you can pretty much use with people not in a package sense, but in a set of principles. And it's the same here. If you've got some known things then you can offer that as some background principle and concept that people might think about and then apply. I shouldn't have used the word package.
Speaker H I'm sorry.
Speaker B I misled. But that's precisely what I had in mind and thinking about that one notes the possible development of at least four types of consultancy organization or institution externally ranging all the way from individual, independent, professional, practitioner and there are individuals in the room who are doing individual practice and they are practicing on their own as named individuals. The possibilities, and I think through other professions and these all exist possibilities of partnership in the ordinary sense of partnership, that is true. Partners, very small group partnership of lawyers, that kind of thing. And Aldo is not here.
Speaker G Yes, he is.
Speaker B Aldo knows a great deal about all this, as he told us yesterday. What he knows about partnerships have led him quite clearly to choose to work on his own as an individual professional practitioner. In fact, they are delicate relationships but certainly possible forms of organization for consultancy work of this kind, this using partner in the legal sense and as he pointed out, it really does require people by and are the same level of working capability or at least within shooting distance at each other for it to work effectively. Jordan describes something in effect beyond partnership and a number of brands of association in fact in description between practicing consultants and practicing partnerships in effect, which is a very interesting one. And the only reason I mentioned the last is that one based on that sees the possibility, in fact for what many other consultancy firmers do in that of employing a firm employing consultants in a straight accountability hierarchy, the large consultant firms and where in fact you have.
Speaker E Well and effectively the graduate student. Last summer he was graduate student. But for us he was an employee for the summer.
Speaker B And that's the kind of organization that in June course, given sufficient development of knowledge in fact could probably provide out services at Stratum four, stratum three? Stratum two. And the catalogs with other kinds of professions very striking. Architects get into, lawyers get into and so on. And probably all these forms of organization are floating around. And certainly once you get up into however that is say category capability five consultant working at higher levels in client organizations they do increasingly become identified as individuals, whether they're individual or partners or whatnot in their work. One just notes that that individual practice stuff begins to come up more sharply. I couldn't help questioning the discussion. Something begins to move out and would do so increasingly as something called a body of knowledge develops because internal consultant attitude is certainly going to vary with this. Is that not right? Because there's such a huge difference as an equivalent that GM organization, that GMO role, such a difference between contracting with a training firm to deliver some listening skills training and in which you're really employing what was that kind of stuff straight up two sorts of instructional packages and so on. Then talking with Katie and initiating a very long term relationship in which in a sense katie is encouraged and requested to develop a very autonomous relationship with the Five. There's just one last comment here then because just thinking back at one time it was all social, analytic and development work. Now one realized discussion that the emphasis is shifting right over the other way and that one doesn't want to lose sight of the possibility occasionally because of development work around the place even when it is possible who are willing and interested in taking part in collaborative efforts of that which certainly had in Edison and in CRA Edison.
Speaker F I think it's been very good about developer in part because there was no choice. No one had done this computing work before, so we had to do development. They were willing to do it. But it's fairly obvious. Dan and I are very good friends, but we've had some very tense moments in this. And I think one of the things that has caused the most tension and I don't know exactly how to deal with this well, we have both managed to cope with it, but officially I always worked for the head of the department and the head of the department asked Dan to do most of the dealings with me. But when the new head of the department took over, I worked for him. And he made it very clear I worked for him. And so the relationship with Dan's boss became much stronger, went from virtually non existent to it's very clear who I work for and I don't work for Dan. And yet Dan and have always worked very closely together and it's difficult for him and he doesn't know what those conversations are about.
Speaker B One of the things that changed was it changed the rules of confidentiality that were legitimate and accepted rules for Katie and I to work together, and appropriately so, and almost by intention to encourage that. But from time to time it was sort of like, hold on a second, we got this baby floating out here with a lot of people walking around with machine guns, like to shoot it, and I'm not aware of all of the things it introduced. Uncertainty that caused a lot of tension. Not really ever personally professional.
Speaker F During the first two or three years, I can't say exactly when the change came, I get the same council Dan and I shared everything because we were both exploring together and very much so.
Speaker B Everything that was going on shared and.
Speaker F Now suddenly everything could not be shared.
Speaker E What impact has that had? I appreciate there are lots of dynamics. It sounds like you two have managed very effectively in terms of your personal dynamic because that stuff can slough over very easily.
Speaker H I understand.
Speaker E What impact did the shift have on the work? Positive, negative, speeding up, slowing down, different kind of process sped up.
Speaker B It had the good effect of finally getting the five, owning the project and that was important. And everything happened at once. Lots of then mobilization, the curve started to climb.
Speaker F I wonder if there's going to be anything we can do next week still. Oh my God, what am I going to do? I can't get it all done. In fact, that's how the whole project has been. There are moments where there really isn't much happening and then almost instantaneously you just have everything has to be done and has to be done immediately. And so it's kind of crazy making that work too.
Speaker B I'm curious whether maintaining the open, trusting, fully on the table relationship between you two needed to necessarily have been stopped when you started dealing directly with John. It seems as if you could have also contracted no, because it was necessary for John to have somebody to talk to about the potential of all of his S minus ones.
Speaker F And his coordinator, he does talk about potential of his people.
