Lasting Contributions: 'Social Analysis' and 'Organizational Design: The Work-Level Approach'

Speaker A I'm a natural writer, I love writing whether I'm a good writer is another question but I write as the Health Service project that Brunell went on. First of all, working papers were written and then two books were published with multiple authorship and the same happened with the social welfare or social services projects. First of all, Working Papers, then two books. These may still have some interest, I was thought the Health Services Book Hospital Organization, where I was the principal author might still have uses for hospital administrators and the like across the world. The social welfare, I think is very oriented to the British scene and I would have thought was of less general interest. The two books which I regard as my particular lasting contribution, if I have one, are Social Analysis, which is a full scale exposition of the method which Elliot Jacks pioneered and developed but which was further developed as we worked on it and Organizational Design, the Work levels Approach, which elaborates the theory of work levels. I'll just say a little more about that in a moment but weaves it in to a general approach to organizational design of a very practical kind, I think which, Paul, you've just touched on what are the levels, what are the accountability and authority relationships? What does this spell out for recruitment and assessment of personal abilities? So that's the second book. I would be very happy to think if people got something from those two books but forgot anything else I'd written, I'd rest I was going to say I'd die now I'd rest a happy man. I just do want to say what about work levels? Because although I haven't followed the story myself, I think there it has to be recognized here something of a parting of a ways in the whole social analytic approach and the people who practice it. Elliot's brilliant insight was that work in organisations is stratified and it has a basic time dimension, I think this sort of huge and lasting social importance as we all know or we who are in the movement. He developed this instrument, The Time Span of Discretion, which was developed initially to help for job evaluation, that is, the fixing of salary bounds. He then went on to explore in several different places what characterized these different strata, not just beyond time, I should say. And of course you have a very elaborate and rich and insightful descriptions I tend to see them as psychologically oriented. They're telling us what the mind is, what the mental ability is that needs to do work at levels one, two, three, whatever. What the insight David, Billis and I myself had, I think and the original questions were posed by David, I must say. It's always, they say in science the most important things is to ask the right questions and David certainly did that was what about the required work itself? Can we say anything about the required work at levels 1234, whatever. And once the questions were posed like that, certainly answers popped up in my mind very rapidly indeed, almost in one evening. They needed a lot of work, which David and I did together. It was a very full and very real collaboration. And the formulations we finished with are very simple. They can be categorized in a couple of words at each level and have proved, certainly proved at the time. The last ten years. Say I was in the work, very easy for managers from industry, commerce, all the public services to understand, virtually. Warren Kinston and I would introduce it as a 20 minutes input in some of our one day conferences and the people there would get some sort of a handle on it immediately. It points to simple facts about work which people know, see in their own experience. Shall I just mention three of them to give a flavor of it? We call the work level at Level One prescribed output because workers at Level One do have to use skill in many places. A lot of discretion, as Elliot pointed out, there's discretion in all work, but they don't have to know what the end product should look like. It should be a brick wall well made, or a room well swept, or a meal delivered to an elderly person, or a certain nursing procedure carried out with a patient. That's what it should look like at the end. As far as it matters, like Work Level Two, which we called Situational Response, you get what might generally be called case workers. You have problems come to you a case at a time, getting this machine working, seeing to this client, and you have to decide within given parameters what the exact outcome should be. You have to decide how long to spend with this customer or this client to get a result which you regard as satisfactory. But you're working at things one off still at a time. You're dealing with lumps of human and technical material. You deal with that. You use your judgment about what should be done, then you move on to the next one. Level Three. The task for the principal worker or the manager is to go beyond seeing life as a series of lumps of difficult cases, to see it as a flow and maintain systems and develop systems to some extent which can deal with this flow. There is a fateful leap from Level Three to Level Four because now in most businesses you'd be called a director, and I'm talking VPs in transatlantic discussion. You're part of a corporate team which is managing a big chunk of the enterprise. You're not just dealing with one off cases, although you do this sometimes, you zoom down and deal with them, and certainly the most important ones. You're not spending a lot of time setting up systems yourself as a systems analyst or project engineer, those sort of things. You delegate, though occasionally you dabble in it and say, wouldn't be a good idea to run it this way. You're standing back, you're surveying the whole of a territory or social landscape, and you've got budgets, you've got so much money, you can allocate and you're setting up resource centers here or there so as to provide a balanced and comprehensive coverage of that territory. Five obviously, the nature of the work shifts again to upper notch by now. One is the chief executive or CEO, whoever it may be, simply is given a field to develop. It might be, say, home furnishings or machine tool manufacture or health services, and now has got with his or her staff to innovate services within this field, not merely to provide a range of already well established services in health services, for example, to see how much might be done in a domiciliary way as opposed to bringing people into hospital. Whereas at level four, the brief would be your job is to provide hospital services. Don't start getting innovating and coming out. If you've got those good ideas, go and get a job as a chief executive officer somewhere else. I think that's probably all I need to say at the moment. About level five, you were saying you were suggesting, Ken, might say a little more about the production of the book. Well, it took several years. First, David and I worked on the ideas for a year or so. We then produced a paper which went into the Human Relations Journal and which I see is quoted fairly often. And we then ran a series of workshops, David and myself, drawing people from industry and commerce, banking, things like this, to expose these ideas and see in a workshop setting how far people found them useful. And then after, I should think probably it would be about four years, we decided the time was ripe to produce a book. And the book's in two parts. The first part is elaborating the theories, so they're, of course, all grounded in practice, our own practice and the practice of people who work with us. And then the second part looking more particularly at areas in which we'd had direct implementation experience in factory organization, I recollect in local government in Britain and again in the health services and drawing together a lot of material which I think is of probably worldwide relevance about the nature of professional work and the use of multi professional teams.