SALS Conference 1989: Part 3 - Elliott Jaques - Part 3

Speaker A The next thing is that by taking a look at flows, they talk about time flowing into the future. Question can you reverse it so that time flows into the past? And Hawking has great fun with this. He says he can envisage a situation in which the future will predate the past. He describes this, read it. It's nuts. Now I'll tell you why it's nuts. I think it's maybe bit presumptuous to say so, but I really mean it. They argue like bloody hell about this stuff. They put minus T into an equation and say they reverse time. This is deadly serious. It's called time reversal. Reason I'm making these points, this that I think physics got there because they started their initial observations were static, that is, so called stationary things, unchanging things. The length of which you can measure dynamics comes 2000 years later with Newton and Galileo. In fact, no dynamics, just statics. And those of you who've studied sciences, I think, will agree that most science courses start with statics. And then you get onto the volume called dynamics things in motion. That's where time comes in. Our field of human behavior starts with dynamics. Our entities are events. That's what you observe. You cannot observe psychological things and measure them in physical length. This means that time is going to be extremely important to us. It's much more difficult to start with dynamics than it is with statics because nothing's standing still. But what it does mean is that if you do start with dynamics, natural science type measurement is easy, because what you do is you start with not time, but the length of time of an event, as you would the length of space of an object. And starting on that basis, all psychological processes, the ones that seem to be very immeasurable, in fact, are readily measurable. Like a desire, for example. And you can measure a desire quite easily. It may not be significant, but measures aren't necessarily significant in terms of the length, the duration of the event in which you could satisfy the desire. And if a child desires to be president when he or she grows up, that's a very long desire, if you see what I mean. That's a good 40 year desire. If you desire a glass of water in the next quarter of an hour, that's a 15 minutes desire. That's one point. And that's what time span is about. Time span measurement has to do with measuring the duration of events concerned with the carrying out of tasks. The second point about it is this. And I think this is absolutely crucial to our thinking about the issues that we have on our plates. And that is to make a distinction, recognize a distinction, which the physicists do not make when they talk about time reversal in the future, coming ahead of the past and so on. And that is to recognize that earlier and later are not the same as past, present and future. That past, present and future. And this is St. Augustine 2000 years ago, 1500 years ago. That past, present and future have to do with the situation of an individual at a particular point in what I'm going to call time of succession. That's dating time. Past, present and future have to do with the perceptions of x at 10:00 on Monday February of the so and so and it's running at right angles to earlier and later. Your physicist needs only the time of earlier and later because mechanical processes aren't going anywhere, they're not going into the future or whatnot. And you time events on the axis of succession. That's physical events by taking a recording at a point x, say 10:00 and a recording at point Y, say 12:00. And you can say from here, post retrospectively that event took 2 hours. The data that you have consists of two records. That's what you have. You with me, you have two records, two recordings and that's what you actually have in your hand. That's what you observe when you make that statement. You can't say that this thing process was going up to this thing into the future, somehow moving into the future. You don't need that conception. Future has to do with current state of mind in which you have anticipation or desire or intent. I'm just going to leave those words like that. This is some of the stuff I want to get on to tomorrow. You got memory past and you've got current perception. Now what this kind of formulation takes you into is an analysis of the life space in terms of the interplay not between past, present and future. The interplay between memory, perception and desire. Now it's easy to do ourselves out of this absolutely crucial approach to the nature of human nature. I think Kurt Lewin was interesting been back over his stuff. He would draw his lifespace this way and if he wanted to use past and future he would draw another little one tagging on the end. That was the lifespace then and here it is out in the future. And what I'm arguing is that lifespace is drawn at right angles to the earlier and later. Actually this should just be a dotted line. We're here at this particular point and here's earlier and here's later. This is a dating thing and what one wants to look at life spaces in these terms it's a kind of oval if you see what I mean, looking across it. And this whole issue of relationship between memory, perception and desire becomes extremely important. I finish here, but I get on the other stuff tomorrow. I'll leave it. But just let me make this point. There'd long been an argument among historians as to whether the historical past actually exists. There is a continuing argument among psychoanalysts and this affects like nobody's business the way you practice. Whether or not Freud meant that in psychoanalytical analytic practice. What one does is to help the individual do something called reconstruct the past. You've heard that phrase. Now, if you approach analysis that way, and many analysts do, what you do is to work with the patient in such a way, say, well, this and this and so and so and therefore such and such, and you help them recover memories. Such and such happened in the past. That's one approach. It's the reconstruction approach, I think probably the most common approach in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. There is another approach. It's quite different from that. And that is to say, it is no part of the role of the psychoanalyst to do that kind of reconstruction, historical reconstruction. It's the role of the psychoanalyst to help the patient understand there on the spot in the relationship with the analyst, the way in which the interplay of memory, current perception and desire and intention are interweaving to cause a particular kind of relationship to be worked out with the analyst. Now, these are two totally different approaches. They really, I think they matter. They are different. And my argument is and what I mean by five dimensional view of the world, if we're going to look at the dynamics of human behavior, it's this that we need three spatial dimensions to locate spatially where what is going on is happening. And we need two time dimensions to look at human processes. One, the time dimension of earlier and later. That's the fourth dimension which the physicist does not need. And we need the time dimension. I'm calling it the axis of intention, which we do need because human beings and human processes that we're talking about are concerned with intention and are directional in that sense. These are human constructions. I'm now inclined to make drawings like this, for example, just to illustrate in terms of leadership, that you can talk about your leader at a particular point in time, let's say a managerial leader here or a command leader. Now, I'm just trying to take this as a slice across and I should draw this all up, but I haven't found a way of doing that yet. And you can take a look at him or her opera reading out in a seven year frame, say, now, that's axis of intention, that isn't seven years forward, seven years later. That's a seven year view of the world. Now, is that right? Interplaying with somebody here with, let's say, a three year view of the world now and maybe an 18 month view of the world now. But what one's looking at is the way in which that whole system is orientated in a current perception of time. That's fifth dimension. That's people's current intents and aspirations. And one can say one of the arts of leadership I think we could least agree on this one, Rod, is for somebody here in a managerial leadership role to try and ensure that all of this is orientated in the same direction in time. But that's in terms of people's mindsets now because once you've done that, set the context given command, then our assumptions are hopes are that individuals will then each carry on doing his or her own stuff within the same context. Now, time span measurement is in fact a description, is a statement by a manager. Now to a subordinate I want you to complete a particular task in one year and there's the completion .6 months later you can review the situation and it may be that it needs a year and a half to complete it. Now, in terms of difficulties that have turned up. But you can take a look at the vicissitudes of a task along the axis of succession in relation to bringing human intention slap into the center of the process, formulating that at all times.