Speaker B Well, see, here's one of those little instances. There is no way I could live in that organization and not separate and pretend that I don't care about who's going to get that job, where they are and so on. But you can be more disciplined than that. I would not be thrown out of the organization by being a catalyst to foster the career development of various individuals. Katie could never play such a role and get away with it without being some yeah, so that's one of the tensions. And now what she does, talking about those positions, if I'm not part of it, I can't help certain people move towards those positions and help their managers recognize them as great development opportunities. And you start to uncouple a little bit, you see it. Frankly, I think the tension never arises if it was driven at the top throughout, because then it would have happened in a reverse sequence. The consultant for the overall organization because the consultant for the overall organization would have played an instrumental role in bringing into existence the GMO role and would have trained the GMO and would foster that. Katie taught me everything and in that sense trained me. But we were co collaborators in the conspiracy to get this thing going.
Speaker G But then in that context, what exactly is the meaning of calling you an internal consultant? Do you see what I mean? You're doing the boss's work. You're helping the boss on this particular organization development work with the help of a consultant who naturally is working for the boss and as part of working for the boss is working with you and maybe other people. I don't see that there's much internal consulting going on. Do you see what I mean?
Speaker B That's really what changed in my work. I stopped being any kind of consultant and had just labor tasks to do. And probably it was because that work was a little less interesting for me personally. I didn't like the discipline. I much prefer the autonomy of having.
Speaker G No formal job, just the employment without the job.
Speaker B Which is interesting because that was the first time I ever experienced better my systems coming home to bite. Because now I got to face the safe facts of defined task outputs, due dates and all those kinds of things. And it's not that much fun to be held accountable.
Speaker E Hence April. What?
Speaker B But there is that sense that's a healthier way to operate. With that accountability. My stress disappears, but it's replaced by the challenges. But that is a real important experience.
Speaker G Can I go back to something you said, Elliot, which I didn't follow? You talked about consultants at levels or consultant work at levels three and two. Did you mean in the field of organization specifically or other things?
Speaker B No, I did. One began to see the possibilities that haven't developed yet, that some of the stuff that's in train, in fact, would be the provision of external services, so called consulting services.
Speaker G I see consulting services as knowledge develops.
Speaker B I mean, one provides knowledge in effect, and it's a very important thing to be able to do. Doesn't need freestanding named consultants and so on to do that. Just listening to discussion, one suddenly realize that that's a development that will take place. There are lots of places that are eager to buy useful, clear, high quality supervisory education and tight, well organized modules on the authorities and so on. You ask bits and pieces. I say why not? Why not teach them how to give correct task design? So I know that it's out of the context of the whole enchilada, but at the same time it's useful pieces of information start debate that's training course material. It can also work to elaborate, if this has.
Speaker F Been agreed at a higher level.
Speaker B In other words, you come in with.
Speaker F Notions about test assignment and then you.
Speaker B Begin to talk about what effective evaluation systems look like and then you gradually talk about requisite tasks, requisite systems and capturing imagination somewhat strategized seeing change in the organization. It's what in English or sticky thing change going in tinkering with this is a system, but that then is a system changes the character of the system, begins to change the culture, begin to think in the language of the kind of whatever minor systems you have introduced, and then they can make the links themselves to other countries. I could just make one comment on that since it's such an important point. I think it's possible to have some bits and pieces, personal effectiveness, phrase of development and so on. I haven't been able to think of any pieces that can be offered separate from a presentation simultaneously and pointing out that you can't have this without having reckless structure. Well, taking you back to the whole enchilada if you think of structure, taking you back to the whole enchilada I cannot think of any pieces that come along separate from requisite structure.
Speaker E But it's interesting you say that we're sort of on into item two, but the case study that I did the other day was an example of where we started with requisite structure, and it was in all of the minds of the people who were involved in that project and others who were aware of it in context. Seven, that that was the first step. And then of course, you'd go to step two and three and four and they got their requisite structure and stopped and said thank you very much, you did what we would have gone to McKinsey to do if you hadn't. And you helped us to get a really great structure and we are delighted with it and thank you. We're embedded in the larger corporation, so we'll stick with our unified salary system even though it's all screwed up compared to this structure and appraisal systems, we can get those from the head office, they'll give those a dime a dozen and they don't cost us anything, whereas you do and on and on and on. So it's I hear discussion of doomish.
Speaker B No, because there's a catch here. You must have done more than that because I don't see how you can help a company achieve requisite structure without a conception of manager subordinate relationships, accountability and minimal authority. Well, if they've got that with requisite structure, then you have limited now the kind of personal effectiveness appraisal scheme they can get because the only scheme they can get is one in which the immediate manager is accountable for appraising the effectiveness of immediate subordinates. If they understood you.
Speaker E Yeah, let me say that this is fairly recent and so time will tell. We have to look back at these things sometimes over a ten year period or more to see where it actually goes. At this point. They were exhausted enough and fulfilled enough with just getting the roles in place. They didn't want to do anything else. Now I think either the structure is going to deteriorate back from requisiteness or it's going to place tremendous pressure on every it already is placing tremendous pressure on everything else that they do and they'll either decide to kill the structure or make it work, one or the other.
Speaker B Maybe that's the point. Shiloh was saying you dropped in that little piece knowing full well that their understanding really was not complete. And that little piece is like the sand in the oyster. Although I think I agree with Elliot in the sense that at least there's an ethical question here that says if you're going to do that, then I think there is an obligation to say I'm doing this performance effectiveness thing based on some beliefs and knowledge that I have about how this works in this kind of system. And you need to know that for me, there's an ethical question I think George has forced me to elaborate on, hasn't occurred to me that the pieces aren't all the same. You can drop in structure without other pieces. It's really understood you then screwed them up for any things they want to do. But you can't drop in any of the other pieces like personal effectiveness, appraisal scheme without structure. They all come tied to it.
