Advanced Systems-Level Problem Solving, Volume 2: How to Measure and Boost Thought Maturity [2nd ed. 2023] 3031409841, 9783031409844

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Otto Laske

Advanced Systems-Level Problem Solving, Volume 2 How to Measure and Boost Thought Maturity Second Edition

Advanced Systems-Level Problem Solving, Volume 2

Otto Laske

Advanced Systems-Level Problem Solving, Volume 2 How to Measure and Boost Thought Maturity Second edition

Otto Laske Interdevelopmental Institute (IDM) Gloucester, MA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-40984-4    ISBN 978-3-031-40985-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40985-1 1st edition: © Author, self-published 2008 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Foreword

Can deep thinking be measured, taught, and learned? Otto Laske’s book How to Measure and Boost Thought Maturity gives a clear “yes” answer to this question. This is good news because deep thinking is urgently needed in dealing with the complexity of the modern world. At the same time, the book makes clear that mature and deep thought is not limited to logical thinking, but above all involves dialectical thinking. The focus of the book is Otto Laske’s Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF), more specifically the Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF) applied to the field of work. DTF is the cognitive component of CDF, a three-dimensional model of human development that describes the development of humans’ social-­ emotional potential together with that of their cognitive potential, but separate from their psychological (behavioral) profile. In terms of CDF, people not only respond to needs, but they are intrinsic meaning- and sense-makers. They ask themselves on the one hand, “What should I do and for whom?” and, on the other, “What can I know and do, and what are my options?” The first question relates to a person’s social-emotional development and the second relates to their cognitive development. Otto Laske’s CDF is a research framework for exploring how people answer both questions, replies to which reflect a person’s level of adult development in the sense of mental growth. I myself got to know Otto Laske’s CDF about 15 years ago and was immediately fascinated by the possibility of using structured interviews to describe a person’s social-emotional and cognitive-developmental state. I conducted CDF assessments with about 20 people about 10 years ago. Now, 10 years later, I am again conducting interviews with the same people and using the same methodology. The comparison of the two assessments makes it possible to observe and describe developmental paths in great detail. The development of human potential is highly relevant to the domain of work. Otto Laske starts from Elliott Jaques’ definition of work: “(Work) is the exercise of judgment and discretion in making the decisions necessary to solve and overcome the problems that arise in the course of carrying out tasks.” Work in this sense consists essentially of inner thought processes, and the cognitive development of a v

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person forms the core of work capability. Work is therefore not understood as behavior or performance, as in other more reductionist models, but as the application of capabilities. Organizations are stratified into levels of responsibility and accountability. Laske draws on Elliot Jaques’ idea of “requisite organization” where an organization’s structure ideally matches the work capabilities of its people with their level of accountability. The more complex the work, in terms of the quality of the judgment and discretion the worker must use to get the task done, the more developed the person should be, both cognitively and social-emotionally. Thus, the “size of person” must match the “size of role.” Social-emotional development determines how a person relates to their colleagues and their responsibilities. Cognitive development determines the logical and dialectical thinking tools that a person has available to do their job. For Laske, the goal of effective human resource management should be to build an organizational structure based on the development of the organization’s people, not merely fit people to a pre-existing structure. The way a person conceptualizes the work they need to do is paramount. For Otto Laske, the real-time cognitive processes involved happen in what he calls a person’s “internal workplace.” This internal workspace is anchored in reflexivity, the root of internal conversations. Work is thus understood through people’s internal conversations in a way that is beyond being captured by job descriptions. These internal conversations are structured developmentally, fusing social-emotional and cognitive components. In this book, Otto Laske describes in detail how the cognitive-developmental line can be scientifically measured with the help of a specific interview technique. This technique involves structuring a conversation around three categories which Laske refers to as the “Three Houses.” These are: –– The Task House: the mental space in which goals, tasks, and responsibilities are conceptualized, contributing to a person’s performance. –– The Organizational House: the mental space where a person conceptualizes the organization in which they work, including aspects like its strategy, structure, and culture. –– The Self House: the mental space in which a person reflects on personal values and aspirations, and where they plan their own personal and professional development. In the internal workspace, a person has two jobs to do at the same time: Job 1 is to fulfil assigned or self-selected tasks and Job 2 is to develop one’s capabilities. Laske’s research on the development of thinking has shown that there is a trajectory of cognitive development that leads from purely logical to dialectical thinking over the adult lifespan. Mature thinking manifests as the complexity and fluidity of dialectical thinking. In the cognitive interview, the scope and richness of so-called dialectical thought forms are assessed. Dialectical thought forms are high-level abstractions that underlie a person’s internal as well as external conversations. Otto Laske distinguishes 4 classes of thought forms (context, process, relationship, transformation), each of which is subdivided into 7 individual thought forms, comprising

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a framework of a total of 28 thought forms. This Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF) forms the basis for measuring, teaching, and learning dialectical thinking. Through dialectical listening and the analysis of interview excerpts, the cognitive profile of a person can be measured in detail. The results of the analysis of a cognitive interview are the DTF measures. The dialectical thought forms can not only be measured but also taught, e.g., in cognitive coaching. During the conversation, the coach can formulate mind-opening questions and thus stimulate the use of dialectical thought forms in the internal as well as external conversation. The dialectical thought forms can also be learned, as my own experience with DTF shows. Learning DTF thought forms is best done in learning groups that analyze and discuss interview excerpts together. In this way, the members of the group learn to identify and use the thought forms themselves. Dialectical thought forms are invaluable tools at work, be it in professional conversations, in developing concepts, and in writing professional texts. Otto Laske’s book How to Measure and Boost Thought Maturity is a highly original contribution to the development of human thinking, not only at work but also beyond. It is also a contribution to a theory of social change with the goal of human flourishing. I wish the book a wide readership. They will not be disappointed. Professor of Communication Studies Bruno Frischherz and Ethics at Lucerne School of Business  Lucerne, Switzerland May 2023

Preface

This monograph is a child of its time. It is a contribution to Dialectical Critical Realism and thus strongly influenced by Bhaskar (1993) but also by Adorno (1999). It is further informed by M. Archer’s (1995, 2003, and 2007), E. Jaques’ (1998), and I. McGilchrist’s work (2009). The monograph comprises three books all of which explain and model a form of complex thinking historically known as dialectical thinking. Such thinking is systemic. The monograph is geared toward understanding, as well as designing, open rather than closed systems. Informally, seeing the world as an open system – as we do in this monograph – means viewing it as in constant motion (Bhaskar’s Second Edge, 2E), constituted by intrinsic relationships (Bhaskar’s Third Level, 3L) and viewed from a meta-­systemic perspective from which it undergoes unceasing transformation (Bhaskar’s Fourth Dimension, 4D). These characteristics pertain to life. One might say, thus, that dialectical thinking aims to construct Life in Thought. In a time where mankind is succumbing to its self-created “data” world, dialectical thinking takes on the form of a rescue operation to save mankind from itself, more precisely, from its exclusively disembodied logical thinking in terms of which the world gleams in pure positivity since all traces of negativity have been unintentionally removed from it. By contrast, dialectical thinking explicates the notion that “reality” cannot be either described or acted upon while forgetting that it is, to speak with Bhaskar, pervaded by absences, or marked by negativity, and that human thinking therefore needs to learn to master “negative thinking” if not also “negative dialectic.” Overall, the monograph joins a genetic epistemology of – solver-centric – systems thinking to a phenomenology of work in real time, viewing “work” as a manifestation of Human Agency in the sense of M.  Archer. For this purpose, the monograph presents an epistemological equivalent of Bhaskar’s ontological dialectic, referred to as a “thought form dialectic,” and does so with a focus on the social sciences and organizations as in part constitutive cells of society. This entails putting into an epistemological perspective (and vocabulary) how individuals, groups, and teams “construct the world” for themselves in real time, influenced by a host of cultural and social constraints but in a way that is irreducible to them. ix