Speaker B Or keeping it linked at all times with the perception of the actor about how far into the future that assignment is expected to last.

Speaker A That's right. That's my current look and my current picture of the future is that it exists now. And that's what I mean by saying what happens to the physicists is they slip into the language of past, present and future and they think they're dealing with the actual future. But they get awfully flummoxed when you ask them do you think the future is flowing into the present or do you think the present is flowing into the future? And they get exercised about that and write papers about it and so on. The point I want to make is it ain't either. And that future has to do with current perception of intent. So this brings intention, desire, will, all of that human stuff into the picture. And what I'm arguing is if we're going to do that, I think we really have to do a major shift again in the way we construct the world. Sorry, last question. We'll stop. There are two aspects of perception time.

Speaker B One is associated with task allocation, well.

Speaker A Or intention or desire. Yeah. The other one is the date, the.

Speaker B Individual that comes across the world no. Which may well be you're allocating tasks to a subordinate which may have a one and a half or two year time span.

Speaker A And yet his construct of the world.

Speaker B Is that he can see very much.

Speaker A Further and see the implications. That's fine, that's all on this axis, that's all axis of intention, those statements. The other one you can say, and that preoccupation is going on in his or her mind at 10:00 on Tuesday. That's the dating axis here. And those will be differences between him, her and the manager, for example, in terms of this fifth dimension, this other axis. And when you set it up that way you can think about it. I think this is absolutely key to getting on with developing measuring instruments. Can we just take these as some general issues that I feel I hope for practical purposes, I thought it useful to raise this morning. The proof will be in the pudding. See if it occurs in discussions and see what you think. I'd be very, very glad to have your reactions. You gather this is stuff in work in progress. Thank you very much. I don't know if you think it's a good idea or not. Would you like just to jot down one sentence what you mean by performance in performance appraisal which we all agree is extraordinarily important and tell me as a practicing manager what this performance is that I'm to appraise? Meaning just a very simple point. What do I look for? This isn't for purpose of getting a definition out but just to see if there is just a clear cut agreement among all of you which would be very interesting. We have three offers.