Speaker E There's one that we drafted a project proposal for and they put on hold because they acquired another company for right now. And they're distracted but are likely to come back to though that was looking at development and what they wanted. They didn't want a stratified systems whole hog program. What they wanted was to take some of the ideas and help them enhance their succession planning process, which was the judgments of managers once removed. And they were quite willing to live with the fact that managers once removed might in fact be three or four of their layers away from the subordinate that they were making judgments about because they were more or less doing that right now. So that for me is an example we talked about it of, well, it ain't going to be the way we like it to be, but it's probably if we can help them clean it up a little bit, it'll be better than what they've got now. And whether that would lead in a domino effect to the way a restructuring, I think, either must or you've got to kill a structure to anything else. I don't know one other example that is exactly what you're saying though, and that was the ISIS case study that didn't get to be shared generally, but in that situation we had worked with them for a number of years. Big social service organization, very complex, and everybody's got to be involved in every decision sort of thing. So it was very difficult to move it. They could not come to a conclusion to restructure but their compensation problems were driving them crazy. So they did agree to have a felt fair pay compensation study in the place. Once that was done, it was impossible not to move to a structure that was correlated with that. So that is an example of where the domino was so heavy that it could not be stopped.
Speaker C In a sense.
Speaker B Yeah. That intrigues me because I could imagine we talked about it use either there's psychological assessments being done every day using whatever kind of digitalization there is also an opportunity in school systems for guidance for children. If you could identify paths where they might aspire I could see that perhaps standing along.
Speaker E Jillian, you might want to comment on this.
Speaker B Does that make any sense outside of the entire context?
Speaker E The reality is as far as I know every CPA that's ever been done since you created it's been done in a non requisite situation. But there are certainly limitations to what can be done with it.
Speaker B To individuals and organizations, unless the context was responsible. That doesn't necessarily mean that that precise moment, my own experience, if one perhaps appreciation, that spins off almost immediately into consideration structure and the appropriate structure. And you need very often also further issues about culture and values. And it's really just another route in. I don't think it's in any way possible that work to balance the work of individuals alongside the work of bringing the structure to a more optimal state. But I would never dream offering appreciation wasn't already open to the possibility that it was less than optimal. But I wouldn't necessarily feel effectively that I would first insist that structure in some way perfect.
Speaker G This does raise, it seems to me, some very difficult questions, depending on the what should I call it? The size of the mess in which you're working. I think there's been a sort of slightly unspoken competition as to who's working in the most antirequisite context, and I.
Speaker B Would certainly like to claim your I'm.
Speaker G Going to put in a very powerful claim for working in as antirequisite an organization as I think could be devised even if you were trying to devise an antirequisite organization, namely the british National Health Service. Elliot was kind enough to say I've been floating in it for 22 years. I feel I've been sinking in it for 22 years, and I think I may now be said to have sunk, actually. I've given it up. But what I'm thinking of there is that really a number of things the distinction between research and development work as against consultancy with a body of knowledge that you have there to offer. I now feel is a very real one. Because I don't feel that as far as health services are concerned, there's yet quite the full knowledge of what health service organization could or should be. And to that extent, it remains research and development work. To quite an extent. And in relation to what Gillian was saying, I think that does perhaps show that when you get a request from an organization for whatever type of work it may be, whether it's coming in through the development and career, progression of individuals or structural questions or issues of the development or functioning of some particular component of the organization. It can actually be very hard to know for a long time what the meaning and the potential of that request is. It just takes a long time to know. You don't know who you're dealing with. You don't know the relationship between the person that you're dealing with and the rest of the organization and how accessible it may or may not be. And it can be a long time of quite delicate feeling out before you've really got a sense of where you are simply what would it be right to do? What would it be wrong to do? If you're working in the research and development kind of part of the map then it seems to me that in one sense it's easier to undertake.
Speaker F Organizations. One is Dan and Katie from talking about Southern California Edison and the other is Mark and Carl talking about what's going on and has gone on in CRA specifically with regard to educating managers. Mark and Carl described CRA as reasonably requisite or as working toward becoming requisite and Dan described Southern California Edison as extremely non requisite. So I think you're going to get some interesting contrasting views. And after the two team presentations they'll form more or less a panel here so that questions can be asked and they can back and forth, problems that they've had, solutions that have come about and so forth. Before we start that, I think I mentioned to you all that there is some work in progress that Catherine and I are doing and this work is intended to end up being educational material. It will also end up, we hope, being an introductory book to Stratified Systems theory. The hope in both cases is to be able to simplify some of the concepts sufficiently to engender understanding and interest particularly among the management level. At four, hopefully six, four, seven, fours and we're well on the way to completing the first segment of it. We've chunked it into nine segments. I'm going to show you very briefly the visual pieces of the first segment which is Basic concepts of Stratified Systems. You won't be able to probably read the content but I think the interesting piece because it's really intended to be done in a room with 2510 people. I think, though, the flow of the headings will give you some idea of how we've tried to break apart the complexity of the material and arrange it in a logical flow that this group of managers will find interesting and begin to learn the concepts and what we're really after is wetting their appetite for much deeper learning. In this area, we intend to not to pass out. And I'm going to teach in a different way when I work with these groups, and I've already been testing some of this. We're going to give the managers or the participants a page which has a reduced piece of the visual itself on it so they don't have to take any notes. And then there will be written material that is explanatory to the visual. My intention is to have them read that through before we talk that segment, so that I'm reinforcing each piece to make it as simple, straightforward as possible for this extremely complex material. So the actual participants will get papers that look like this. Thank goodness for computers where I can do my graphic big and then just shrink it down here and add the rest. Thank goodness for Page maker, because that's the process that I'm using. I think I'll give you a sense of what the ten segments are first to set the context for where we started with the first segment. And as I mentioned, this is very definitely work in progress, so a lot of changes will happen. These are the segments. It's called System 21, and it's a guide to understanding Stratified Systems theory. We have basic concepts. Then we'll talk about functional alignment. In the next section, working relationships, managers, teams and project work. Then a section on Advanced theory, then HR systems and Talent pool development, planning and Information systems control and leadership values and Motivation and managerial work. One of the problems that we're wrestling with in this is that our feeling that some of this material is not too difficult to take down to level four, but others are not really a level four concern as such. So we're struggling with that. For example, these we feel that we can position clearly at level four. This really is a higher level concern. And that is one of the continuing issues that I have in using Stratified systems in positioning how I explain the educational material that I'm dealing with. Very often you have fives, fours and threes. Well, not very often. You very often have fours and threes in a room together. And I'll tell you a little bit at the end of some educational work that I'm doing right now where we're really struggling with trying to explain some level six work to level fours. And there aren't any level fives in this organization, which is a terrible problem. We talk about extremely nonrequisite. This is what the flow that we've worked out so far, and we've even gone one iteration past that. First, a definition of Stratified system theory. This doesn't clear up. I haven't been able to figure out how to clear it up even. It's just blurry on one side. I'm so near sighted. I can't I am too. I never can do this myself. So I'm going to let somebody else do it.
