Kinston’s 1988 article is up.

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For Friday, here’s “Seven Distinct Paths of Decision and Action” by Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie from 1989. This paper describes the seven different approaches to decision-making, but note that it’s really about action.

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Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
Alistair Mant, Chairman, Socio-technical Study Group, spoke at the 2005 GO Society Conference in Toronto about his experiences and work with Wilfred Brown, the chairman of Glacier Metal Company, where the ideas about work levels were originally worked out. Mant makes the point that well before Dr. Jaques and his Tavistock [...]

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From Rushworth Kidder’s Moral Courage, chapter one. Walter Eric Duckworth (OBE), who I believe went on to serve as Head of the Fulmer Ltd. and Chairman of the London Metallurgical Society, describes an incident early in his career with Glacier Metal Company, right about the time that Tavistock and Elliott Jaques started working with the [...]

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Photo by Felipe Micaroni Lalli
When last we left them, the three union men had burst upon Elliott Jaques with the brilliant solution that had come to them while drinking: the reason why some people got paid more than others had to do with how long it took to get paid. My fictionalization aside, what [...]

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(The next post today will address the Underachieve issue directly. This one describes why Wilfred Brown is important to listen to. We’ll refer to these things later.)
As Paul Holstrom pointed out, my telling of the story about the Union guys was a bit off. They had been having a pint and were talking about the [...]

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Let’s face facts: RO means that a lot of people (1) aren’t as “smart” as they think they are, and (2) the system in which they have succeeded is built on sand. And that’s a big reason why RO doesn’t succeed. When people read about work levels and RO, especially the CPA and Elliott Jaques’s [...]

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Since we’ve been talking about naming, and Glenn Mehltretter posted such a great example in his comment, it’s a good time to consider Ontologies. Since Kinston’s Taxonomy is what the knowledge management people would call an ontology, I’ve been looking at them.
Barry Smith of the Basic Formal Ontology project at Institute for Formal Ontology [...]

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