Speaker B Playing a role.

Speaker A Sorry? Playing a role. Playing a role. Right. Mother. The nearness of fit of an accomplishment to a preconceived standing right. Which would be very much the same.

Speaker B The way a person handles the task situation.

Speaker A That's different, I think, isn't it? Now tell you the reason I bring this out. The definitions that are most common are in fact the common definitions of performance. They have an enormous impact in organizations you play right into. Except for Dan's definition. What managers find easiest. Now recognize we talk about performance appraisal. Is that right? I think I made myself clear what's the performance and performance appraisal mean. The general approach that we encourage managers to take is what do you mean by performance appraisal? What you do is you have your objectives set right and then you see how near your subordinate got to meeting those objectives. Is that right? If he met the objectives or she met the objectives, that's good performance, presumably. And that's performance appraisal. It's objective and you count. And I think you missed the whole ballgame in doing so. And this has got some interesting consequences unless you do what Dan was suggesting. That is, judge not in terms of whether or not I achieved the output but the implication what you were saying, your judgment of how well I did or didn't in doing so. That's a very different game. If you take that game, that means that one individual who did not achieve the stated objectives had better performance in your sense than another one who did. Is that right? The main point I want to make is that there are two different things. We're using the same term. Do you get the two different things? One, whether or not I achieved the output. Two, how well in your judgment I did in doing so. Two different concepts. Seriously. They agree. One term, the field's rife. It's either one term for range of concepts or a range of terms for the same kind of thing and you never quite know which. And these all have effects on real managers. And the common use of performance, which is the one that was most commonly brought out here this morning, is the one that encourages managers to believe that their task ends when they've decided whether or not their subordinates have made their objectives. And whole performance appraisal schemes are based on that. Steve is working on one. The Army's Officer Effectiveness Reporting System requires that you write out the objectives at the beginning of the year and then you write down whether they were achieved. And everybody believes it's a far school exercise. Now I'm going to move on to the main point I want to make about all this just before we break for clothing. That what we're into, I believe, at least, are issues of the nature of social reality and getting our hands on it in terms of what exists out there that we really can define. And that raises some real problems. And in getting back into some of the problems in the development of the natural sciences as we know them at the present time and they had exactly, I believe the same kinds of problems we've got and we can learn a great deal from their experience. For example, heat material is hot. Why? General assumption heat is a liquid called caloric that flows from one substance to another. Nobody has seen it yet, but that's the standard working assumption. This is factual and matter of fact. The early chemists like Boyle were still working with that conception of heat when he formulated Boyle's Law and things like that. These were the early days of chemistry. Now how would you know? This is nature of reality. That's their problem. How would you know now? Because the assumption now is that heat is a property of materials. Is that right? Properly having to do with the rate of impacting, rate of molecular activity. How do you know?

Speaker B Design an experiment which provides a test of the concept. In other words, you were talking about the philosopher's stone earlier. The important thing about that term is the philosopher's evidence that it's imagined it's an idea. The question of naming a phenomenon and then having the term twinned with the phenomenon rather than being a free floating concept anymore and then starting to count those things to establish the dimensions of that now operationalized concept. And my reading of what you were saying to us earlier about being on the edge of alchemy on trailing edge of alchemy is that we have a lot of words floating around that are not particularly well shared as concept. And we need to reach the point where we can put our finger on phenomena to attach the words to, but then start and then the definition of the word is in the phenomenon, not in dictionary.