Speaker B If the cart if the machine is.
Speaker F Like I said, I can't see somebody telling me my eyes are it's okay. If I had my glasses on, I could thank you. And then an introduction to the book, because it would be my hope that this group has the book as well. And it's our intention to interest them in beginning to dig into the book, particularly around the basic concepts in this case that we're introducing. Then why are you here paying attention to I mean, I'll talk to you as if you were the participants. Why is this worth your time to sit here, listen, so forth? Then the first concept that we move to is the concept of cognitive power. Now, you remember that there is a page of two, three, four paragraphs that explains this in front of the participants. And they've read it before I would be talking in depth about the concepts here. So these are just high key points to focus on around the rest of the material. And I'll explain the rest of the material and elaborate on it. And I know there's a lot of very fine educators in the room and I am open to any ideas and suggestions around this about what works, what might work better. What you found doesn't work because it's not easy to prepare introductory work in this. The next one is the relationship between tasks and cognitive power. And as all of you who work in this area know, we were still working on this yesterday. That's why we don't have a computer one. But this was the relationship explanation that we came up with yesterday that we felt was appropriate at this point in time for this group. And it'll all go onto one slide. This is the rest of it. See, there was a big blank here because we just hadn't been able to pull that together yet in a way that we liked. And yesterday we at least think we got closer to that. So that's the second piece, the relationship between tasks and cognitive power. And then a beginning description of categories of cognitive power. Could you hand me? Thank you. And I like to use these and draw on them to liven them up so I don't always have them finished. There's some finishing work I usually like to do in the talking process, then begin to move into the very explicit definitions that are required and pointing out that they are required and that certain words will have very special meaning and only that meaning in dealing in stratified systems area. And then the introduction of the idea of accountability hierarchies and what they are moving from there into requisite organization structure. And that probably will be quite a long sort of lecturette segments that we're still working on. That's why Katherine and I have disappeared from time to time because before she got sicker, probably the next one to go down because we've been working on this because it's hard to find times together. Just like you've been grouping Nancy, just a knit, really, around language. Yes.
Speaker B At the bottom where it says structure provides the correct number of layers for.
Speaker F The level of work. Yes. Trying to get the language right.
Speaker B Where would Stratum fit within that sentence? The layers and the levels?
Speaker F Well, I've struggled with that. I think it is at this point that I would introduce the word Stratum. See, that's always what I'm struggling with. In fact, I was just working on that this morning. So rather than put a word, they haven't and these are the decisions that you make on every single one of these. Rather than put the word strata there, I think I'd put layers. I think I'm not finished. As I say, actually what you're seeing now has gone forward one more iteration. So the next iteration have some different things. But I was actually working on that exact thing this morning and I thought, AHA, this is where I introduce the fact that those layers are called strata because subsequent slides say strata. I don't think I then have to explain strata because you don't have too many definitions to have to deal with. But these are all moot points, suggestions gratefully received because as you rightfully point out, the next slide. Because what I'm trying never to do is to introduce a word without explaining it previously on the slide before and then use it, or if I bring it in, explain it. So on this one, I wanted to explain it on that slide and then talk about these are the various strata in an organization. Typically these are titles for that strata.
Speaker B Yeah, that's the only thing that's potentially problematic with that, I think with what are not strategic corporations, perhaps they have a CEO, president and so even that language is potentially confusing. If you're working in systems, that science because they're seeing their president and CEO. What's my guy?
Speaker F That's a very good point. And I think what probably should happen is that there should be a slide inserted in the customization or the semi customization if you're in a given organization, or even if you're not. I mean, if you have people from multiple organizations you could typically show, as Elliot did so well yesterday, talk about the Stratum Two organization. The Stratum four organization. Talk about different kinds of organizations. I think that might be very useful. And I absolutely agree with you, you're 100% on that. I would make up one and use the titles because I find that organizations don't like it. They like it if you use their language. And that's something I've always tried to be very careful of as a consultant over the years. And when I first go into an organization, I note all their own particular jargon and try to throw it right back at them because it increases their comfort level, makes me seem less of an outsider. So I would do the same thing on this.
Speaker B Yes.
