Work and Using Language

Original Clues

Organizations exist to do work of a scope and complexity beyond a single individual. So the fundamental driver in designing organizations must be ensuring the effective performance of work by staff. While it is well understood that organizations must have levels and pyramidal charts, clarity about these hierarchies is vague and their operation in practice ranges from inefficient to nightmarish.

Design of hierarchies has been so unsatisfactory that the term «hierarchy» gets equated with a command-and-control style or bureaucratic rigidity. There is often a reflex rejection of any notion of hierarchy with futile suggestions like "turn the chart upside down" or "throw away the chart".

The break-through by Jaques and Brown at Glacier Metal Co. in the mid-20^th century was to recognize that in organizations:

• levels of management should correspond to defined levels of work, and
• line-management authority should be set up to cross just one level.

Jaques observed differences in language use in his early formulations of work-levels. He identified:

• two sharply different uses of language by staff at Work-Levels 1-4 and at Work-Level 5 upwards.
• progressive and more subtle differences from level to level, which revealed a repetition/correspondence (i.e. WL1 to WL5, WL2 to WL6 &c).

This difference in the use of language came from using information in the lower set of levels and concepts in the higher set as shown in the diagram.

More explanation ►

• The information at lower levels is always local—which is why information systems never integrate easily across departments or divisions (unless forced to from higher levels), and never mesh across organizations (where forcing cannot occur). Direct observation reveals that this idiosyncrasy of local information is because language is being used associatively (=PH'5L2)—see example.

• At higher levels, information is analysed and situations are handled in a general way, so concepts are essential. The concepts in use are general and group-based, not local and idiosyncratic. Crucial concepts are similar amongst all organizations or within industries or societal sectors in accord with business, accounting and other social conventions. This confirms that language is being used conceptually (=PH'5L3)—see example.

  The ordering of the two language methods, conceptual above associative, neatly accords with the sequence in the over-arching PH'5-Hierarchy.

Extending and Generalizing

The originally published work descriptions and management arrangements focused mainly on conventional organizations that produced tangible products or services—like manufacturing, mining, beverages, health services, the military. This remains the emphasis for current Jaquesians e.g. a search on the GO (Global Organization Design Society) website for «biotechnology», «film industry», «nanotechnology», «investment banking», «financial technology», «political work» and «spirituality» produced a blank in each case. (Search conducted on 5 October 2013.)

At the time of my introduction to Jaques, the knowledge economy was barely born, but its work was remarkably similar to that of academic disciplines. Everyone realizes that both hierarchy and language are rather different in academia.
Example

A Work-Level 1-laboratory technician must speak with a conceptual sophistication about his activities in a way that a Work-Level 1-plumber (or receptionist or road-mender) does not and need not. So regardless of time-span equivalence, it must be a different Work-Level 1. As will be described later, it is WL-I in a higher domain.

The need for additional formulations became inescapable on entering even more esoteric areas of organisation and management like work in politics (councils, parliaments) and in religions (churches, ashrams).

My starting point was to regard Jaques' 4-level hierarchy within a single type/level of using language as a standard set of styles, a THEE Style Hierarchy. This would then be applicable to all 7 types/levels for using language, and not just those types shown in the diagrams here.

It follows that there must be 7 x 4 =28 levels of language use. I refer to these as LL# starting counting from the lowest style of the L'1-Concrete Approach (=1α). Each of these subsidiary types corresponds to a distinctive way of constructing reality in order to change it, and therefore there must be 28 levels of personal capability.

It is then a separate issue to consider how those capability levels enable responsible work in society.

The hierarchy that Jaques and his followers focus on evidently extends from LL5 to LL11. By extrapolation, there should be other similar hierarchies, called in THEE: Q-hierarchies. Each of these can be expected to function very differently in accord with the way language is used within them.

As a result, despite many commonalities, each Q-hierarchy will specify work in society in a dramatically different way. The term I use here is "Arena" i.e. the 7 Q-hierarchies specify 7 Arenas of Association requiring Responsible Work.

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• Explore the emergence of Q-hierarchies.

Originally posted: 25-Oct-2013