Speaker A The thing that struck me about it to do experiments you've got to have some instruments and you haven't got a thermometer and that gets difficult. In fact this got sorted out. I think this is historically correct with the development of the thermometer and the discovery that the room seemed to be going up and down, getting hotter and colder at the same rate as certain kinds of liquids went up and down. And I was amused because the other day doing some reading that I'm just going to describe this for a second. The original thermometers were standardized. What they noted was that if you took a test tube and put it in a flat vessel of water, that you catch a little air thing inside, and the water comes up a bit, and that if you warm it, this goes down. If you cool the air in it, this goes up. You get this up and down movement with hotter and colder. And the materials they used were body temperature at the time. They would hold the thermoscope, as it was called, and as it warmed, this would go down and then cooled it with an ice salt mixture, which was the coldest material they had at the time. And then it would come up. And Fahrenheit graduated the thing by saying, okay, I'm going to call this .0 with ice mixture, and I'm going to call this with body temperature 100. And that's how the Fahrenheit thermometer was graduated in the first place. And that's why water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212, those inconvenient levels. And I've always laughed. I said, yeah, I think Dr. Fahrenheit must have had flu the day. He's reading a lovely book the other day, cooper a physicist, and apparently I was wrong. He thinks that Fahrenheit used his wife and that his wife had flu. Now, once you start getting measuring instruments, you move into a different world. And let me just throw one last proposition to you for the moment, or a break that this that somewhere around the way. If we're going to develop a social science, I make this proposition that just as the natural scientists have had to do, we have to learn to distinguish between things and properties of things. And for me, this is what definition is all about. Is heat an entity? Is it a fluid? Or in the language that we would now use, is it a property of entities? It's not always easy to tell cognitive complexity in an individual. Is that an entity? Is that a thing? Is that a property of a human being? Or in psychology, where we have problems that the physicists don't have, is it somehow a rating or a judgment? The kinds of data we get with questionnaires is the question clear? What is it it is? What would you go out and look for? And I gather a number of you are not uninterested in that topic in terms of what came up last night. How do you recognize potential, current potential, future potential? Is potential a thing? Is it a property of people? Or is it some kind of thing that you get with Keshina ratings? And how would you know, is motion. This is Newton, the so called Newtonian revolution. Is motion inherent in the object or do objects move only and so long as they are pushed? Modern physics started with the redefinition of that one. The assumption up to new time was that objects moved only if pushed. Remove the application of force and they stop. And he comes along and says, no, things will continue to move unless they are caused by a force to slow down or speed up or change direction and so on. These are major shifts and these issues are crucial. And I think getting them right somehow is essential to learning how to look for things and develop adequate theories. And a proposition I want to put to you is this and that is proposition about three different kinds of definition that I think we have to get under our belts. One, and you can take a look at it in quantitative terms. There's a problem here when we think of social entities, social things, I don't know if you think that way easily or not. Our problem is that our entities are all processes. They're all events that all have duration. And so you can't just look at them all at once the way you can that you got to look at them by seeing something start somewhere where you decided it was starting and then see it move and shift across. You can't look at them in the material sense, which is where the natural science started. So entities are things that you ought to be able to look at somehow and see. And the quantification issue, I think, is the useful one here. You quantify by counting processes. Psychologists these days unashamedly call everything measurement and they will even talk about measuring the size of a football crowd. Most people would say you count it. So if you can count them, that is, there's one and there's another and there's another, then you got yourself an entity. Entities have properties and we define entities by boundary definition. That is, you set boundaries, say, here's the definition of the set and anything that will fit within these boundaries is a member of the set. It's categorization properties. And the attempt in physics to get clear on what they meant by properties led to their description of the so called process of measurement. I'm going to call it measurement. I couldn't argue that point. I just want different language. And the mode of definition is operational definition, which I think has been abused in the social sciences. It means explicitly a description of the instrument that you would use and how to use it for measuring the particular phenomenon. That is, you measure temperature in terms of a description of how you build and use a thermometer. You measure electrical resistance by a description of how you build an ometer and operate it. And that's standard. And to my surprise, at least one learned that there aren't properties all over the place. The natural sciences have got something of the order of 95 properties now identified. That is 95 measuring instruments. They're not infinite by a long shot. And up until the 16th century, when Alchemy shifted into the modern natural sciences, there were what, four? You could measure mass, you could measure length, you could sort of measure time and specific gravity. That was about it. Then I'd like to think of attributes. Attributes, and you get at attributes. Those are individual judgments about entities. And that's the basic, almost unique mode of measurement in the human sciences at the present time. This is Keshinaire techniques. And what you get are judgments individually. They're idiosyncratic and not shareable. They're shareable in sense that you can state, yeah, I would rate him or her three on a scale of zero to ten, liberal to conservative, political outlook, that kind of thing. And what you get are individual ratings. And we've been inclined to call this measurement and are going to argue that it won't do, and that what we really have to do is to get into this area where we can begin to identify properties, to develop measuring instruments for doing so. And a major one the present time I would think of as trying to develop a measuring instrument for getting at cognitive power in the individual. Cognitive power in the individual. Let me just illustrate that, and I'll stop here for a moment. I'm going to argue that this is where we are, as far as we call it, competence. Cognitive competence or cognitive capability in the individual. That what have been described, and I wish to hell now I hadn't written it. I had the courage of my convictions in writing the book, and I'd gone over to the language of cognitive categories, because that's what I've described. Finn and I call them cognitive levels, I think level one, level two, level three, and got into those dreadful problems. But all the stuff on cognitive capability, at least in requisite organization, has to do with the description of state, the assumption that an individual is