Speaker F Very good, thank you, I appreciate that. And any other suggestions please give forth then we'll talk about some of the categories of roles. It's too complex to introduce all of them yet, but some of the key ones again to foreshadow the next couple of things that we'll be talking about and dealing with then talk about minimum managerial authority. That ought to engender quite a bit of discussion in a number of organizations.
Speaker B Pardon we haven't talked about that yet this week but that one slide there really gets some good discussion going about that's a slightly process and they're really bump up against what people's tradition.
Speaker F And then we move into levels of work and time span. What does it mean? And an illustration of the fact that people feel their real manager is the one at the appropriate level above them rather than the one who has the title or the position in non requisite organizations. Because obviously the only thing we're going to be people we're talking to are in nonrequisite organizations. That's more an illustrative slide then this one's a lulu. I'm struggling with this one myself right now and trying to write a course talking about decision making, task complexity and decision making and this one has been quite drastically changed from this particular iteration and I've actually struggled whether or not to bring it in yet at this point. But I think it has to come out in the first basic concepts in introductory material. And then I think this model is very useful to many people because it really shows graphically what one has been talking about up until this and finally ending with quite detailed description of work at the various levels. And here again this I think would have to be customized to be organization specific or various. I think this one could be very customized and this is the one where one could change the time frame of the discussion. I have found often when I've gone in to introduce this idea to people I can only get an hour of their time. This material is intended to take up about 2 hours. This one could be minimized or just handed out for later reading the actual content of that piece. So that gives you some sense of that work in progress and we hope to have similar material available for the other nine. We're working another nine segments that I pointed out. We're working on two more simultaneously right now and hopefully next year we can give you maybe it might be done, we'll try.
Speaker B Is that material that you see using an organization who has already general terms accepted the need to restructure or such a training education sponsored by the company already talking about something which explains it to people in order for them to think about whether they want to use that.
Speaker F Our primary purpose right now is the latter. I would hope it will develop into the former. But I personally don't have the experience that you're going to hear this morning. And until I get more of that experience, I don't really have the sense of what makes that work well in an organization. I hope to gain that by gaining experience and by sharing of people's experiences themselves. So I would say that's our ultimate direction. But there again, it'll have to be customized and organization specific. But in this age of the computer, that's not too hard to do. At least it takes less time to do it. In terms of the production, are there any other questions about that that I just ran through? I'd like to then have Carl and Mark talk about their work at CRA and address some of the areas that Ian was raising. How is this actually done? What does work in educating managers and what is less effective and how do you overcome the problems? So I'll turn it over to Mark and.
Speaker B Slide it.
Speaker C Nancy has asked me this morning if I'd lead off from the CRA perspective, from the point of view of discussion on educating managers to carry out their role in the reorganization process. And I thought before I started that for those of you who are not familiar with CRA, I'll just give you a very brief thumbnail sketch. CRA is an Australian company which employs approximately 26,000 people. The annual sales are in the order of five and a half billion dollars. The organization is primarily concerned with the extractive industries that's mining raw materials, with metal processing, and with fabrication of the final product. CRA has interests in Australia, in the US. And in Europe, and has been engaged in the reorganization process since around about 1978. So it's something that we've been working at for quite a number of years, in fact, over a decade now. And the purpose that lies behind that decade of work is to maintain and improve the competitive position of the organization in the world market. So that was the overall context to allow the continued survival of the organization. The topic which Nancy's asked me to talk about this morning is one which can cover a very wide range of circumstances and intents. In other words, organizations can be in very different, may I say, degrees of requisiteness and have quite a variety of intents in why they want to become a requisite organization. So I thought that I'd just address two themes today, which is very much from a pragmatic point of view, and that is to look at issues of needs, that is needs both as requirements of the managers in the organization, what their contribution is and also what is required by those people to allow them to do their work effectively. And the other theme then was to look at some of the issues that need to be considered when addressing the education of managers in the organization. In contrast to Nancy's work, which, as I understand is aimed more at people in level four and above roles. These observations are drawn particularly from experience with providing education for managers in level two and level three roles, although it has got some general application. CRA has undertaken formal training programs for members of the organization from level one, level two, level three and level four roles. And Carl will be talking more about the level four work in a few minutes. I thought before we get too far down the track, we should, however, make sure, bearing in mind some of Elliot's comments yes, in the last couple of days, that we've got a common understanding of what I'm talking about, whether or not you agree with it. But at least you know where I'm coming from. The first one is in the topic of educating managers to carry out their role. I'm seeing here managers and their role as being the leadership work that we were talking about yesterday, and that the reorganization process is one of changing the nature of the organization or changing the organization to become more requisite. I think that in many instances that change process is regarded as only really involving structure. If we change the structure, then we've made the organization requisite. If you look at it only in that sense of sense, a sound change to structure really involves you in a consideration of such things as role definition, role relationships, authorities and accountabilities. So those are all issues which need to be brought into the education process. I think though, that it goes beyond that includes such things as systems. Which brings us back to the point that Carl was making yesterday about the need to have systems to support the structure once you've implemented it and beware the backside of your trousers if you don't do it. And similarly, then you need to go on to address such issues as the values of the organization. As I indicated right at the outset, this isn't a process which is going to be done in a hurry. I don't believe in an organization such as the business unit that I'm in now, which is a level five led unit. I would anticipate that in a circumstance where the managing director, as the leader of that work unit, is driving the process at a reasonable pace, that the full change to an organization such as ours will take somewhere around six years to achieve, just as an indication. So there will be education needs throughout that period, both in a formal sense and on an ad hoc basis. And we need to give consideration to all of those, turning then briefly to