After reading Harald Solaas’s article, “Why Requisite Organization (RO) Theory Is So Difficult to Understand”, I’m pretty convinced that he’s right: the starting point for describing Requisite Organization is not mental processing — yes, it is pretty cool, even then — but that Requisite Organization represents how people naturally want to organise in hierarchies.
Requisite Organization is an emergent function in human groups of large numbers.
By first talking about how it simply gives a common language to the intuitive understanding of who should manage who that folks have, you get more non-HR people on board since you are validating their own experience. You’re telling folks that folk wisdom isn’t wrong, that the way that they feel in their gut work could be done best is usually right. And here’s a theory to see that in action.
I think that the next point after getting this broad point across, along with the idea of your boss being a certain distance from you that feels correct (tacit knowledge working here), you should go straight into felt-fair pay. Turn the compensation ideas on their ears. Solass writes:
The level of pay stated as fair and equitable by the subjects:
- Does not correlate with the type of occupation they work in,
- Nor with their actual pay level,
- Nor with the marketvalue of their positions,
- But it does correlate significantly with the level of work as measured by time-span.
Image Credit: ADLER typewriter Model n°7 (Frankfurt / Germany). Unknown model date (probably ~1930/40). © Dake. (CC BY-SA 2.5)