using primary sets or serial sets or so on. And if stuff is right, one gets a particular cognitive category between something called three months in a year, let's say, or two years, and one is assuming particular kinds of cognitive capability to handle levels of work or role complexity of this order. There still remains the problem of how you measure points within that working assumption. Cognitive power is a property of the individual human being and ought to be measurable, not an entity problem. Find a measuring instrument for measuring cognitive power. Well, at least you're stepped forward if you can ask the question, because you can begin to look. And that's what a lot of us are doing at the present time, busy looking. And this is the problem the natural scientists have had forever. They've still got the damn problem with hardness. They know hardness is a property of materials. At least that's certainly the working assumption. But how do you measure it? Get kind of rough rating stuff at the time moment, but not effective measurement. So I think there are a lot of problems here and that's why the emphasis on definition. I think if we don't get some kind of agreement even on our starting entities, that it becomes awfully difficult to do work and awfully difficult to share experience. I've been raising a lot of issues here for the moment. Can we take a break there and see what comes up afterwards? I'm hoping you don't find this perhaps a bit too esoteric like you gather. I don't think it is and I don't think it is in this particular sense. I don't believe that it will be possible to get substantial total organizational change unless the issues I'm raising are clarified and understood and that without it we will not understand what we're asking people, for example in industry and commerce and so on and bureaucratic hierarchies to do. If I'm right, we're asking them to change their whole outlook to the nature of the world, nothing less than that. And at your peril do that. So I think what we get into is little opportunities open up a bit of performance appraisal. Can't you help us develop that here or could you help us with our compensation scheme there or a bit of organizational structuring in another place and so on. And that as you get into that and the implications of what you're doing begin to become clear, projects for some reason or other tend to shut down. Now that's a not uncommon experience. I happen to believe that it's because the scale of what we're asking people to do is more apparent to them than it is to us. Hmm. Now I happen to believe that is a very very practical issue that I've just stated. And I don't think we can just get by. We got picked up every damn time. Olga brought out a beauty. Does anybody have a copy of Requisite Organization? I could kick myself on that into some discussion, boys and so on. Do you see here's? Lovely definition. Yeah. Any task this is on page 16 has both a what to be accomplished and a by when. What I didn't read you is what was in the parenthesis that follows that good clear stuff. Any task has both a what to be accomplished parenthesis the output or the goal or the objective. And if you think that little bit stuff doesn't lead to confusion, I can give you chapter and verse. I had this thrown back. What the hell do you mean? Well, actually I did define output later on as the answer. And it's not the what. No, sorry. The output is the what is the output, the what by when is the goal and objectives are something else altogether. When you're talking managers about work and you've got things. Like that floating around. They won't raise them with you every time because they expect to be able to read something and they entitled to expect it and for things to say what you mean and they got enough confusion on their own hands distinguishing between outputs, goals, objectives, functions and so on. Have you been through these discussions with managers and they ask you for help and you come along and say oh well it's a goal, an objective output. You know what I mean? And that doesn't help anybody and they know it doesn't help and we will not get away with it, thank goodness. These are the practicalities of what I'm talking about. As I say, I think there is a total shift in the view of the nature of social reality that's involved here. It starts with the view that it is possible to see social things. For me a stratum is what? Is that an entity? An organizational stratum? Is that an entity? Is that a property of an entity or is that a rating? I'm going to argue it is a thing and that you've gotten see one but you've got to learn how to see it. And this is probably the most basic point I'd like to make is this that these concepts that we have literally well, you know this, this is old stuff. It's just that damn it all, it comes home and hits you in the gut when you realize you're in the middle of it and that your concepts influence the way you think and what you see. Everybody's always known that that's us and what you don't see is potential. Is that an entity? Can you see one? If so, some of you probably not uninterested in the question how do you go out and see one? Is that right? It's that practical question what do you look for? Now, if you start out with the conception that well, I think it's a thing do you see a social thing, a psychological thing? If you start out with the assumption that these things are continuous, which is the general assumption in the human sciences it's called a normal distribution curve continuous. We don't get changes in state. We do not have a change of state conception. By and large there's a bit in P-I-J. In developmental psychology but the assumption about IQ, for example, is some people rate higher and some lower but it's continuous. If that's your assumption that's what you will look for then that's all you'll be able to see. If you start with a different assumption that it's likely to be discontinuous, which is the assumption that our good old alchemists and metal founders always took for granted, you actually will look for something else. Now, I don't know if I'm making a point here. I mean this deadly seriously the impact of a theory. My hunch is probably that most of you think that when you see a snowflake land and it turns to water that you think you see that snowflake change to water. Is that right? It hadn't dawned on you that that's just your theory? Depends on your theory. A more primitive actual conception is that there's something curious about snowflakes. When they land, they tend to disappear. And curiously, every time a snowflake disappears very often let me put it this way. I don't think they did statistical analyses, but very often a drop of water condenses in its place. And who were you? Sophisticates to say that snow and water, a snowflake and water are the same thing? That's a very sophisticated theory. It's what you see, it's what you think you see. It's not a bad observation. It turns out to be a better theory than the other. Particularly when the chemists learn to analyze snow and find it's the same H 20 content as water and that steam is the same H 20. Because then they're able to make the statement that H 20 comes in different states without knowing about H 20. Do you realize you can't make a statement, is it water that comes in crystal state as well as liquid state, or is it ice that comes in liquid state? What's the substance? Argue, just talking with Ian and Flyn, that this will come up this afternoon like nobody's business. When you're trying to judge potential, is there any way of getting a better grip on what you see? And I think all of us have had the experience of what a testing issue that is when you're trying to look at it, is that right? And you don't know quite all that clearly what you're looking for. Anybody ever had that experience?