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By showing that and in what way dialectical systems thinking includes and transcends logical systems thinking, and demonstrating in what way it is an adult-­ developmental achievement, the author establishes a relationship between “thinking” and “work,” viewing work (not only organizational work) as a manifestation of human agency. Especially in Book 2, following E. Jaques, the author shows that both thinking and work share that they require what Hegel called the effort of the concept, that is, conceptual thinking able to transcend merely logical thinking. The adult-developmental processes by which logical thinking extends itself into dialectical thinking are the main topic of Books 1 and 3. In Book 2, the author applies what today is known about human cognitive development over the lifespan and the thought-form structure of mature thinking to an inquiry into human capability and its function in organizations and institutions. Addressing the sociological and epistemic relationship of Structure and Agency introduced into sociology by M.  Archer, Book 2 focuses on human agency as “work” as well as “reflexivity,” and empirically explores the mental space in which work in real time happens, referred to as individuals’ and teams’ internal workplace, with dramatic consequences for organizational consulting and human resources management. Joined to the practice of dialectical thinking throughout the monograph, the reader finds an exposition of theoretical distinctions and empirical findings of research in adult development over the human lifespan, especially cognitive development toward dialectics. The connection made between dialectics and development is not haphazard: the monograph views not only individual but social and cultural development as dialectical in the sense of Bhaskar’s Four Moments of Dialectic, explored in all three books. In this manner, the monograph extends and deepens the literature of Dialectical Critical Realism, introducing methods of dialectical systems analysis for such diverse professional domains as long-term strategic planning, government prediction, policymaking, critical-systems analysis, and educational reform. The broad differences between the monograph’s three books are the following: • Book 1, subtitled Approaching Real-World Complexity with Dialectical Thinking, has an epistemological focus. It joins Bhaskar’s ontological notion of the Four Moments of Dialectic to the epistemological one of dialectics emerging in the human mind as it transitions from Understanding to Reason viewed as phases of cognitive development. The book’s purpose is to present what is known today about human cognitive development over the human lifespan, a topic still obscured by the dominance of behavioral belief systems, especially but not only in business. (The last chapter of the book broadens its epistemological inquiry to social-emotional meaning making which is intrinsically linked to cognitive sense making.) In this way, the book lays the theoretical foundation for Book 2 which explores the structure of the mental space in which Work happens in real time, with a focus on managing human resources. • Book 2, subtitled How to Measure and Boost Thought Maturity, adopts and critically deepens E.  Jaques’ notions of Capability and Work. Amplifying Jaques’

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pioneering distinctions and differentiations within the domain of human Capability from an adult-developmental perspective, the book investigates social agents’ internal dialogue about their work activities, to empirically explore the methods of mental processing they use to deliver work in real time. Introducing the notion of agents’ internal workplace as well as methods for scrutinizing its developmental structure by way of qualitative interview methods, the author sheds light on the gap between behavioral and epistemic notions of work and work design and displays the consequences thereof for professionalism in human resources management and the development of work-supporting technology. • Book 3, subtitled Manual of Dialectical Thought Forms, comprises the only existing set of tools for assessing individuals’, groups’, and teams’ present level of cognitive development toward dialectical thinking. This set of tools is what beginners in dialectical thinking and assessment need to master to become practitioners of dialectics. The book updates, refines, and expands the never published Manual of Dialectical Schemata put in place in 1981 by Michael Bopp, a student of Michael Basseches, thereby safeguarding the historical continuity of dialectics. It is a textbook for teaching and learning dialectical thinking and mastering its epistemology. For that purpose, the book presents a detailed description of four different modes (and “moments”) of dialectical thinking, each of which is associated with seven thought forms that together make up the author’s DTF (Dialectical Thought Form Framework). Examples, exercises, and practice reflections facilitate using the Manual. In general terms, this monograph presents systems thinking as a manifestation of individuals’ dialectical thinking capability which, over their lifetime, lets them extend logical to more complex, “transformational” ways of thinking. In three intrinsically related books, the monograph guides the reader on his/her journey from Understanding to Reason (Bhaskar, 1993, 28–37), showing the latter to be the master and the former a mere emissary (McGilchrist, 2009). By delving into the epistemological intricacies of individuals’ internal workplace (Archer, 2003, 2007), the monograph presents dialectical systems thinking as an achievement of adulthood whose implicit potential for untrammeled thinking lets humans transcend the “data world” that mere Understanding (logical thinking) so easily gets stuck in. By so doing, the monograph escapes committing both the epistemic and ontic fallacies (Bhaskar) in terms of which the real world shows up as an irrealist “data world” to which to succumb is potentially fatal for Human Agency (Archer, 1995, 2003). Throughout three intrinsically related books, dialectical systems analysis unfolds itself as a critical discipline whose practitioners transcend positivistic views of the real world by uncovering the latter’s negativity, thereby laying bare the dialectics of Structure and Agency all thinking is framed by. The new discipline views the ways in which humans construct the world through language as fallacious if they cannot dialectically reflect upon their own thinking; as shoddy if they do not take the world’s negativity into account; and as risky to the extent that they are under the sway of epistemologically reductive models of the real

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world that are, intentionally or not, out of touch with what is empirically known today about the epistemic structure of individuals’ internal workplace. In sum, the reader is embarking on a journey into a genetic epistemology of dialectical systems thinking in the form of an inquiry into the cognitive-developmental structure of thinkers’ internal workplace by which they engage with structures of the real world in real time. Gloucester, MA, USA  Otto Laske

References Adorno, Th. W. (1978). Minima moralia. London: Verso. Adorno, Th. W. (1993). Hegel: Three studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adorno, Th. W. (1999). Negative dialectic. New York: Continuum. [Negative Dialektik. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1966]. Adorno, Th. W. (2008). Lectures on negative dialectic: Fragments of a lecture course 1965/66. Malden, MA: Polity. Adorno, Th. W., E. Frenkel-Brunswick, and D. J. Levinson. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Norton. Archer, M.  S. (1995). Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. S. (1998). Culture and Agency. Cambridge University Press.. Archer, M. S. (2003). Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. S. (2007). Making our way through the world. Cambridge University Press. Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of naturalism. London: Routledge. Bhaskar, R. (1993). Dialectic: The pulse of freedom. Verso. Bhaskar, R. (2002). Reflections on MetaReality. London, UK: Sage Publications. Bhaskar, R. (2017). The Order of Naturally Necessity. University College London Institute of Education. The Authors. Jaques, E. (1998). Requisite Organization. Arlington, VA: Cason Hall & Co. McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his Emissary. Yale University Press. McGilchrist, I. (2019). Ways of Attending. London & New York: Routledge. Taylor & Francis Group.

Introduction

The book before you, reader, is a contribution to Dialectical Critical Realism (DCR), a philosophical ontology put in place by Roy Bhaskar (1993) and elaborated in Margaret Archer’s social ontology (1995). As Bhaskar shows in his The Possibility of Naturalism (1979), human beings are social agents whose “mind” acts in nature and society as a causal power. For him as for Archer, Mind is an outflow of human agency, as much as agency is an outflow of what Archer refers to as mind’s Reflexivity, i.e., cognition (2003, 2007). Taking the Agency⟶Mind⟶Reflexivity sequence a further step, as done in this book, it becomes evident that what we call “work” is itself a major manifestation of human Reflexivity. In this monograph on human cognition (Reflexivity) and its development over the human lifespan to the point of thought maturity, it is natural to view what we know today about human cognitive development as of direct relevance for how to conceive of “work” and “work delivery.” A first inference from the sequence Agency⟶Mind⟶Reflexivity would be that “human resources” manifest Reflexivity not only in “thinking” but via thinking also in “work.” In fact, as this book shows, thinking and work are synonyms, as was first seen by Hegel who spoke of “making the effort of the concept,” an idea taken up by Marx in an upside-down, materialistic fashion for the sake of investigating capitalism as a subversion of human work and agency. The first and only twentieth-century management scientist who saw work in terms of cognitive development is Elliott Jaques (1998a, 2002a). Jaques did not stop there. He introduced the notion of “work capability’ (in distinction from “work delivery”) and pronounced the latter a matter of mental processing (1998a). In a further step, he viewed work capability, the reflexive ability to deliver work, as a feature common to the organic world, saying that all animals do work but at different levels of mental processing (2002a). For me, the crucial sequence for writing this book has been that of Agency⟶Mind⟶Reflexivity⟶Work Capability⟶Work (Delivery). I have been deeply influenced in my thinking by Human Capability: A Study of Individual Potential and Its Application, a book written by Jaques together with K. Cason in 1994. In this book, the authors view what they name “work capability” as an xiii

