Here’s the second in the set, from 1990. Warren probably hasn’t really looked at these for some time, and I know that he has taken things farther in documents coming out of his SIGMA Centre. Warren Kinston and Ralph Rowbottom. 1990. “A New Model of Managing Based On Levels of Work”. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 17: 89-113. [PDF, 9.3MB] …
Pragmatist Meets Structuralist: A Web Example
Here’s a good example of what someone who is a structuralist sounds like when talking to a pragmatist, for those who’ve been following my discussions of Warren Kinston’s and Jimmy Algie’s Seven Languages of Achievement (aka the Seven Decision Languages). The manager, like most managers, is a pragmatist working in a pragmatist company. “Get ‘er done” is the motto. The …
Isabel Menzies Lyth: 1917-2008
I just read about the death of Isabel Menzies. She was a major force for good in healthcare organization and a long-time member of the Tavistock Institute. She died in February of this year. The Independent carried an obituary of Menzies Lyth.
“What’s With This ‘Coding’?” A bit of personal manifesto
One of the problems with having grown a blog out of one’s own thoughts (and conversations with friends) is that the early stuff always looks a little questionable. Last time, I linked to a post from 2004 October in which I used some of the technical language about the Capability of Information Processing coding. The language rightly raised some eyebrows. …
Retraining Mainframers to Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
I’m going through my old email archives, and discovered a note from a project I ran to help a very large US property & casualty insurer to better retool their mainframe-oriented programmers (procedural using COBOL) to client-server paradigms (mostly Object-Oriented Programming using Java). It was an interesting project because the dirty secret was that some people were better than others. …
Contemplative Work
From Kinston, Warren. 1988. “A total framework for inquiry”. Systems Research, 5(1): 9-25. The inherent dangers in the Level VII' [the contemplative] inquiry include fixation on an incorrect idea and inappropriate messianism. Speculative ideas are not practically usable until they have been socially shared with the relevant community…. Scientific process occurs at this level through holistic syntheses which reframe or …
On Naming: It’s For Survival
Warren talks a lot about the power of naming, that until you get the all the names right in a particular framework of the Taxonomy, the whole thing seems wrong somehow. He’s not the only one to recognize the power of naming, of course. The Bible’s Adam starts naming things almost immediately, and it’s important enough that it is about …
Why Work Levels Are Rejected: Others Are Selfish Fallacy
While reading the excellent and highly recommended book by Heath & Heath, Made to Stick, I came upon this passage about Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs: Imagine that a company offers its employees a $1,000 bonus if they meet certain performance targets. There are three different ways of presenting the bonus to employees: Think of what that $1,000 means: a down …
The “Taboo of the Blank Slate” (Why Work Levels Are Rejected)
The levels of work from Requisite Organization / the Glacier Management Method / Stratified Systems Theory are routinely dismissed out of hand, almost without review. It’s an instinctive rejection rather than rational at any level. What drives this? While doing some research, I came upon Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. In it, Pinker describes …
Uncertainty: Why Both Executives and Creatives Are Managed Through Collegiality
In a recent flurry of emails about something else with a variety of folks, Jack Fallow discussed why he thought that the executive levels were called a “collegium” by Elliott Jaques. Fallow, who was CEO of GasWorks in the UK, believes that the nature of the work at level 5+ meant that you couldn’t have the same QQT/R management style …