Speaker B Elliot, there's an additional problem, which is you're looking at the snowflake and anticipating the drop of water.

Speaker A Well, who is in potential? Yeah, I don't think you're looking at anything for the time being. I think we're having difficulty seeing a damn thing. It's why we use clinical teaching methods, apprenticeship teaching sort of thing, use examples. Some few people clearly have become quite good at seeing. But the difficulty getting through to articulations and other problems, I happen to believe I think this is a testing time. See what you think this afternoon. Been talking a lot about this. I think it might well be that during this coming year, based on Jillian's Painstaking work or what, 14 years, Jillian, something like that. Time goes by. Just reading something I wrote in 1961, which was an initial attempt to try and describe what discontinuity might be about, I was very touched. There were some formulations called level one perceptual concrete, level two, not stratum or anything in those days. The imagine imaginary concrete. You can get those difference. Very easy to see. And level three, the conceptual concrete and level four concept formation and level five theory formation. You know, all those theories that the fives generate an attempt what we're fighting for is what to look for. That's where we are. What do you look at? The whole point about getting through to a formulation is a it allows you better to know what you're looking for and what you actually might be seeing without knowing it, because we're certainly seeing something. I think the present stage is that what we've got this is by way of illustration, is the ability of some trained people to distinguish I'm going to call you the term category here, categories of cognitive complexity. And I think we can distinguish categories of task complexity, but we don't know how to measure level. The point about that is that that's a good feeling because at least you can identify something that you'd like to try to do because unless you identify it, you'll never look. In other words, I don't think we know if we can identify somebody currently operating in, say, category or three months to a year. Category two. The question of how to measure the level of complexity or level of cognitive power. Let me put that the individual within that category we haven't got yet. That is, I can recognize water and watery states, and I can distinguish between hot water, medium tepid water and cold water that is high three, medium middle three, and low three. But I don't know how to measure degrees of temperature. Don't have a measuring instrument yet. But there's a proposition here, and that is that it is a property of a human being. And if it is a property of a human being, ought to be measurable. Actually, some of us been using the term for the measure time horizon of the individual. So we've got at least a statement of the unit without knowing how to measure it. But that's a step forward. I wouldn't even know what term to look for. If I'm talking about task complexity, and I talk about this as a category two task, that is, a task requiring diagnostic accumulation in order to solve that's categorization, I find my mind just closes down when I think what could a possible unit of measurement be that would give you level of task complexity within category two state? You with me?