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outgrowth of cognition which I broadly equate with Archer’s notion of Reflexivity. In Jaques’ last book (2002a), he explained that all organisms do work but on different levels of work capability that he also refers to as levels of mental processing. The broad view of work that Jaques took brought him to the central notion of Requisite Organization. He showed in detail why work capability, as the root of work delivery, needs to be seen as comprising different levels, or Orders, of mental processing, each of which is associated with its own peculiar logical methods. Orders of work complexity thus equal orders of mental processing complexity. Jaques went a step further still. He argued that if there are different Orders of mental processing associated with different Methods of mental processing, then their relationship should also define managerial Accountability. This step then led him to postulate that human organizations be called “requisite” (i.e., requisitely organized as well as managed) only if their levels of accountability are commensurate with levels of mental processing (degrees of cognitive maturity). For him that entailed that organizations’ role matrix, in turn, had to provide for an equivalence of “Size of Person” (SoP) – the cognitive-developmental level of the person in a role – and “Size of Role” (SoR) – the level of accountability of the role:

SoP  SoR  Requisite Organization

In this equation, SoP is an adult-developmental notion, defined by Jaques in terms of “maturation bands,” and in this book critiqued and updated in terms of findings in cognitive-developmental research since 1975, specifically about the transition from logical to dialectical thinking in adulthood (Basseches, 1984; Bhaskar, 1993; Laske, 2008). Jaques, choosing to be an outsider, re-defined the task of “HR,” the human resources department of organizations, as safeguarding the match of SoP with (SoR) throughout an organization. In his view, only if an organization’s human resources are configured, placed, and used in such a way that a worker’s (agent’s) accountability level in a role matches the person’s level of cognitive development can the organization be called “naturally organized” or “requisite.” This hypothesis of Jaques is the central tenet of this book, as explained throughout and most centrally in Chap. 1 and exemplified in the two Appendices. The statement of Jaques’ hypothesis in the context of the sequence arrived at above:

Agency  Mind  Reflexivity  Work Capability  Work  Delivery 



brings me to the point where I can begin to outline the contents of this book. I begin with a remaining question to which good answers are still open, viz., where (in consciousness) does work mentally happen? More precisely: in what space other than the behavioral space of “doing” is work done? If “thinking” precedes “doing,” work delivery in the broad sense would seem to happen in an autonomous mental space in which agents can “deliberate” and “reflect,” in a way Jaques referred to as a “loosening and bifurcation process.”

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*** In the book here before you, the place where work in real time happens is called the internal workplace, and is seen, with Archer, as a place of internal conversations. The notion of internal conversation is the centerpiece of Archer’s critique of present-day social theory (Archer, 2003, frontispiece & p. 9): What it (social theory) completely neglects is our personal capacity to define what we care about most to design courses of action to realise our concerns in society …”, clarifying further: agents have to diagnose their (social) situations, they have to identify their own interests and they must design projects they deem appropriate to attaining their ends. … the fundamental question is not whether they do all of this well but how they do it at all (highlighted OL) The answer to this is held to be ‘via the internal conversation, … the modality through which reflexivity towards self, society, and the relationship between them (including ‘work’, OL) is exercised.

Archer’s statement above brings us from Agency⟶Mind to the following sequence of relevance for work in organizations:

   Reflexivity  Work Capability  Work  Delivery 

 cognitive devellopment  internal workplace  internal conversations

In my view, Archer’s introduction of the notion of agents’ internal conversations is as revolutionary as is Jaques’ introduction of the notion of orders of mental processing linked to levels of work complexity and accountability. These notions are grounded in the common ground of the notions of Reflexivity and Capability. For the purposes of this book, Jaques’ Work Capability is a synonym of Archer’s Reflexivity, both defining human Agency. While in her writings about internal conversations, Archer makes a huge jump from Structure/Agency⟶Reflexivity directly to “internal conversation” (2003, 2007), in this book, I deepen and differentiate her notion of internal conversation adult-­developmentally as well as epistemologically, placing the mental space in which work happens, i.e., the internal workplace, into the social-ontological framework I share with her (viz., Bhaskar, 1993). In doing so, I make clear that internal conversations need a physical as well as mental place to happen in, and that as far as work projects – in contrast to life projects – are concerned, that place is the organizational workplace, not simply a mental space referred to by Bhaskar abstractly as “positioned practices” (1993, 152 f). Indirectly, I differentiate DCR’s notion of how society changes and reproduces itself in a process of morphogenesis (Archer, 1995), in that I see morphogenesis, based as it is on the causal efficaciousness of agents’ Mind in interaction with social Structure, as influenced not just by internal conversations in abstracto, but in the concrete way of how those conversations are cognitively structured dialectically in the sense of DTF. ***

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In this book, then, “work” is thought to happen in an internal workplace that is “autonomous” in the categorical sense of being irreducible to either the physical-­ behavioral space in which work is done and the social environment in(to) which work is delivered. Seeing work in this fashion gives rise to questions of great importance for this book, specifically the following: 1. What is the cognitive-developmental structure of workers’/agents’ adult mental processing, thus of their internal conversations? 2. In what way can this structure best be described epistemologically? 3. What does cognitive-developmental research (i.e., Basseches, 1984, Laske, 2008, 1999) say about how these conversations differ from person to person, agent to agent, in terms of the development of an agents’ work capability from logical to complex, dialectical thinking? 4. What supports for complexifying work capability  – thus thought maturity  – should HR put in place to enhance agents’/workers’ professional internal conversations and thus the quality of work output? The book answers these questions in terms of cognitive-developmental research since 1975, focusing specifically on the extension of logical to dialectical thinking over the adult lifespan, which equally is the topic of Books 1 and 3. In the Appendices of this book, I demonstrate how qualitative cognitive interviews are analyzed, while in Appendix 2, I clarify how such interviews can be conducted in a manner to make their evaluation (“scoring”) scientifically valid, that is, interrater-reliable. *** When you, the reader, think about how human Reflexivity, as an outflow of Agency, is rooted into work whose (1) levels of complexity unfold in terms of (2) phases of cognitive development and (3) their associated levels and methods of mental processing, you will have before you an outline of this book. The book answers the following research as well as practical questions in some detail: • How does cognitive development over the lifespan unfold (see also Book 1)? • How, in different phases of adult cognitive development, do methods of mental processing re-shape work on different levels of mental processing complexity (see Chap. 1)? • How does the use of different methods of mental processing impact a person’s work in a role, especially in terms of his/her developmental Size of Person (see also Book 1)? • How does Size of Person – defined by a DTF “cognitive profile” – determine the present limits of a person’s work capability (see Chaps. 1 and 2)? • How does a person’s current applied capability differ from his/her potential capability, whether current or emergent (see Chap. 1)? • How does a person’s present level of work capability (i.e., cognitive development) structure the anatomy of the person’s internal workplace, described by the Three Houses (see Appendix 1)? • How do limits of a person’s work capability define the Size of Role in which a person is held accountable for his/her work (Chaps. 1 and 3, and Appendix 1)?