the question of needs. And first of all, what is required of the individual who's going to be successfully involved in an education process. If a manager is going to contribute to the process of change in the organization, then it's necessary that that person, I believe, has a desire to understand what is involved and to contribute. To the work that's required. Now, that can be achieved in two ways. You can have someone who is assigned a task if it's assigned clearly and they know that there are consequences for poor performance that tends to create a need. In other words, people want to know as a resource, they want knowledge so that they can perform the task successfully. Alternatively, there are some people who have a simple curiosity about what alternatives there are for doing things and that may in itself suffice initially. What are the things that the organization needs to provide to satisfy the requirements by the individual so that it is reasonable to have them involved in the change process? I believe that it's necessary to provide the context for people. In other words, some expression of the environment in which the person who is initiating the change that they're in so that the person knows where it's coming from. They need to know what the purpose of the change is, particularly the purpose as it affects them in their work so that they can relate the work. They've got their own context. Very importantly, I believe that the education process should allow managers and the participants to understand what the nature of the work is that will be required of them as their contribution to the process. And critically, that that work is legitimate work within the organization because it may be new work to the organization, work that has not been done before. And so they have to be given the opportunity to realize that that is legitimate. Then consideration needs to be given to providing opportunity for managers to learn about the concepts which form the basis for the reasoning on which the change is being undertaken as it affects those people. They need to be able to participate in the process of change so that they are involved both in the sense of being given opportunity to question and to criticize the concepts, to be involved in the analysis process and consideration of recommendations so that the whole thing becomes explicit. Rather than being simply an evangelical thou shalt do this which from my observation in CRA, where it has occurred on one instance particularly was very counterproductive and engendered a very negative response because people were not allowed to understand. There's another interesting issue involved in this, and that is that if an organization wants to make a significant change in the behavior that is required of the members of the organization, then I believe that the conditions of employment have to be made very clear as they are changed. So that if there is to be a change in behavior, it has to be made clear what the circumstances or conditions are if that behavior is not changed so that will or will not the organization tolerate nonrequisite behavior after how long and under what circumstances? So are you going to say that at the outset anybody who is seen and judged to be making a negative or destructive contribution to the change will be required to leave the organization? Or are you going to say that that is tolerated and that after a period where an education has been allowed, opportunity for learning has been allowed that as part of your performance appraisal system that if people are judged not to have changed their behavior appropriately that they will also be required to leave the organization. And I think that's an important matter to consider turning then a little more to the issues of educating managers and the people involved in the reorganization process and looking at some of the ways of doing that. Perhaps most the most effective way of achieving change in an organization is to have the manager's manager change their behavior. In other words that a pattern of requisite behavior is established on which people can model their own behaviour. This provides the introduction of the concepts and also illustrates the process for people involved and as I say sets a pattern on which they can model their own behavior. I believe from observation in CRA that it is essential that the reorganization process is not seen as the mechanistic implementation of a series of apparently unrelated concepts, and rather that the process itself, whatever process you choose to implement, allows for adjustment both in the rate and the content in accordance with the circumstances of the people who are involved in it, such as allowing for personality changes or personality differences, for workload that's on for particular cultures and so on. We have had in fact I have had made to me comments on one occasion which really set me back a bit. Somebody said that organization development which is what we called the process of introducing change organization development is a malevolent force. There's a term that was made to me it wasn't even in a pub, it was in a laboratory. I tended to take it fairly seriously on quite a number of occasions you hear people around the organization saying comments like we've been OD or since we were OD or OD got us and these sorts of things. And I find that a little sad because it suggests that at least in my contribution perhaps hasn't been as good as it could have been. And that it is indicative, amongst other things, because I think it indicates a number of things. But it is indicative, amongst other things that the reorganization process has not really been understood for what it is and that is the introduction of a consistent body of knowledge into the organization which, if it is applied successfully will allow the realization of individual capability and lead, one hopes, to a successful and requisite organization. The other thing to bear in mind in any education program and in fact in the reorganization process itself is that it is not necessarily a benign process. It is something where there will be pain because if you take the circumstance where you have capable people involved who understand what is going on, even for them, there can be a lot of work involved and that isn't necessarily the easiest thing to do. People may enjoy it in the long run, but it isn't easy. Alternatively, you'll have people whose attitudes, whose behavior requires significant change. And I think in that case, as we talked about earlier, the question of how do you do that and what are the consequences of that have to be addressed. And the managers in the organization have to be prepared to demonstrate their commitment, both their commitment to the reorganization process and the concepts which they are trying to introduce and also, of course, their compassion for the individual. But this can involve considerable pain for those people insofar as who should do the education is concerned. I believe that education, the provision of education is in fact a very important part of the work of leadership and so it is naturally best done by the manager of the particular work unit. This achieves a number of things. It demonstrates that individual's commitment to whatever is being introduced because it is a public statement from which that person will find it very difficult to withdraw. Also, from a very practical point of view in preparing the material to present it, a manager probably learns a lot more than his or her managers who he's addressing and the process can then be reiterated and the manager, once removed, so to speak, should be requiring that his or her managers continue that process. One can, if you wish, involve consultants or external people in that process. And if time is desperately short, then you can probably, simply by the introduction of more resources, achieve the end result more quickly. However and I see Ian shaking his head. Can I just finish? One has to ask whether in fact the end result that you require is really being achieved and weigh it against the advantages of having the manager do the training.
Speaker B Distinguishing distinguishing training. I would put education as a provision of knowledge.