Speaker B Expand on that a little bit. Are you saying that time span of the task assignment is not then the.

Speaker A Measure you're looking at? Time span is the term that I use for measuring the level of work in a role. I use the phrase target completion time for the target time for a task, and target completion time of a task will give you a measure of the minimum level of complexity of that task, but will not place it more accurately than that. In other words, a target task with a two year target completion time will be at least two year level of complexity, but might be much more. So I want to make a this is the language thing again. I make a sharp distinction between task target completion time and time span measurement. But you see the kind of discussion we can get into without some agreement, just on simple language.

Speaker B You think that it's going to be time, a time related measurement.

Speaker A Sorry, you said that your mind goes.

Speaker B Blank, but it's hard to imagine that. Could you talk a little bit? Do you think it's going to be related to time span in some way? Time to time?

Speaker A I don't know. My gut feel says no. And that the discussion we were just having in coffee break and that we're dealing with somehow measurable units of information processing, complexity, numbers of variables floating around and so on, perhaps more around in that neighborhood. But it's all right. It's a nice feeling to be unclear, if you see what I mean. There's nothing more encouraging than an empty feeling to send you seeking something. But these are the kinds of issues and it'd be quite useful if we could get some agreement on where we are, if you see what I mean, and sort of step on off from there. These are very, very practical problems and as I say, the major issue for me is what one meets in the field. Unless you have conditions which are very rare and difficult to obtain, where you can have what I would call a full scale social analytic relationship with a company, that is, the CEO is in on it and all the senior executives are in on it and so on. And they recognize that this is a developmental field and they're not buying a management consultancy package and they don't necessarily want stuff delivered overnight. You know, that common situation that we meet in the field and where you can sit back and think with people under those conditions, people are willing to take stuff like this in their stride after a period of time. Carl right. So there we are, as I say, your HR, your personnel people and so on, smell this stuff a mile away and for good reason, just on that. I've been looking very carefully for the last couple of years now, systematically, just to have a look at current HR personnel training organization development practices and not necessarily for discussion, no, but I'd be interested in your observations on this. I have not found any that after a honeymoon gain period in the very short term that are not in the mid and long term counterproductive, that is, you're worse off as a result of using them. If that's correct, that's a very serious issue. It's a shift from that, do you see? Maybe to something else, goodness only knows, but that what's going on won't do. So that's why talking, I thought, might be useful to share some of these you'll gather concerns you realize I'm sort of thinking out loud this morning. I hope that's evident. If you take the existing HR training personnel practices that exist in industry and in kinds of organizations we're talking about civil service the whole gamut that I haven't been able to find any whose use is not counterproductive, that is that you're worse off for using them than you would have been if you didn't. Sorry. It's called human resourcing is the popular phrase in this country now. And that's why we keep changing all the time. Things don't work, and then you change something else, and you get the seven year cycle stuff, and this keeps going. I think it's accumulating and trouble accumulating. Okay, let me just scuttle on here in the remaining time, and if think about some of this stuff, I'd really be glad to have your comments. And there's other stuff that I'd like to raise tomorrow afternoon, but certainly it'll go back to some of the general points I've been making, and I think you'll find other others in the group and presentations this week coming back to issues of this kind. Now, um, just quickly, I'm putting a lot of emphasis on the measurement issue, as you can gather, because I think that's the missing one. And it's absolutely extraordinary. Again, that mid 16th century, mid 17th century development in the sciences is a very moving period, I find. Anyhow, it is literally the case that chemistry and scientific metallurgy emerged from alchemy in under 50 years