From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
Can you give me an example of how you would incorporate Time Span in a job description?

Response:
In a role description, Time Span leads us to better understand the Level of Work in the role. Traditionally we describe the tasks and activities associated with the role, but rarely define the Level of Work.

In each level, we have to understand the nature of problems to be solved and the decisions to be made.

Level I Roles
Level I roles typically consist of individual direct output. This is where we find technicians, equipment operators, clerical, data entry. Team members in Level I roles receive task assignments from a supervisor, coordinator or designated manager. Most discretionary decisions revolve around pace and quality.

“Am I working fast enough to complete the assigned task in the time expected? Am I working carefully enough to meet the quality standard set for this task?”

The output of a Level I role is often the direct product or service experienced by your customer.

Team members in Level I roles may work in the same room with other people, but are rarely concerned with other teammates’ activities unless there are direct hand-offs of work tasks, one to another.

Work materials and equipment are organized only for the working session. Ordering additional work materials for future work, next week, next month, is generally outside the bounds of Level I, unless specifically authorized by min/max standards set by their manager.

Goals, or task assignments are generally expected to be completed within one day or a few days. Experienced team members may be expected to continue projects without supervision as long as a month. The most experienced team members in Level I roles may informally assist other team members in trial and error troubleshooting or modeling work routines or special skills and may be assigned projects as long as three months in length.

Tomorrow, we will look closer at Level II.
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We are currently pre-registering for our next Hiring Talent program, beginning March 1, 2012.

I want to welcome new subscribers from our workshops last week out in California. Busy week this week, Wilmington to Washington DC ending up in Chicago. Looking forward to reconnecting.
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“So, if the first step in the hiring process is to define the Level of Work in the role, how do I do that?” Ellen sounded off.

“Ellen, look, it’s not like you are starting from scratch,” I assured her. “You know how to talk about the tasks in the role. You use words to describe the activities. You just have to listen to the words. Let’s start with a Stratum I role. And let’s pick a discipline, like marketing. Describe to me what you would include in a role description that calibrates the role at Stratum I?”

“Okay, marketing. Stratum I. I know that Stratum I roles typically work on tasks that can be completed between one day, to one week, to one month to three months. I immediately begin to think about the administrative paperwork that is attached to any marketing campaign. Marketing is creative, collaborative, often involves outside vendors. There are contracts that have to be signed, media orders that have to be placed, layouts that have to be completed, colors that have to be approved. Many of those decisions are outside the bounds of a Stratum I role, but the paperwork still has to be typed, and filed. Phone calls still have to be made. Folders have to be completed that contain the contracts.”

“It is interesting that, in defining Stratum I decisions, you most clearly identified decisions that were NOT Stratum I. You talked about contracts that have to be signed, and indicated that was outside the bounds of Stratum I?”

“Well, yes,” Ellen described confidently. “A contract is about a commitment with a client. The contract commits resources, budget, managerial oversight. The Time Span of those commitments are way beyond three months.”

“So, you WERE listening. To the words you used to describe the role. The clues are all there.”

“So, I have a candidate that I hope is up to the job. But what I really want to know is, whether he has Stratum I, Stratum II or Stratum III capability. Can you conduct an interview and tell me?” Ellen asked.

“Not likely,” I replied. “But let’s suppose I could. What would that tell you?”

“Well, if he had Stratum III capability, that would be better than Stratum II?” she guessed.

“Would it?” I pressed.

Ellen’s brow furrowed, wondering if I had forgotten all my math skills. “Three is higher than two.”

“What does that matter?” I asked again. I waited, and then some. “In the end, does it matter whether this person is successful in the role?”

“Well, yes.” Ellen was a bit exasperated with me.

“When you define the role, is it important to define the level of work?”

“That’s what I have been trying to get to, the capability of the person to do the level of work, the level of work required by the role.”

“So, have you defined the level of work?”

“Yes, in the Role Description, we describe the activity and what this person will be responsible for.”

“But have you defined the level of work? What is the complexity of problems that must be solved, the decisions that must be made and the Time Span of the goals in the role?”

Ellen ran through the Role Description in her head. “Not specifically. The job title is Manager and this person will be responsible for everything that goes on in that department. But, we haven’t thought about specifically defining the level of work.”

“If you can do that, define the level of work, the complexity of problems to be solved and the decisions to be made, then, interview for that, you will be ahead of the game. And you will also be in a better position to judge the capability of the person related to the work. It’s all about the work.”

From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
In yesterday’s blog, you mentioned a Post-It Note mentality. What’s a Post-It Note mentality?

Response:
When Elliott Jaques described the four states of mental processing, he was describing the way our brains perceive the world. This perception is used in problem solving and making decisions. I found this picture of a Post-It Note way of seeing the world. Below the picture I have clipped in the descriptions of Jaques four states. You tell me.

