Origins of this Inquiry

Brunel Institute

I was first introduced to levels of work by Elliott Jaques personally: he was talking with me when I bought his General Theory of Bureaucracy at the book display of a psychoanalytic conference in London.

The power of the ideas and the clarity of the exposition swept me away. Shortly after, at his invitation, I joined him at BIOSS (Brunel Institute of Organisation and Social Studies) and began consulting to the UK's National Health Service (NHS) using their method called «social analysis». It was explained to me that this involved «making the implicit explicit».

Jaques focused on work capability, organizational design and the use of management structures. He was less interested in decision styles, in values, in marketing and other aspects of work. This focus led him to develop a coherent structuralist ideology for management and leadership. See more on Jaques here.

National Health Service (NHS)

The NHS where I (and The SIGMA Centre) mainly worked is ferociously complex, far more so than any metal company, army, mining operation, or civil service. Of how many organizations would you say:

  • everyone is a potential customer at almost any moment in time
  • work issues are matters of life and death
  • the public can enter the premises where work is ongoing
  • newspapers run daily accounts of what's happening
  • there are 100+ occupations, many fully professionalized
  • one profession is highly dominant and international
  • costs continually escalate faster than inflation
  • it is tied into academia with research part of daily work
  • it is tied into higher education with teaching part of daily work
  • numerous varieties of non-profit organizations interact strongly
  • numerous regulatory authorities are involved in changes
  • numerous advocacy organizations interact strongly
  • politicians are highly involved at all tiers and in particular cases.

Handling such issues forced me to widen the scope of our inquiries. The original levels of work ideas needed sharpening and broadening. The focus moved from structural design to the dynamics of managing, and from the management of organizations to the organisation of management.

Political Work

As part of widening my interest in work, I found myself assisting politicians in their work within local government. Colleagues advised me that "you can't talk to politicians".

It was true you can't talk to them in the language of information (L'2) and concepts (L'3), but you can certainly talk to them in the language of values (L'4) and beliefs (L'5). It became clear to me that politics belonged within an altogether different domain of work.

At the time, I focused on getting purposes and values explicit and clarified, and I primarily assisted politicians using those frameworks.

However, once the mental hold that there was a single domain of responsible work was broken, the way to discover all the domains became the new challenge. Furthermore, I became convinced that the answer lay in a clarification of how language is used.

It was a challenge to pick up again from this work, carried out quarter of a century ago, and it remains a massive and exciting prospect. Follow what has been achieved here and contribute.

Originally posted: 11-Oct-2013