after the development of thermometer just changed totally. Because you could now take a look at change in state, which is what you're doing in melting and you can begin to understand certain things are happening at the same temperature and different mixes and alloys melt at different temperatures and so on. And you can begin looking at chemical reactions have to do with the application of heat to materials and watching change, and you just get a whole different grip. And within 50 years, I say they'd stopped looking, running around looking for calor or caloric. It just changes. And one way of looking at the history of the natural sciences since then is in looking at the development of measuring instruments. I say now, 96 measuring instruments is against four. So that's 92 measuring instruments or thereabouts in 250 years. They don't come all that easily. And if you're Dr. Ohm, and you're trying to get some way of getting hold of the electrical resistance of materials, which was a critical issue with the development of electricity, how do you do it? Do you see how do you do it? And lo and behold, he thinks up the ometer. I mean, that really is terrific stuff. And wham development then goes on again and so on. Now, then, I'm distinguishing measurement from rating, because again, we use quantification as putting numbers on things as a sign of objectivity, and it ain't. You can put numbers on all kinds of things, like in job evaluation schemes, which are objective, because you use numbers. The numbers are what I'm calling ratings attributes. You get a number of people sit together and they all pass opinions, and then you somehow get them to put their opinions in terms of numbers, and you say you've quantified it and made it objective. You haven't. You got numbers on opinions. And so level of work measurement in terms of time span gets called a single factor job evaluation method, but it's not a rating. I think it's true measurement, and just a couple of criteria of true measurement in the sense in which I want to use it as distinguished from ratings or attributes like beauty and job evaluation and so on, are that the numbers are interesting. When you're into measurement, the scale ends at zero. There are no negative numbers. You don't have a minus two inch rod. You can easily get minus ratings on questionnaire. As a matter of fact, minus five to plus five is a popular way of setting up questionnaires, because you're talking about properties of entities. No property, no entity, no temperature, no entity. Goodness knows what happens at absolute zero. Is that right, Carl? What do they got down to? I'm sorry? I use Carl as my science mentor here. When I'm over there, down about minus, I think zero something or other, is that right? And it's very, very close, but it ain't there. So you've got a scale that starts at real zero and then goes on up to infinity, and it's the scale in which you get that unusual circumstance where two times two equals four. That's the very special case. Two times two rarely equals four. Is that familiar stuff or not? Well, where you have attributes, two times two doesn't equal four. When you've got ratings using questionnaires and rating scales and so on, you can't say something is twice as big as something else. It's only when you've got a true scale of zero rating. Now, what I'm saying is that I certainly think in terms of trying to get scaling, measurement scaling for the property of cognitive complexity or cognitive power in the individual, where zero cognitive power means no person. Well, you laugh about that. Have you ever thought what zero means in an IQ scale? Any idea what it means? It don't mean nothing. He gets down to 40 IQs of 40, and it gets very dicey when you get down below that. Is that right, Anne? What? That's the phrase. Is it non testable? Now, this is what we're used to death as all your rates going to zero. Sorry? Skinner used to define death as all your rates going to zero. Which rates? All of them. The psychological ones. It's all very well, he means the physiological ones, is that right? The psychological ones? If so, which? And I don't think he had any that I know of. Any of you know of any psychological properties that Skinner had got hold of? I don't want to bash Skinner much, sorry. These are basic issues. I thought at least draw your attention to them. Now then, let me get back to a couple of other things quite quickly. I've talked about requisiteness, and I think that really, honestly, is something just going to need tons of clarification that takes us full tilt into the whole value issue of values.

Speaker B The negative definition wasn't good enough. Just putting it together with a concept of rewards and penalty. Things like the nature of trust.

Speaker A Of any ulterior.