Speaker C Right, yes. I'm working on that principle. I'm talking here and I hope I haven't used the wrong words anywhere, but I'm talking about education as the in the sense of providing knowledge to allow people to do something. And I would encourage in my organization require managers to do that. Yes, because if you leave it only as training in the sense that you're using, which is a skill, then I think you risk it becoming very mechanistic. You have to allow people to understand the whole and the links between the concepts that you're trying to introduce. And I'll come back to that one to the point of how to do that in just a minute. In fact, that was going to be the next point when you're looking at that education process, and I think Nancy alluded to it earlier this morning, that it has to be couched in language, both in the actual words. That are used and in the construction and include examples which are all relevant to both the capability and the circumstances of the people involved. So there is no point to use a very simple example of illustrating a talk about the role of the superintendent with examples of the work from a railway rolling stock maintenance workshop. If you're talking to an audience of people from a mine or from a Smelter, they simply don't understand. It is not relevant to their environment. And it is those sorts of considerations which I believe you need to make very carefully indeed. And I think that this is in fact where the work that Flynn and Ian introduced the other day is of particular significance, given that understanding of the construction of language and the different interpretation that that allows to be able to use that to achieve a better education. The other thing to give consideration too, when you're looking at education in the sense of a program, is to always be watching that you're matching that against the perceived needs, the needs that people have. As I mentioned earlier, we have had a series of formal education opportunities for quite a number of people throughout the organization. But you also need to be watching for opportunities to do that, if need be, on a one to one basis in the workplace at the time it's required, when a particular task has triggered a particular need, use that opportunity as an effective manager, a leader, to introduce a concept, to help the person do their work. As somebody once put it to me, there is no point in answering unasked questions. Wait until the questions being asked can often make your education work much more effective. And critically, always link the training to the implementation work. Just to finish up with a couple of fairly general thoughts. We in CRA are, I believe, seeking to achieve, amongst other things, what Elliot has described, and if I may quote here as the pattern of connections which ought to exist between roles if the system is to work efficiently and to operate as required by the nature of the work to be done and by the nature of human nature. So the implementation of a structure which distributes the work required of the organization in a requisite manner, in other words, according to Stratified systems theory, is not necessarily or is not to achieve a requisite organization. I believe to achieve that requisite organization requires having that work done. There's no point in simply saying here it is distributed, it has to be done, it has to be identified correctly, it has to be assigned, and it has to be assessed. The performance of that work has to be assessed. Having the work done requires the appointment of the appropriate people, it requires the implementation of correct systems, and it requires effective leadership. Again, amongst other things, the objective of educating managers. So all the work of educating managers, the objective of that is to equip all of them to become an informed and effective force for changing the organization to equip them in fact for their future work as managers in the organization. The difficulty and I speak now both as someone who was involved in almost a consultancy side of things and as someone who was involved as a manager now trying to introduce these changes or further the changes. The difficulty is that what is of the nature of things which Elliot refers to is not always readily apparent or acceptable to those who are the nature of things.
Speaker B Flesh that one out a little bit.
Speaker C Well, you've got the people involved who are the nature of things it's not always readily apparent to them what is required. You've got culture, you've got what was that lovely expression you had, Stephen, for resistance to change which I was talking to you, you called me psychological something.
Speaker B Special.
Speaker C But what I'm really saying there is that the introduction of what is seen as requisite of the nature of things is not always current.
Speaker B What?
Speaker F She's having difficulty hearing you.
Speaker C I'm sorry, that's just for effect for looks, is it? So I've been leaning what again want me to say it all again? What I'm saying there is simply that from my observation the introduction of ideas which are seen to be related to an understanding of human nature and the characteristics of being human are not always recognized as such by other people for a variety of reasons. So don't assume that you're going to get that recognition unless there are any questions. At this stage I'll hand over to Carl.
Speaker B In your education and training? Do you do anything in terms of helping your managers understand their environment? Or is your experience implementing simply that you make assumption that somehow purposes and goals prioritize organizers are already known given and do anything in your education process to inform managers broader to help them concern themselves whether in fact goals that are being followed. As priorities are both repetitive, they seem to fit the needs of the environment and secondly can be shared in the way that you're supportive.
Speaker C We do. Yeah, the answer would be yes in that looking there simply to the formal education opportunities because I can't really speak for the informal ones. The formal education or learning opportunities in which these concepts are introduced include reference to CRA's wider environment and the context their context both from a technical point of view and from a financial point of view and also from the wider perspective of the human relations work. So for example that will include reference to the development and work of union organizations in Australia to other training work that's been done throughout the country. Is that the thrust of the question?
Speaker B In other words when you're doing this training you are clear and explicit about the priorities with your what your priorities are and that's something that in the training either people know or you can explicitly tell them well still play it absolutely crystal clear. That's what every education session starts with. When we enter into an organization development study. Here is a brief financial analysis of the organization. Here's an analysis of the migrant past trends. Here's the positioning of the organization on the international cost curve. This is what our labor and capital productivity trends are. This is where we go. The reason I asked the question is my limited experience. Of course, I work a lot public organization that I find it very difficult to get into. Looking at structure, system and even personnel capacity, when most people don't know what their priorities are and how one begins that education process without getting to live somehow. The process started with Sir Roderick Carnegie's.
Speaker H Appreciation and the fact that CRA was.
Speaker B Heading for oblivion, in spite of the fact that at that time it was an extremely profitable organization and he could produce the rationale for this. What he said was, we have got to change our organization because if we don't shoot our productivity wider steps of productivity by an order of magnitude will be gone in 15 years. And that was about 15 years ago. If you look at what has happened people was.
Speaker H When we took it down.
Speaker B Through the organization, we're looking at a business unit. We dissected the business unit, what it had been doing. We're looking at a level four led.