• Stratum I – Declarative Processing – the ability to focus on single task, direct output, solving problems through trial and error. Logic consists mostly of opinion without evidence to support.
• Stratum II – Cumulative Processing – the ability to piece together separate elements of a problem, pattern detecting, solving problems through past experience, documented in SOPs, best practices.
• Stratum III – Serial Processing – the ability, not only to see patterns, but cause and effect relationships between elements. Problem solving through comparative analysis, root cause analysis. The ability to sequence discrete elements into an efficient system.
• Stratum IV – Parallel Processing – the ability to handle multiple serial processes simultaneously. Not multi-tasking, but seeing the interdependency, contingency and bottlenecks that exist between multiple systems and sub-systems. Problem solving through systems analysis.

Post-It Note mentality. Which is it?

From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
How do you distinguish between Ten years experience and One year experience ten times?

Response:
I love analogies. When we attempt to describe capability, we most often fall into analogies.

• This person has a Post-It Note mentality.
• We need more band-width in this role.
• We have to get more horsepower on this project.

When I press for articulation, most often the explanation is another analogy. But when I look around the room, everyone knows intuitively what is meant by Post-It Notes, band-width and horsepower.

So, what’s the difference between Ten years experience and One year experience ten times?

Elliott Jaques (Requisite Organization) most clearly depicted these different states of thinking and corresponding levels of work –

• Stratum I – Declarative Processing – the ability to focus on single task, direct output, solving problems through trial and error. Logic consists mostly of opinion without evidence to support.
• Stratum II – Cumulative Processing – the ability to piece together separate elements of a problem, pattern detecting, solving problems through past experience, documented in SOPs, best practices.
• Stratum III – Serial Processing – the ability, not only to see patterns, but cause and effect relationships between elements. Problem solving through comparative analysis, root cause analysis. The ability to sequence discrete elements into an efficient system.
• Stratum IV – Parallel Processing – the ability to handle multiple serial processes simultaneously. Not multi-tasking, but seeing the interdependency, contingency and bottlenecks that exist between multiple systems and sub-systems. Problem solving through systems analysis.

So, now you tell me. What’s the difference between Ten years experience and One year experience ten times?

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.

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 push-back is predictable in today’s business environment. The central question is NOT, who reports to who, but which manager can be held accountable for the output of the team member?

Elliott saw things differently. Elliott was a scientist who spent his time observing both functional and dysfunctional organizations. He didn’t make up warm and fuzzy theories, he 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 problems were solved differently. And the way problems were solved 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 push-back 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.

From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
I understand the concept of Time Span as it relates to a manufacturing environment, based on the the examples you used in your workshop. Our company is a software company, we write code, software as a service based in the cloud. Having trouble translating Time Span to this model.

Response:
The first piece of translation is to calibrate your production activity. In a manufacturing environment, production (individual direct output) is most often calibrated as a Stratum I role (Time Span tasks – 1 day-3 months).

Software programming (production of software code) requires a higher level of capability. Task assignments to write code that produce specific software functions, appear to fall within a short Time Span. A coding project might take two weeks to construct, code, de-bug, and test. Seems like a short Time Span task. But in the role of a programmer, the longest Time Span task (which calibrates the complexity of the role) may have less to do with programming and more to do with learning.

I often ask programmers, if you stopped learning about new routines, new programming objects, how long would your code be effectively written, current with the state of the art. The joking response is five minutes, but the real answer is somewhere between three months and one year. It’s not that their published code would stop working, but there are more efficient routines and ways of manipulating code invented every day. Time frame to obsolescence is somewhere between three months and one year.

A good example of this is the move to HTML 5. HTML 5 solves the current dilemma in the way video is handled on the internet, particularly with mobile computing, in a dispute between Apple and Adobe. Adobe would like all video to be handled using its Flash player, Apple says HTML 5 makes the flash player obsolete (and refuses to support it in their iPad and iPhone products). It will take some time for adoption of HTML 5, but programmers are having to learn its new routines. A year from now, programming code that ignores HTML 5 will still work, but fall short of generally accepted programming standards. So, the longest Time Span task, for a programmer, is not necessarily producing code, but continuously learning about new developments in code construction, requires minimum Stratum II capability (cumulative processing).

But writing code is not the whole story. A simple stand-alone function is useless. Software typically contains hundreds of functions collected together in a system that creates value for the user. Stringing those functions together requires Stratum III capability, a serial state of thinking. So, you may have programmers, but somewhere in your personnel mix, you will have a manager, also likely a skilled programmer, who decides how the functions are put together.

But a software system is not the whole story. Software systems, to be truly valuable are integrated with other software systems, with interoperability hooks, not only among internal software systems, but external software systems, like Facebook and Twitter. This integration will likely require a manager with Stratum IV (parallel processing) capability.

All of this discussion centers around production. Software companies have other disciplines which must also be integrated, like sales and customer service. Effectively integrating those systems into the mix requires Stratum IV and Stratum V capability.

Levels of work
Stratum IV – Parallel processing
Stratum III – Serial processing
Stratum II – Cumulative processing
Stratum I – Declarative processing