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From a cognitive-developmental perspective, these further issues arise: • How do applied and potential work capability unfold through methods of mental processing? • How do DTF cognitive profiles describe a person’s applied or potential capability (see Appendix 1)? • What is the cognitive-developmental structure of methods of mental processing associated with the phase of cognitive development a worker or manager is currently working in (see Chaps. 1 and 2)? • In what phase of dialectical thinking development does a worker/manager need to be in to establish a match between the Size of Role s(he) is presently in and the Size of Person that defines his/her present work capability (see Chaps. 1 and 2)? • Etc. Importantly, the discussion above necessitates a further refinement of the notion of a “workplace.” Once we conceive of work as being done in an internal workplace, based on internal conversations, it is obvious that we need to refine what we mean by a person’s “workplace,” as shown below. • Obviously, we need to distinguish two workplaces, an internal and an external one. • The external workplace is the physical, social, and cultural place from where an agent/worker delivers work. • Both workplaces are separate and inseparable in that the external workplace is being interpreted by workers/agents in terms of their internal workplace, depending on their level of cognitive development. • The internal workplace is the autonomous mental space in which an agent/ worker engages in internal conversations whose topics comprise the professional concerns based on which s(he) launches and carries out work projects, whether assigned or volunteered for. • In delivering work, a worker/agent is doing two jobs, Job 1 and Job 2. • Job 1 refers to the work that is assigned to an agent/worker or is volunteered for by them. • Job 2 is the developmental, social-emotional, and cognitive “inner” work an agent/worker needs to do to satisfy the accountabilities of his/her role; his inner work will be a function of the Size of Person s(he) has presently achieved.

Summary This book has both a theoretical and practical side. On the theoretical side, it proposes a new notion of “work” following E.  Jaques’ research on Capability and M. Archer’s research on Reflexivity, while on the practical side, it provides a framework called DTF (Dialectical Thought Form Framework) for determining empirically and systemically an individual’s or team’s present level of thought maturity, measured in terms of dialectical thought forms.

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Together with an introduction to the DTF framework and discussions of its components and their relationship, the book provides a large set of tools, not only for “changing one’s mind” but also for developing clients, colleagues, supervisors, and board members to a higher level of thought maturity. To get an impression of this potential put into practice over two decades, go to https://interdevelopmentals. org/blog/. This book’s focus of attention is workers’ and agents’ internal workplace as an autonomous mental space in which movements-in-thought shape and structure internal conversations. As Jaques shows the reader in Chap. 1, these movements-in-­ thought consist of “loosening and bifurcation processes” executed in the form of “reflective judgment and discretion within a time window.” In Chap. 2, the reader is introduced to cognitive-developmental issues, an outline of the progression toward increasing complexity of movements-in-thought from logical to dialectical thinking over the human lifespan. In Chap. 3, this outline brings the reader to understanding the anatomy of the internal workplace, which in Chap. 4 lets him understand what dialectical thinking and listening in the workplace look and sound like. Two appendices deliver the empirical and textual evidence required for understanding notions such as thought complexity, thought maturity, cognitive profile, and cognitive potential, summarized by DTF cognitive-developmental scores. As the reader will notice, this book’s approach to thought maturity is very broad. The author views “thinking” and “work” from a broader, social-science perspective, not simply an epistemological or organizational one, seeing them as closely related. This entails asking “what ultimately is thinking, viewed in terms of individual agency, and what is the broader category under which both thinking and work can be viewed so as to understand their contribution to social change?” The relevance of the approach here followed, especially for the nurturance of an innovative workforce, is well expressed by CEO Jan De Visch who speaks of the effect on himself of studying this book as follows: How to Measure and Boost Thought Maturity takes the assessment field into exciting new territory. It offers a paradigm shift from behavioral to cognitive assessment. It is an absolute must-read book for academics and practitioners who claim to be interested in improving conversational processes at all organizational levels. The methodology helped me break through the taken-for-granted assessment methods, considering how individual perspective-­ taking evolves during lifehood. Practicing hypothetical listening habits (derived from the book) enabled me to grow past my limits.

As Jan well expresses, “conversational processes,” whether “internal” or “external,” indeed stand at the center of this book, not so much in terms of their content, but their cognitive, thought-form structure. As Jan indicates, engaging in conversational processes of great complexity does not only promote excellence of work delivery but has a dramatic impact on one’s own thinking; thus, on the way, the world “shows up” for oneself. The author hopes that “growing past my limits” will become for the reader a shared experience.

Acknowledgments

I owe this book about assessing thought maturity in adults to my studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where between 1992 and 1995 I absorbed research findings regarding both social-emotional and cognitive adult development over the lifespan. It was Michael Basseches who, through his wrestling with Piaget’s legacy in his research between 1978 and 1984 (more than personal teaching), showed me how to conceive of the development of complex human thinking as the formation of a transformational system of increasingly equilibrated elements that emerges over a person’s lifetime. In studying Basseches’ work, I learned that the human cognitive system can be empirically researched by viewing its elements  – which Basseches called “schemata”  – as composing the epistemological foundation of people’s internal and external conversations in real time, and that when shaping conversations as semi-­ structured qualitative interviews, as “interviewer” one could show, by way of evaluating and “scoring” structurally relevant interview fragments, that these conversations embodied empirically measurable degrees of cognitive equilibrium (or disequilibrium) of the mind about which feedback can be given to interviewees. Basseches’ pioneering work on real-time thinking encouraged me to learn to listen to interviewees “dialectically,” in such a way that their speech content became the research material based on which to discern which conceptual elements called “schemata” were used by interviewees to express their associative thoughts, especially thoughts about their work (or another topic they were motivated to speak about). I learned to make a distinction between “coaching” and “assessment” as a distinction between listening to speech content and listening to the cognitive structure shaping that content, and further to develop a kind of “cognitive coaching” in which the client’s level of development of dialectical thought forms, rather mere speech content, became the object of study. *** A second influence on this book is that of Roy Bhaskar’s work on dialectics as the foundation of Dialectical Critical Realism, an outflow of his work of 1979 on the “Possibility of Naturalism” in the social sciences. In his work of 1993, Bhaskar xix

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developed a profound critique of both Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics and, resuscitating dialectical thinking, introduced what he referred to as the Four Moments of Dialectic. Through this work, he revived dialectical thinking in both its ontological and epistemological forms in a way that deeply resonated with what I had learned about dialectics from Th. W. Adorno between 1956 and 1966, considering that both thinkers were shaped by their lifelong engagement with Hegel’s legacy. What I found missing in Bhaskar’s work of 1993, and still find missing today, after his premature death, is a sensible delineation between his primarily ontological dialectics, on one hand, and his much less explicit epistemological dialectics – that underly the book text he was composing in 1993 – on the other. In short, what I missed was Bhaskar’s articulated reflection on the structure of his own dialectical thinking as the writer of his 1993 opus. While as a dialectician I did expect Bhaskar to say that the two dialectics – the ontological and epistemological one – were intrinsically linked (which indeed he strongly implied), as a cognitive developmentalist and epistemologist it seemed evident to me that what Basseches had unburied through qualitative interviews empirically would have a strong bearing on our understanding of how Bhaskar’s Four Moments emerge in the human mind, seen as a psychological as well as an epistemological phenomenon. I therefore made the decision to hypothetically consider Basseches’ schemata, which I called thought forms, as vehicles of explication of Bhaskar’s Four Moments of Dialectic, both those he stipulated as pillars of this ontology and those he demonstrated by writing his 1993 on dialectic. *** A third influence on this book stems from the work of Elliott Jaques on Requisite Organization (1998a). Jaques was the first management scientist who empirically demonstrated the relationship between the concepts of “cognition” and “work.” Specifically, Jaques  – both in person and through his writings  – showed me that human resources in organizations can be neither understood nor fostered without a knowledge of the research findings on the cognitive development of adults over the lifespan. This insight permitted him as well as me to distinguish between what people “are” (their cognitive capability) and what they “have” (such as competences, skills, learned behaviors, temperament). It is this methodological distinction, made by Jaques (1998a), that sets this book apart from all other writings on the assessment of human resources that I know of. This book is a synthesis of Basseches’, Bhaskar’, and Jaques’ work, shaped to focus on the issue of human resources in organizations. One could think of it as providing scholarly foundations of management science of a kind that no longer blinds itself to being an integral part of the social sciences. The link between management science and social science is quite simple: “human resources” consist of social agents who manifest their “agency” as “work capability” which, ultimately, is itself a manifestation of “reflexivity” that is brought to bear on the natural, social, and cultural structures that are engaged by work, of which organizational structures are only a minor dimension.