Speaker H Site as a lot of our operations are, we dissected the performance of the site. What that does is to give a backdrop and it gives a rationale for why we're doing what we're doing. I believe that is essential, absolutely essential. It was interesting to sit through George's case study the other day, because just looking at what they'd done, it appeared as you had done that also. What I'd like to talk about is the education process. I'll make a couple of comments to begin with and then I'll describe some of the things that we did. And in general, most of the description will be things we did wrong. I was very interested in Nancy's comment about where you aim this education material in the organization. Given that most of our organizations consist of individual sites, some of which are close to major population centers, some of which are remote, and those sites are led by a person in a level four position.
Speaker B You'Ve.
Speaker H Got to really understand the leadership impact that the individual in that position has.
Speaker B Um.
Speaker H The general manager of the mine in Broken Hill, for example, at one stage, not, not currently, nor the previous one, was on the committees of 37 local organizations. They're not all like that. When I took over as general manager in Weeper, I resigned from the kindergarten. It was the only organization I was on. And that's so that I could be uniformly nasty to all of them. And because having lived there for so long, I was aware that there had previously been a history of promotion being gained through membership of clubs. When I went there you joined the bowls club. The next thing you joined was the Lions club. I'm stepping through a couple of year gaps here. Then you joined the golf club and then you joined the bowls club. If you actually took the care to step through the staff of the organization who had been there for a long period of time, you could pick the periods of their promotion to staff by their club membership. And I am serious and I didn't want people saying afterwards that the way to get promotion. While Stuart was general manager was join the kindergarten. What you're dealing with in a site like that are the systems and the human processes of the entire community, not just the organization. What that leads into is an understanding of the process you're about when you enter into this organizational development change consultancy. Bear in mind I'm talking about an internal consultancy where it's harder to walk away from the result and forget it's. The process of the actual change itself can guarantee a failure. And we had that one of our very few sites where the relationship between the award workforce, that's the unionized workforce and the staff was good enough to have the union members openly prepared to be involved in the interview process.
Speaker C Because.
Speaker H They are interested and keen to improve the productivity of the organization. The organization development team successfully alienated them and the entire staff and management group of the organization.
Speaker C That.
Speaker H Was five years ago. An organization development still stinks in that organization and they're still working their way.
Speaker E Out of the trouble.
Speaker H The reason for that in my view team leadership and some of the membership was of wash my mouth out, was unable for whatever reason to fully comprehend and understand both the process and the theory that they were trying to apply. And so it was all Kent. And bear in mind this was an organization, and still is for that matter, where people ask direct questions and you better be able to answer even if you say Shit, I don't know, I'll tell you later if I can find out. At least that's an honest answer. What they are answered with was a recitation from the scriptures and it was a very destructive process to what was a very good organization that required very little structural change too, I might add. You can get caught on some very small things. Another very good team, early in the process through CRA as a convenience mechanism for their own work in structural design, sorted their line management functions from their standalone contributor functions symbolically and they drew their organization charts. Thusly where this is a line management function and that's a standalone contributor. Now we went back there, I smiled because it really was a lesson to us. Fortunately we learned it before we started our own work. We went back there about twelve months after the organization team, organization development team had left. And they were having an enormous amount of unhappiness in the group that were in these roles. And we spoke with some of them and one of them clarified it beautifully. He said it's even on the organization chart. We're stuck out there on the side a little ball and we just snap off and fall into the abyss, right? By, just by the symbolism of the diagrams you had denigrated everybody in a standalone contributor role. They fall into the abyss, lost forever. I talked about systems, I'm always talking about bloody systems. People in the organization are thoroughly fed up with me talking about systems.
Speaker B But.
Speaker H Never mind, I enjoy them and I'm going to keep on talking about systems. One of the education exercises, and it really is a very simple 110 minutes, is tightly now the militaries, the armed services of countries have got this pretty well locked up. They've had them around for a long period of time. You might say they've probably got more sense than to try to change them. But if you're going to get clarity of understanding through the organization, if you're going to develop a language which allows the members of the organization to talk about the structural arrangements you have applied, if you want that to be anchored in the culture of the organization so that it becomes invisible and holds the process viable years down the track, you have got a very powerful system available to you in Titling. And if you go, I'll use our titles. Managing Director, general Manager, manager, superintendent supervisor.
Speaker B You it.
Speaker H Where that is your managerial line. You are then confronted with the issue of what to do with your various standalone contributors, your support specialists. If you care to set up a titling system which identifies those positions.
Speaker B It.
Speaker H Can become immediately clear to the organization by looking at a person's title, what position they hold, and if you have educated people to develop an understanding of the type of work which is required in that role, you can use a single title as a very excellent clarifying process. For example, if your title is Chief Organization Advisor, you have said that's a level four role deals with organizational issues and it's advisory role. The work of that role is the delivery of high quality expert advice. It's a level four role. So the advice is delivered to the managing director and on his direction to fellow general managers. That's the titling convention. Let me tell you, we're still fighting about it and I think there are two business units out of the 20 OD in CRA that actually use it. The rest of our people at this level in the organization were so horrified by the thought of losing the general manager title that our leadership buckled and didn't require that it be mandatory. Mind you, we have done so down.
Speaker B Here.
Speaker H And sort of there. And for the organization there's a message in that. So you're just going to give a ten minute section of your education process untitling? No. Understand what you're doing, fight through what it should be, get it agreed to, take a deep breath and put it in. It'll rattle around for about six months, and then everybody will get used to the new moniker.
Speaker B You.
Speaker H We had an interesting argument down here in level two roles, the superintendent is no problem. As the manager, what do you do for a standalone contributor?
