From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
As I look at Elliott Jaques model organization, I notice that it is a hierarchy. Over the years, I have heard, or been taught, or read articles about how it is important to flatten out the hierarchy, drive decision-making down to the front lines, closer to the customer. It makes sense to me, but Jaques seems to ignore these new flat organizational models.

Response:
Your observations about Elliott Jaques’ high regard for hierarchy is correct. And these new organizational models really aren’t new. The flat organization, for all its well intentioned “new-ness” is the way things were before there was hierarchy.

Why has hierarchy gotten such a bad rap? Likely, the adverse experience comes from poorly run organizations who blamed their tribulations on something they didn’t understand.

Most people see organizational layers as reporting relationships. Who reports to whom? Who is a direct report? An indirect report? A dotted line report? This view lends itself to command and control and the pushback is predictable in today’s business environment.

But Elliott saw things differently. Elliott was a scientist who spent his time observing the way organizations worked, both functional and dysfunctional. He didn’t make up a bunch of warm and fuzzy theories, he just observed, in a scientific way. He gathered data, documented his findings and arrived at principles he found helpful.

Elliott observed, in functional organizations, that each layer had a Time Span orientation distinct from the next and that, if you drew a picture of those layers, from the longest Time Span goals at the top to the shortest Time Span goals at the bottom, you ended up with a picture of hierarchy. If his findings had been a circle, he would have reported it to be a circle, but his findings supported hierarchy.

As he examined each layer, he found that they solved problems differently. And the way they solved problems was directly related to the Time Span of the goals each layer was working on.

The value he found, in this hierarchy, was the capability of each successive layer to assist the next layer down with their problem solving. This capability created a value stream for problem solving and decision making throughout the organization.

Where we get screwed up with all this pushback on hierarchy is that we see hierarchy as a reporting structure. The real power of hierarchy comes from its value stream. Here is the way Elliott saw it:

Every employee is entitled to have a competent manager with the Time Span capability to bring VALUE to their problem solving and their decision making.

Thanks to Gil Herman for inviting me to spend the day with his Vistage KEY group in Chicago sharing the research of Elliott Jaques. Here is a question from yesterday’s session.

Question:
How do you implement the concepts of Time Span, and the corresponding layers, in an organization where there is very little structure and very few managers. Everyone seems to be doing everything.

Response:
This is a dilemma for most Stratum I and Stratum II organizations. How do you begin to create structure where there is no structure?

This is not a question of implementation. This is a dilemma because it is a decision. Before you can implement, you have to decide, and the decision has to stick, that means commitment.

It’s like being in love. When you are young, you think being in love is a feeling. Later in life, you understand that being in love is a decision. Implementing the principles of Time Span is a decision.

And here are the details of that decision. The choice is to continue to live with the chaos that comes from everyone doing everything. And the reward for free-wheeling chaos is more chaos. The organization will remain, stuck, in its own muck.

The other side of the decision is to change. Stop the chaos, organize roles, define methods, create systems. Easy to say, hard to do. But it all starts with a decision.