Contents

1

 Developmental Theory of Work Capability ������������������������������������     1 A Introduction to Capability������������������������������������������������������������������������     2 The Hidden Dimensions of Delivering Work��������������������������������������     2 Limitations of the Notion of Work in HR and Management Science�����     3 Work and Work Capability������������������������������������������������������������������     4 Jaques’ Definition of Work������������������������������������������������������������������     5 Jaques Definition of Work Capability��������������������������������������������������     7 Deepening Jaques’s Notion of Potential Capability����������������������������     9 Further Comments on Capability and Capacity����������������������������������    13 Why All of These Fancy Distinctions?������������������������������������������������    14 Embedding in Nature: Human Beings in Relation to Pre-linguistic Organisms��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    17 Three Aspects of Capability��������������������������������������������������������������������    18 Jaques’ Assumptions Summarized������������������������������������������������������    18 Deepening Jaques’ Four Orders of Mental Processing Developmentally����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    20 Overview of Jacques’ Definition of Capability Assimilated to CDF�����������������������������������������������������������������������������    22 Current Applied Capability (CAC)������������������������������������������������������    25 Current Potential Capability (CPC) ����������������������������������������������������    26 Emergent Potential Capability (EPC)��������������������������������������������������    27 Ways of Supporting Human Capability at Work����������������������������������    28 Practical Consequences of the Developmental Definition of Capability�����    29 Behavioral Coaching����������������������������������������������������������������������������    30 Cognitive-Behavioral Coaching����������������������������������������������������������    32 Cognitive-Developmental Coaching����������������������������������������������������    33 Fully Developmental Coaching ����������������������������������������������������������    34 A Developmental Look at Human Resources��������������������������������������    34 Conclusion ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    35 Chapter Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    36 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    39 xxi

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 Cognitive Theory of Work in Organizations�����������������������������������    43 A Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    43 Jaques’ Answers��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    48 Measuring Time Span of Role ����������������������������������������������������������������    50 Single vs. Multiple Task Roles����������������������������������������������������������������    52 Level of Work Complexity in Single- and Multiple-Task Roles��������������    53 Summary of Time Span ��������������������������������������������������������������������������    54 Accountability Architecture and Stratum of Role������������������������������������    56 Summary of Strata ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    60 Review of Requisite Organization ����������������������������������������������������������    61 Critique of Jaques’ Notion of Requisite Organization����������������������������    62 The Author’s Perspective on Jaques’ Work����������������������������������������������    63 Updating Jaques’ Notions������������������������������������������������������������������������    66 Revisiting Potential Capability������������������������������������������������������������    66 Revisiting Complexity of Work ����������������������������������������������������������    67 Strata and Their Associated Types of Work ��������������������������������������������    68 Jaques’ Four Different Categories of Work ��������������������������������������������    70 A. Work as Direct Action (Str-I and V)������������������������������������������������    70 B. Work as Diagnostic Data Accumulation (Str-II and VI)�����������������    72 C. Work Based on Finding Alternative Goal Paths (Str-III and VII)��������������������������������������������������������������������������    73 D. Work as Pursuit of Parallel Goal Paths (Str-IV and VIII) ��������������    75 Chapter Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    76 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    81

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 The Anatomy of the Internal Workplace ��������������������������������������������    85 Highlights of This Chapter����������������������������������������������������������������������    85 The Structure of the HCA������������������������������������������������������������������������    91 The Arbitrariness of Sociological Distinctions����������������������������������������    93 Empirical Evidence Regarding Stages of Meaning Making (Kegan, 1982)������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    95 A First Introduction to Dialectical Thought Forms (TFs)������������������������    98 Understanding the Three Houses of Work ����������������������������������������������    99 Difference of Emphasis in the Three Houses������������������������������������������   102 Changes in Agents’ Professional Agenda������������������������������������������������   103 Intermediate Summary����������������������������������������������������������������������������   105 Discussion of Each House Individually ��������������������������������������������������   106 The Self House����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   107 The Difference Between Self and Role����������������������������������������������������   107 Work Context ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   110 Professional Agenda����������������������������������������������������������������������������   110 Personal Culture����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   111 The Task House������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   112 The Organizational House ����������������������������������������������������������������������   114 The Four Organizational Perspectives in Detail��������������������������������������   116

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Creating an Integrated Change Policy and Plan in the Organizational House ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   118 Chapter Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   119 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   122 4

 Dialectical Thinking and Listening in the Workplace������������������������   125 Part A. Conceptualizations of Human Thinking��������������������������������������   126 The Cognitive Crucible������������������������������������������������������������������������   127 How Successful Leaders Think������������������������������������������������������������   127 Differences Between Abductive and Dialectical Thinking: A Critique of Roger Martin������������������������������������������������������������������   130 Psychological Obstacles to Complex Thinking ����������������������������������   134 Anxiousness as a Matter of Inquiring System ������������������������������������   135 Part B. Understanding the Three Managers ��������������������������������������������   136 The Quote Above Considered as an Interview Excerpt ����������������������   139 A Closer Look at Manager C’s Thinking��������������������������������������������   140 Manager C’s Cognitive Behavior Graph����������������������������������������������   142 Some Conclusions��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   143 Returning to Manager B����������������������������������������������������������������������   144 Outcome for Manager B����������������������������������������������������������������������   145 Part C. Dialectical Listening in Practice: Thought Forms as Mind Openers����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   146 What Is Dialectical Listening?������������������������������������������������������������   146 Chapter Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   150 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   153

Appendices������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   157 Index����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   205

Abbreviations1

A B C C CAC CD CPRT

First Order of Mental Processing (Jaques) Second Order of Mental Processing (Jaques) Third Order of Mental Processing (Jaques) Context (mode of thinking) → DTF Current Applied Capability (Jaques) Cognitive development (sense making), in contrast to ED The Four Modes of Dialectical Thinking (Context, Process, Relationship, and Transformation D Fourth Order of Mental Processing (Jaques) CBC Cognitive-behavioral coaching CBG Cognitive Behavior Graph CPC Current Potential Capability (Jaques) D Fourth Order of Mental Complexity (Jaques) DTF Developmental Thought Form Framework DTFM Manual of Dialectical Thought Forms DPC Developmental Process Consultation ED Social-emotional development (meaning making), in contrast to CD EPC Emergent potential capability (Jaques) FOR Frame of Reference (= world view) HCA Human Capability Architecture Job 1 (assigned or volunteered for work) Job 2 (the inner work needed to deliver excellent work) LMC Level of Mental Complexity (Jaques) LL Lower Left Quadrant (Wilber) LR Lower Right Quadrant (Wilber) MAA Managerial Accountability Architecture MELD Bhaskar’s Four Moments of Dialectic (1M, 2E, 3L, 4D) MMP Methods of Mental Processing (Jaques)

 See also the Glossary in Book 1.

