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Elliott Jaques, Requisite Organization.

Elliott Jaques is like New York City – most people either love him, or hate him, but it’s hard to feel indifferent about this organizational theorist. Following his training as an MD at Johns Hopkins, Jaques was the first person to coin the phrase “corporate culture” in his 1951 PhD dissertation at Harvard. Imagine a world in which the number of managerial layers in a company was determined by the complexity of the organization’s work and the time-span required to achieve its strategic goals. A world in which people are promoted and paid based on their level of experience, expertise, and intellectual horsepower, rather than time and grade, or how well they play company politics. This is the organizational reality that Jaques proposes in his book, Requisite Organization.

Like two sides of a coin, the foundation of Jaques theoretical edifice rests on his research into: a) the nature and complexity of work, and b) the kinds of mental processes needed to perform work of increasing complexity. On one side of the coin, he defines work-complexity as the number of variables involved, their rate of change, and the ability to identify and control the salient variables over discrete time-spans. So the level of complexity involved in managing a construction project that spans 1-2 years is greater than the complexity of the tasks associated with a manufacturing process that spans one or two days. On the other side of the coin, Jaques has identified four basic mental processes at increasing levels of complexity by which people process information – mental processes that follow the rules of truth tables in modern symbolic logic. Echoing the current literature on cognitive and neuroscience, Jaques argues that the mental processes inherent in: a) problem-solving, b) exercising judgment, and c) making decisions, are not directly accessible to conscious knowledge or awareness. So the people performing work of a given level of complexity must have the appropriate level of knowledge, experience, and intellectual horsepower to achieve their goals. Sounds like common sense; but common sense is not common as evidenced by the tendency to assign jobs based on time and grade, and the truth behind the hackneyed phrase, “It’s not what you know it’s who you know.”

Taken together, Jaques’ notion of the complexity of work and mental processes have profound implications for the nature of organizational structures, systems, and culture because it argues that there is a “requisite” way to organize people into managerial layers (strata), where requisite means according to nature. In other words, Jaques proposes a universally applicable hierarchical system of managerial layers that are defined by the complexity of the work an organization performs and the time-span needed to complete that work. So top managers can build a requisite organizational reality by: a) mapping the number of managerial layers to the complexity and time-span of an organization’s work, and b) populating those strata with managers who have the expertise, experience, and intellectual horsepower to function at those levels.