I was first introduced to 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.
byThe 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.
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:
Handling such issues forced me to widen the scope of our inquiries. The original
ideas needed sharpening and broadening. The focus moved from to the , and from the to the .As part of widening my interest in
, 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
and , but you can certainly talk to them in the and . It became clear to me that politics belonged within an altogether different .At the time, I focused on getting
explicit and clarified, and I primarily assisted politicians using those frameworks.However, once the mental hold that there was a single
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 .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