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NP P PBG PEL R RO SoP SoR STI Str T -T TF(s) UDR UL UR

Abbreviations

Need-Press Questionnaire (also “psychological dimension”) – not Book 3 Process Mode of Thinking → DTF Problem Behavior Graph (in cognitive assessment) Point-Elaborate-Link Sequence (in dialectical thinking) Relationship Mode of Thinking → DTF Requisite Organization (Jaques) Size of Person (Jaques) Size of Role (Jaques) Systems Thinking Index (in DTF cognitive assessment) Stratum (Level of Accountability (Jaques) Transformational Mode of Thinking → DTF Dysfunctional psychological traits (E. Jaques) Thought Form(s) Understanding-Dialectic-Reason progression (Bhaskar) Upper Left Quadrant (Wilber) Upper Right Quadrant (Wilber)

Chapter 1

A Developmental Theory of Work Capability

Human work is an expression of what Bhaskar, the founder of Dialectical Critical Realism (1993), refers to as Human Agency. Human Agency stands in a natural contrast to social and cultural structures embedded in which work happens. Among these structures we find organizations that manage work according to specific rules of governance that both promote and stifle work, a dialectical give and take that mirrors the sociological Structure/Agency relationship (Archer, 1995) in which Structures function as both constraints and enablements. To social agents, organizational structures appear as antecedents they need to negotiate when launching work and life projects, whether these antecedents appear in the form of constraints or supports (Archer, 1995, 2003). This negotiation looks different depending on the level of adult development a social agent presently functions on. This chapter outlines in what way an agent’s cognitive development is a major determinant of how s(he) will deliver work and what part of her work capability will be engaged or will be discounted in the delivery of work. In Archer’s view, here adopted, agents bring to bear their Reflexivity on the social and cultural work environment they find themselves in. In organizational work, agents deliver work under the supervision of managers, i.e., agents in roles of higher accountability than those they supervise. But even so, these “higher-up” agents deliver work just as their supervisees do, right up to the Board of Directors, based on the same methods of mental processing that others bring into play, only that in terms of organizations’ HR department, sociologically they are the privileged party. It is due to the cultural constellation described above that the notion of Work is an ideological one that is shaped by the powers that be in the manner they prefer. In organizations, agents delivering work at lower levels (seen from the Board of Directors) are referred to as “human resources,” a term that subordinates them to other organizational resources such as financial and technological ones. As is easily understandable, this nomenclature makes it difficult to realize that on all organizational levels WORK is, as E. Jaques put it, based on “reflective judgment and discretion,” and is thus a cognitive endeavor shared between janitors and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 O. Laske, Advanced Systems-Level Problem Solving, Volume 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40985-1_1

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members of the board. It is even more difficult to realize, without adult-developmental training, that the different levels of work complexity one encounters in organizations reflect the phases of cognitive development over the human lifespan that a particular agent presently functions on. At least that is the ideal, “requisite” case (E. Jaques) in which the developmental size of an agent’s person is equal to the size of his or her role. Due to the complex embedding of Work in cultural and social structures it has taken a long time for organizational theorists to realize, and thus explore, the nature of work empirically, freed from the ideological shackles of “management science” and “HR.” We owe it to E. Jaques (who died in 2003), that we now possess a first, rudimentary theory of work, more precisely a “cognitive” theory of work that takes cognitive development over the human lifespan into account. The relevance of the term “cognitive” becomes evident as one reviews the literature of HR which describes work as a jumble of skills, competences, experiences, temperaments, and other behavioral traits. In this chapter, I introduce as well as critique the still revolutionary notion of human capability, pioneered by Jaques and Cason (1994), who, for the first time, viewed work as both an adult-developmental and a social-science issue. Inspired by their work, this book outlines a comprehensive cognitive theory of work based on empirical research in adult development including cognitive development toward dialectic. The research, empirically detailed in Appendices 1 and 2 both methodologically and in terms of its results, regards the issue of how social agents construct “work” internally (mentally), in what in this book is called their internal workplace, in contrast to their external, physical, or social one. More specifically, in this chapter we learn about E. Jaques’ notion of “work capability” as a manifestation of human Reflexivity, or “cognition,” for the sake of better understanding organizational functioning, including such consulting services as coaching, mentoring, and facilitation. This chapter is in three parts: • Introduction to Capability • Three Aspects of Capability • Practical Consequences of the Developmental Definition of Capability

Introduction to Capability The Hidden Dimensions of Delivering Work We saw in Book 1 of this monograph that organizations working with leading indicators are singularly well positioned to take advantage of human systems in which such indicators are found in profusion. In human systems, such indicators are developmental, in the sense that they refer to steps along the trajectory of adult

Introduction to Capability

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development over the lifespan (Kegan, 1982; Laske, 2015). The exciting news for those working to understand organizational work delivery and collaboration is that the developmental sciences have opened to scrutiny two of such trajectories, the social-emotional (Laske, 2005) and the cognitive one (Laske, 2008), and thus have made adult development measurable, and management as well as coaching potentially evidence-based. The simple hypothesis that binds developmental indicators to business success is that adults – whether they are managers, executives, or employees – do their best work at higher levels of development, regardless of whether one considers cognitive or social-emotional development. This indirectly also holds for customers, in the sense that the most discriminating customers operate from a high level of discernment, thinking, and engagement with their experiences. Clearly then, supporting adult development over the lifespan is a crucial undertaking for business success. It is unfortunate that at a time when the developmental sciences have made revolutionary and empirically incontrovertible discoveries about the dramatic impact of adult development on work delivery, organizational conceptions of the workforce (such as the Balanced Scorecard) have continued to be exclusively behaviorally oriented. Although research in the developmental sciences since 1975 makes it evident that adult development grounds behavior, opportunities to boost especially cognitive development as a core driver of work delivery have not become widespread. Rather, managers of human resources have remained blind to the extent to which adults are naturally inclined to develop themselves cognitively in the domain of work without having to be externally motivated to do so. As a rule, organizational job descriptions are so void of references to hires’ cognitive development that the notion of a “job” has become a very narrow one. Such descriptions reflect a view of work that is overfocused on what in this book is referred to as Job 1, viz., assigned work that needs to be carried out, without the consideration that the quality of work to be delivered greatly depends on what I refer to as Job 2, viz., the internal work a contributor needs to do to deliver high-­ quality work.

 imitations of the Notion of Work in HR L and Management Science When studying contributors’ internal workplace in detail (see Appendices 1 and 2), we find that is a mental space in which work happens in the form of internal conversations (Archer, 2003). Scrutinizing such conversations, we also find that Job 1 and 2 are inseparable: nobody delivers assigned-to or volunteered-for work without at the same time contributing to his/her self-development as a precondition of delivering excellent work. Wherever HR management is conducted purely behaviorally, with a focus on Job 1 and the external workplace, Job 2 vanishes from view.

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An additional issue needs attention. In recent decades, due to new technologies, work in organizations has become increasingly scripted. Based on abstract procedural models (such as “agile design”), work has been greatly depleted of its adult-­ social-­emotional and cognitive depth. As a result, the most gifted individuals have found ways to pursue their self-development in places other than organizations, which have been left with lesser work capabilities. Especially start-up companies usually hire young, developmentally immature, “smart” people, who are enamored by technology rather than advanced adult-developmentally. One might object that new technologies tend to strengthen human competences no matter what. Critical as this book is of competence models as behavioral reductions of much broader human potentials such models cannot capture, my view is that one cannot truly assess the potential of technology to strengthen work effectiveness (or design effective apps supporting human work) without having studied the cognitive and social-emotional development of adults over the human lifespan and, on account of such study, having put “apps” meant to support adult development into practice. A major question posed by work-supporting apps is how complex the thinking is that they provoke in their users, specifically, whether they are able to further the dramatic shift research has found to occur from purely logical to dialectical thinking that occurs in the middle and late stages of adults’ cognitive development. (See Book 1 for the theoretical, and this Book for the empirical, demonstration of the cognitive development of adults.) A prominent example of the delay in making use of validated findings of the developmental sciences is the neglect in which complex “dialectical” thinking has been held so far. Although such thinking is a straightforward extension of logical thinking, dialectical thinking has been reduced to “critical thinking” and has been viewed as esoteric and in need of a pedestal one can hesitatingly keep walking around. As this book shows, once one truly decides to support professional self-­ development for contributors and leaders alike, this avoidance stance needs to be abandoned.

Work and Work Capability One way to understand what companies have missed in their search for talent is to acquire a deeper understanding of managers’ and contributors’ Job 2, of professional self-development. Any such attempt needs to begin with Elliott Jaques who defines work based on adults’ cognitive development over the lifespan, as an exercise of reflective judgment and discretion. Agreeing with Freud for whom “work and love” were the two main topics of human life, and finding a theory of work missing, Jaques (who was also a psychoanalyst) began to develop the foundations of a cognitive theory of work early in his career. This book extends Jaques’ theory of work into the adult-developmental domain, especially the development of dialectical thinking.

