Comments on: Kinston & Rowbottom: "Levels of Work: New Applications To Management In Large Organisations"

By: Al Gorman

Al Gorman — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:48:27 +0000

Forrest,
Interesting response. You’ve begun by stating that the labelled “bald assertion” is really not that bald and end by stating until additional information is published that we will need to be content with the “bald assertion”. Although I initially did not understand your references to quintaves there may be some relevance inasmuch as the eight stratum is concerned.

In its association with the Georgian scale due to the neutral tuning within the quintave system, the eighth degree or octave is slightly widened, which often results in a rise in pitch from the beginning of a song to the end.

From my recollection of a stratum VIII organization Jaques advocated these to be super corporations not unlike General Electric or General Motors. The analogy that they are distinct and a widening of an S VII organization seems appropriate.

By: Paul Holmstrom

Paul Holmstrom — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:50:44 +0000

There are a number of issues at hand – one set about personal capabilities and the other about organizational levels.
There is nothing in the research that Elliott and others conducted during the bioss years that indicate more than seven levels. The proposal of an eight level does not have the solid research background as the initial seven.
Yes organizations usually have (far) more organizational levels than there are levels of personal capability. The consequences of that is well described by Elliott and other authors. But should the difficulties in adapting the number of organizational levels to the number of levels of personal capabilities drive us to add levels to accomodate the issue?

By: Forrest Christian

Forrest Christian — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 04:10:24 +0000

It’s not that bald: there has always been a good deal of disagreement between Jaques and many of the BIOSS staffers about there being eight levels to corporate management. These aren’t a single question but several: Are there no more than seven levels to work organizations? Are there more than seven levels to mental processing regarding work? Are levels grouped in quintaves? How many quintaves are there? How are quintaves organized? What is the relationship of timespan of discretion or personal time horizon to multiple quintaves? What in the world are we “measuring” here? What does this interact with?

Some folks have solutions that would clearly indicate that Jaques was “kind of right, kind of wrong”, as were the BIOSS staffers who disagreed. Unfortunately, until they are finally published I can only provide Fermat’s bald assertion — “”I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.” Except in this case it is “others” and not “I”. You have to love academic review cycles.

By: Al Gorman

Al Gorman — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 01:59:09 +0000

“Jaques at some point allowed for an 8th level of work within organizations, and said that other levels of thinking exist. He was kind of wrong here and kind of right, but it is useful to think of seven levels of work as outlined in this article being within a single domain of work.”

Forrest- This is a rather bald assertion. Can you explain how Jaques was “kind of wrong and kind of right”?

By: Paul Holmstrom

Paul Holmstrom — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 04:05:29 +0000

Thanks for posting the article! It takes a while to get these articles from the library.

The original research done initially by Elliott on development of pay, which resulted in the bands of the development curves only had seven levels and modes. This was confirmed by other researchers at Bioss. The Levels of Work framework as developed by Gillian Stamp has seven levels.

When Elliott later reinterpreted the levels and constructed the concept of declarative, accumulative, serial and parallell, and the metalevels of these, it was possible to theorize about levels which did not exist in previous research findings.