Stanovich’s “rationality” is essentially Bayesian Analysis. Think Nate Silver vs. the conservative (this time) pundits during the last US presidential election.

Wisdom, as the ancients meant it, is different from even Stanovich’s ideas. It feels like a complex construct to me that is not really related to Elliott Jaques levels of work, either. I’m guessing it has something to do with discernment and differentiation, although I’m not sure I mean that as Streufert did.

So, they can come up with extremely sophisticated stupidity.

In fact, some stupid ideas are so extremely complex so that you have to be particularly intelligent to believe them in the first place.

And with respect to the issue of rationality and wisdom, I think that a lot of it has to do with your ability to grasp the appropriate a priori assumptions about reality.

To me, rationality is the ability to follow these assumptions.

Whereas wisdom is more the ability to identify the correct assumptions.

I wonder if conation fell out of favor after WWII because of the Nazi obsession with The Will.

And I need to know more about Kolbe. Let me know what you thought of the experience some time.

I don’t think that values explain things entirely. One can imagine a psychopath having wisdom (which I’ve seen), which would be problematical for a values centrism. It would also imply that people or groups who are “lower” on Spiral are less wise, which is clearly false.

Not that values don’t play a part, just that they are not everything.

Your comments about Nazism and Islam are interesting, though. Christianity and Judaism, as earlier “desert” religions, might have similar things in their roots, which perhaps are less pronounced (dunno) now that they have moved from the desert.

Thinking about conation some more, I realized that Marcus Buckingham’s Stand Out assessment might also be getting at a person’s conative profile. Though it is anecdotal, it is easy to see a correlation between my Kolbe profile (6673) and my Stand Out results (Creator-Equalizer).

The Career Leader assessment focuses explicitly on work values but it also seems to correlate with Kolbe and Stand Out. This is in contrast to DiSC and MBTI in which I have not found much correlation to conative preferences. I think this is because the latter two focus more on affective traits.

ak

ak

Crazy coincidence that you are touching on conation! Recently, I have been revisiting Kolbe’s work. I picked up one of her earlier books and have been reflecting on my assessment results. I’ve also been speculating about the conative profile of people I know. I am finding that conation has a lot of explanatory power when trying to understand and predict a person’s behaviour.

I immediately thought about conation when I came across Kinston’s latest stuff on Willingness. I know that Jaques believed that values are an important determinant of behaviour and they seem to be bound up with conation.

Speaking of values, your comments about the Star Trek episode got me wondering if the difference between intelligence and wisdom could be a function of values. More specifically, reading about the Star Trek episode I was reminded of the Blue and Red values in Spiral Dynamics. Nazism could be thought of as a hybrid Red-Blue value system gone horribly wrong.

In a related vein, Islam could be an example of a Blue value system that was created to evolve out of the Red conditions in the middle east at the time.

ak

Thought-provoking post. I know you have some more thoughts percolating so I look forward to the follow-up post.

ak

I learned RO from Herb Koplowitz and I really can’t thankyou him enough for introducing me to RO. It has been quite a fascinating journey for me over the last 4 years.

Once I got a hang of RO I did realize that RO was becoming old school and had to be extended in today world by joining it with the new school stuff, There were challanges but overall it has worked out very well. Agile has a lot of problems due to it non accountable nature, It works well in small teams but it weakens when it is scaled up. This is where I thought of combining RO with Agile and comming out with RA. Agile on the RO framework can be very powerful framework as they both complenent each other.

The core team of RA has done a lot of work and countless hours in deveoping RA, hopefully in next few months we plan to launch it.

We might do a presentation of RA in next GO conf. Herb has been talking to Ken about this and let us see how it goes.

I think I have been talking to Chris and we do have to shedule a conf together , I have to learn more about his work.

You are right when you say it is not a management method , I agree with you on this.

We should always try to extend and improve presious work of great people like EJ , There is a limited amount of things that a person can do in his life time, What he has given us is something very fascinating and we should all try to use its power to the maximum and extend where it is needed.

Thankyou for your appreicaition, You will surely see a lot more on RA in comming days. Once we make the official public site of RA , I will invite you and others to be a part of it.

I agree to you what you say about India, after all it is a country of religion where hierarchy, authority and accountablity was very well defined in the hindu Gods. So this comes natural to us. Look at TATAs and other big companies in India who have used the power of RO. We do plan to do the launch of RA first in India and I look forward to see you there and being a part of it

Nice to see your comments on RO as a person having dirtied your haands trying to use RO concept in an IT organisation.

I am also was finding it difficult to relate to a Situation like you mentioned in A & B.

What is required to build a RO necessarily may not take you to a Profitable organisation and there are other ways of getting to a profitable organisation.

Can I get your cordinates so that I get some of your expert thoughts in teh context of IT, India and comparatively younger organisation.

Christian Forrester was kind enough to through some good light to me on building an RO and his blog is helping us to be connected too Thankyou Christian!

Regards

Anil

Jaques was a researcher and never was interested in the issues of actual management. Wilfred Brown was because as MD/CEO of Glacier Metal, where Jaques did his seminal work over 25 years, he had to be. His book, ORGANIZATION, has only parts of what Jaques would later concentrate on. It went farther afield. I’m not sure that he would have even known the term “change management” which is relatively new. But he did run the company as they went through some large growth, changes in production and at the end, a buyout.