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In what follows, I demonstrate in what way Jaques’ theory of human capability as Reflexivity underlies his teachings about organizations, the latter seen under the aspect of what he came to call Requisite Organization. As Jaques’ last book makes clear (2002), his theories originate in a broad understanding of how human consciousness evolves in a social, “language suffused,” world in which humans, in contrast to pre-linguistic organisms, reside. The notion of levels of work complexity has intuitive appeal. Everybody feels the weight of responsibility as a function of the complexity of the work s(he) does. People in organizations serve different functions depending upon the level of mental complexity their work embodies. This complexity is manifest in the role people play. However much the hierarchy of levels of work complexity may be distorted by cultural, political, financial, or ideological factors, the role of an individual worker in an organization is largely defined by the complexity of the work s(he) does. Before we can inquire into what makes one kind of work more complex than another, we will have to answer the question: WHAT IS WORK? In the social world we live in, this is a central question to which very few cogent theoretical answers to the question exist. Among these answers, Jaques’ definition of work is, to my understanding, the most solid one, given that it is backed by cognitive-developmental research since 1975. In my view, it is also the most cogent one from the point of view of developmental theory, especially since it encompasses the inner work humans do to realize their potential (as we will see in Chap. 3 where workers’ internal workplace is scrutinized.) To capture the essence of human work conceptually, we need to understand a small set of interrelated concepts. We also need to understand the relationship of these concepts to the theory of cognitive development. That is exactly what this chapter is about, which explores the notions of: • Work • Work Capability The discussion of these two notions is extended in Chap. 3, which focuses on: • Contributors’ internal workplace (and the internal conversations they hold therein) • Levels of work complexity • The balance of levels of work complexity with levels of human capability (which makes organizations “requisite”).

Jaques’ Definition of Work The way Jaques defines work is surprisingly simple, removing much of the psychological and behavioral clutter it is typically burdened with. His definition is meta-­ psychological and cognitive (Jaques & Cason, 1994, 10): (Work) is the exercise of judgment and discretion in making the decisions necessary to solve and overcome the problems that arise in the course of carrying out tasks.

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Slightly elaborating “tasks,” he states (1998a, 13, Glossary): (Work is) the exercise of judgment and discretion in making decisions in carrying out goal directed activities. In these definitions, the emphasis is on the cognitive dimension of work. Reflective judgment is joined with discretion, where “discretion” points to the “liberty of deciding as one thinks fit, absolutely or within limits”. In goal-oriented pursuits such as work, this liberty is decisive. Goals are “what-by-when’s,” that is, (moving) targets that need to be reached within certain time limits (Jaques, 1998a, 19; Glossary). Within those limits, unforeseeable circumstances arise. In addition, certain goal paths to work solutions are promising and manageable while others are not, and to distinguish between them is a matter of discretion. There is another aspect of Jaques’ definition of work that requires attention and is related to Archer’s notion of Reflexivity. For Jaques, work is based on mental processes that are by nature ineffable, or inaccessible to consciousness, as is spelled out by Jaques’ term “discretion” (Jaques, 1994, 10; 2002, 22): A major point about problem solving, exercise of judgment, and decision making is that we are dealing with a process that is not accessible to conscious knowledge and reasoning. Conscious knowledge can be and is used for setting the framework and boundaries within which the process runs and problems are tackled, and for providing information to be taken into account. But what happens at actual choice points and how various possibilities and priorities are determined, remains ineffable. In other words, if you know and can articulate the final reasons for making a decision, you have not made a decision. You have merely calculated an inevitable outcome, much as a computer would do. In work, therefore, we have a process in which a goal is pursued, and judgment, discretion, and discernment are used in analyzing the pathways to the goal and difficulties in the way, so as to create possible choices for resolving (the) problems from which a final decision in action can be taken. The process of loosening apart and putting together (synthesis) in the form of [reflective] judgments is the ineffable part of the work process. … I assume that the greater the level of capability of the individual, the greater is the loosening and bifurcation process [emphasis OL], in the sense that the greater is the number of associations that become possible, and hence the greater the complexity of the problems for which possible solutions (and decisions) can be created.

In the quote above, Jaques points out two related aspects of work: • The exercise of reflective judgment and discretion underlying work is a matter of Reflexivity in the broad sense (i.e., comprising other than strictly cognitive ­factors), and is therefore not always totally accessible to logical thinking, at least by the person delivering work. • The inaccessible mental process in question consists of a “loosening apart and putting together” of mental subject matter, which is what Reflexivity consists of, and is, as will be shown below, a process grounding both logical and dialectical thinking. Importantly, as Jaques says, “if you … can articulate the final reasons for making a decision, you have not made a decision. You have merely calculated an inevitable outcome [of your ineffable process, OL], much as a computer would do.” In other

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words, you are mistaking your reflection on the decision for the decision itself that you, ineffably, have made. Independently of this, Jaques introduces the hypothesis: • that the ineffable process in question is developmental and must be differentiated in terms of different levels of capability. On each of these levels, the “loosening and bifurcation process” of Reflexivity is a qualitatively different one. Another, more subtle, implication of the quotes above is the following. As Jaques emphasizes, when engaged in work the worker encounters unforeseen hindrances and obstacles to goal completion, especially in tasks posed by ill-structured problems. In large measure, the loosening and bifurcation process mentioned is focused on recognizing, detailing, and eliminating, or circumventing, such obstacles, in whatever form they may appear (e.g., as social or organizational constraints). Cognitively, this implies that the language-suffused world in which work happens – in terms of Chap. 3, workers’ internal conversations – is one that is not only complex but also in unceasing motion. This implies that following recipes, best practices, or work rules (such as stipulated by “agile design”) is not work in the strict sense since it only applies pre-defined scripts. (In this perspective, much of the work done in organizations today which is highly scripted is not “work” in the sense of Jaques but would be considered by him as taking place at a low level of mental complexity however complex the rules may be that it follows.) I demonstrate in this book that while Jaques should be credited with developing a very good understanding of the mental processes underlying work, the lack in his work of a truly developmental theory of cognition hindered him from detailing such processes beyond the limits of logical thinking. He was thus tempted to consider as “ineffable” processes that through an analysis of semi-structured cognitive interviews (see Appendices 1 and 2) and focused on dialectical thought forms, can be much further elucidated than he thought was possible. One should add, furthermore, that Jaques was not up to date on the branch of research focusing on what R.  Kegan (1982) calls “meaning making,” a strand of human development addressed in Laske (2023a, b) as “socio-emotional,” to distinguish it from strictly cognitive development. Researching these two developmental strands significantly reduces what one can justifiably call “ineffable.”

Jaques Definition of Work Capability For Jaques, Capability is central to human existence. While animals, too, possess a capability for work, their work remains at a level of mental complexity below that of humans. Since animals don’t live in a “language-suffused world” as humans do, their capability lies in a different order of mental complexity (Jaques, 2002, 157 f.).