That’s not to ding Dr. Jaques: he was a brilliant researcher who did amazing work. He just wasn’t interested in those problems, andRequisite Organization passes over it. His collaborators such as Stephen Clement (whose son, Chris, comments above), Owen Jacobs, Ian Macdonald, Catherine Burke , and Karl Stewart were more interested in seeing things get done. Their output fills some of these holes. I would especially recommend Macdonald, Burke & Stewart’sSystems Leadership: Creating Positive Organisations. You can read a condensation of three chapters in the GO Society’s book.

I also like what Jos Wintermans has to say. He was President of Canadian Tire Acceptance, the more-or-less standalone credit card arm of Canadian Tire (CA’s largest retailer), and President of Rogers Cable (CA’s largest cable TV provider), among other head positions. But I’m not sure that he’s actually published anything.

The project-oriented world is new. Certainly software and IT have become obsessed with it and everything is done that way.

It has been a few years since I worked in software and iT consulting at global companies. I liked the core of Agile Development but it always felt like a solution to what was largely bad management. (Alistair Cockburn has insinuated as much in an interview, although I don’t think he would put it quite so strongly.) Warren Kinston’s domains of work (and the associated languages of achievement) reveal some of the reasons why Agile processes are so successful with software development, because it has to interface with Organizational people who simply speak a different language. I’ve addressed this with some of my recent clients but I’m not sure that anyone has really talked about it.

Burke wrote an earlier article about RO in IT. Glenn Mehltretter used RO principles to help very quickly reorganize an IT departments of the merged healthcare company that was fairly large (tens of thousands, I think). One of the presenters a few years back talked about how IBM consulting in Canada was using RO to determine

Mickey Jawa of Satistar is a process design specialist who has teamed up with Don Folke, an RO expert, to balance out his work. Nick Forrest of Forrest & Company (no relation) points out in a soon-to-be-published manuscript how Jaques’s types of authorities make defining cross-functional processes sensical. Like you, he is shoring up RO because it simply does not address key points necessary even in doing the change management necessary to install an RO in the first place. But he totally believes in its power and efficacy.

But I think you’re right that many people advocate Requisite Organization as if it is a management method. It’s not, at least not entirely. It really needs to be augmented.

It’s great to see someone extending Requisite Organization into IT. IT has always seemed to me to be either extremely well run or absolutely abysmal. I’m looking forward to seeing more.

And glad to hear more voices coming out of India. My money is on your country as the place where post-Jaques work will explode.

It is a pleasure to read all the comments and I will be one of the younger guys not the youngest who is passionate about RO. I was introduced to RO a couple of years back and I have been implementing RO in my own IT company based out of India having global operations and for few of my clients.

Though I love EJ’s work but there are areas where RO is weak and thin.

There is no mention of Change Management in RO, In today’s world organizations have to quickly adapt the changing market conditions to excel and survive. When it comes to change management Jaques would simply say that structuring, filling and leading an organisation using requisite principles creates an organisation that is able to change quickly as required, which is not actually true.

This might exactly be the thought that has lead many organisations to failure in change.

There is a big difference in setting up an organisation for efficient and profitable operation (A) and guiding an organisation successfully through change (B).

Assuming that having done (A) will ensure (B) is a big flaw. They are totally different modes of operation.

(A) requires stability and maturity and “regulation”. (B) requires Agility.

Assuming that having done (A) will ensure (B) is a big flaw.” RO is pretty silent about B and A. RO has lots to say about how the organization ought to look like and operate to be like (A) but RO doesn’t say much of value on how to get there.

In RO a project is a task. QQT/R but there is nothing defined in RO that says much beyond that other than how to use your team to help plan it. RO does not define anything that says how to execute a project, what are the processes invloved in doing a project. How to break the project into smaller tasks so that they can be executed.

A few of my collgues and I are extending RO in some key areas where it is thin and we are devloping a new framework called “Requisite Agility”

Regards
Amit Aurora

Cason would be clear about her opinion here: “if they aren’t doing timespan they’re not doing Jaques!” At least she has been in the past in meetings. I’ve heard people say that timespan is a big part of RO’s problems in the marketplace of ideas but I am less certain. However, I come of out of software development and systems consulting, and our world is faster paced than other people’s, so time is of greater importance.

Glad to hear about the new book. From what I’ve heard from your father, it will be a solidly managerial book which the field needs. I am looking forward to picking up the book when I can and doing a review.

I once spoke with Ravi “Shanks” Shankar about the problems of his global workforce in southern Asia. He talked about the importance of a common culture. Since they did not share a common culture normally (different countries, belief systems, native languages) he created a strong culture within the firm. It’s an area that RO has nothing to say about that is very important. RO is in many important ways an embedded set of cultural values. Where kinship and power centrism reign, RO will be unsuccessful.

A true “talent pipeline” is really a relatively rare. Very few companies have matured to the point where the whole culture will support it. According to Warren Kinston (Strengthening the Management Culture) talent management requires a Systemicist culture, which is top of maturation for management cultures. Few companies have systemicist cultures and so talent pipelines can never be really developed. It requires a particular type of thinking.

Succession planning, however, is much simpler and requires much less maturity from the management culture.

But who can best help you will depend on exactly why you need it. Send me a private email at manasclerk at/sign gmail (period) com and I will try to connect you to the right resources.