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Like work in the “pre-linguistic” world of animals (in which different animals work at different levels of abstraction), human work capability is based on the potential of engaging in cognitive processes at different levels of complexity. These levels correspond to different methods of mental processing by which mental loosening and bifurcation are accomplished. This being so, it is a straightforward idea to distinguish between the potential capability for doing work and the level at which potential capability is applied, thus becoming manifest as performance. As a developmentalist, Jaques highlights two fundamentally interrelated aspects of work capability (Jaques & Cason, 1994): • Applied Capability • Potential Capability where the latter is further subdivided into current potential and emergent potential (his term is “future potential capability”), as shown in Fig. 1.1. Importantly, Jaques’ cognitive definition of work cuts through all psychological and behavioral clutter that is typically heaped on “work,” certainly in today’s management of human resources (HR). In contrast to conventional understandings of work, his notion that ability to do work is based on levels and phases of cognitive development alone represents a dramatic shift in management science that brings his work closer to the social sciences. Jaques’ re-definition of work is a critique of “behavioral” assumptions about work which are more psychological than cognitive and are based on the category error of reduction (Bhaskar, 392–3). For Jaques, psychological and behavioral factors of work only matter when considering APPLIED CAPABILITY, which for him is a manifestation of potential capability that is unceasingly emerging from what Simondon (2020) would call a “pre-individual” level. Therefore, behaviors do not intrinsically define work capability but only express how much of existing potential capability has become realized by an individual at a specific time point. Although as a psychologist and Current Potential Capability Applied Capability Emergent Potential Capability

LIFE SPAN DEVELOPMENT What people ARE (and cannot suspend)

Fig. 1.1  Three kinds of capability according to Jaques

ACTUAL WORK DELIVERY

What people HAVE (and may decide not to use)

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physician, Jaques was fully aware of the psychological factors involved in work, he did not consider them to be foundational of work capability. Rather, that capability was, in his mind, strictly a matter of cognitive development over the lifespan. Based on his revolutionary definition of human capability (1994), Jaques (& Cason) proceeded to distinguish between what individuals “have” and what they “are,” equating the first with education, expertise, competences, etc., and the latter with an individual’s current and emergent potential capability. They thought that individuals had absolutely no way of hiding, denying, or divesting from their capability, although they could divest themselves, or decide not to use, acquired competences. Thus, everything socially acquired is, for them, something individuals (only) “have” rather than “are.” It would be mistaken, in my view, to see Jaques’ definition as “one-sidedly cognitive.” The overriding reason for his definition is that he saw work as based on human potential, and that, for him, this potential was a cognitive one.

Deepening Jaques’s Notion of Potential Capability There is one issue regarding which I part ways with Jaques’ definition of work and work capability. While he introduced the term methods of mental processing (MMPs; see below) as a standard for measuring work complexity and levels of work capability, he did not provide a truly adult-developmental notion of either of these terms. Instead, he took refuge in behavioral data about managers’ salary history which seemed to show that over the long term, they advanced in their level of accountability, and were accordingly paid increasingly better. Rather than explaining the structure of managers’ cognitive development over their professional life in detail – as did Kohlberg School cognitive-developmental research in the 1970s and 1980s – Jaques inferred from salary data that managers must have cognitively advanced as they made their career in a particular organization, based on which he concluded that their methods of mental processing must have become more complex as they matured as adults. In short, Jaques lacked empirical evidence about the specific steps by which the cognitive development he inferred from managers’ salary histories proceeds in real time. A second lack in Jaques’ definition of work capability regards his neglect of social-emotional (in contrast to “cognitive” development) as first explored by R.  Kegan (1982) and refined by me in (Laske, 2005, 2023a, b). For this reason, Jaques did not realize that conceiving of work capability “developmentally” amounts to tracing not only the cognitive but also the social-emotional development of managers and contributors. Despite these omissions, Jaques’ definition of work capability as at the core cognitive remains revolutionary. These two missing pieces of Jaques’ definition of work capability – evidence on how exactly social-emotional and cognitive adult development proceeds – become relevant when reflecting on Jaques’ definition of Capability in more detail, as I suggest we do by way of Fig. 1.2.

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“horizontal”

“vertical”

Work Capacity

Work Capability

[Psychological (performance) profile]

[Developmental Profile]

Jaques’s “Temperament”

current applied

potenal

current

emergent

Fig. 1.2  Jaques’ distinction between work capacity and work capability

Figure 1.2 follows Jaques’ notion that there is an important difference between adults’ developmental and psychological (behavioral) profile, to the effect that “work capacity” is what people “have” while “work capability” is what defines them in what they “are,” as social agents delivering work. Jaques took the further step of viewing work capability as either “currently applied” or as potential that was either current or emergent. This highly differentiated definition of Capability as ultimately based on Potential constitutes his core contribution to management theory. From this definition derive many entailments, e.g., specifically his concepts of (1) level of work complexity, (2) level of mental processing, and (3) degree of accountability. The definition allies him with concepts of social agency developed in Dialectical Critical Realism, especially M. Archer, to the effect that agency is based on Reflexivity, and work is therefore a form in which agents encounter physical, social, and cultural “antecedents” in the form of either constraints or enablements they have to negotiate when, based on their private or organizational concerns, they launch work and life projects (Archer, 2003). While Jaques did not “dig down” all the way to concerns as the basis of human agency and work, as Archer does, he developed a sophisticated concept of the dynamics of the social and cultural environment in which work is delivered in organizations. To capture the dynamics of work delivery, he developed the notion of “time span” of a work project (1998b), as well as the corresponding epistemological notion of “judgment and discretion,” the latter term referring to an agent’s capability, to weigh decisions relating to the social structures encountered in goal pursuits over a more or less long time. Let us now turn to the way in which concepts developed by E. Jaques are taken up in Laske’s Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF, Laske, 2005),

Introduction to Capability

11 Cognit ive Development

Learning & Percepon

Capacity

Social-Emot ional Development

FoR

‘WORK’

Work Capability Fig. 1.3  Work capability (vertical axis). (Mediated By (Psychological) Capacity (horizontal axis))

especially its component called the Dialectical Thought Form Framework (DTF, Laske, 2008). In Fig. 1.3, “work” is shown as delivered at the intersection of two dimensions of consciousness: a horizontal dimension of perception and learning, and a vertical one of cognitive and social-emotional development. These two dimensions come together in what is called Frame of Reference (FoR), or world view, that determines how the real world and, as part of it, work, is internally approached, constructed, interpreted, by a person. FoR or “world view,” stands for the outcome of an individual’s lifelong and unceasing internal conversations whose developmental structure is measured with the aid of the tool set referred to the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF) (See Appendices 1 and 2). As seen, Fig. 1.3 depicts Capability as a vertical dimension standing in contrast to an associated horizontal dimension, that of Capacity. On the horizontal axis of Fig. 1.3, continuous learning takes place that is, however, ultimately determined in its outcome by discontinuous vertical development over the lifespan representing Capability. In short, Capability determines Capacity. What can and cannot be learned is a function of a person’s present position on the vertical axis, and both social-emotional and cognitive development in their interaction (Capability). As is well known, learning per se may well do nothing but reinforce a person’s developmental position and hold him or her hostage in it. By contrast, vertical development inexorably carries the person beyond his/her psychological status quo and does so as far as level of mental health permits. The difference between social-emotional and cognitive development is of great importance for the topic of the nature of work. In this book, the former, social-­ emotional development, is also referred to in this book as “meaning making” standing against “sense making.” The former, first conceptualized by R. Kegan (1982),

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refers to the way in which, due to their development of consciousness, people position themselves toward each other dramatically differently depending on how they conceive of themselves in relationship to others. (These “others” are primarily “internal” not external others, i.e., voices in the person’s mind that direct their social-emotional movements in thought.) Social-emotional meaning making is thus a social and cultural capability, and while it is pervaded by “cognition,” it is in no way reducible to or identical with the trajectory of cognitive development that has its own peculiar rhythmics. Nor is an agent’s social-emotional development reducible to his/her psychological profile which in Fig. 1.3 is indicated by Capacity. By contrast, sense making, the topic of this book, is here equated with cognitive development over the lifespan. As shown in Book 1 of this monograph, it is a different developmental strand (trajectory) that has its own developmental rhythm. How “sense” is made of the world has more than 2500 years of history in (Western and Eastern) philosophy, and is directed to understanding the nature of physical, social, and cultural Reality in the ontological sense of the term. Unfortunately, the relationship between sense making and meaning making – cognitive and social-emotional development – is still unclear since the two developmental strands have so far not been sufficiently separated to ask cogent questions about how they intrinsically relate. Another term used in Fig. 1.3 that needs explanation is that of Frame of Reference. In the author’s view, FoR is nothing that can be learned or taught. It is a social-­ emotionally as well as cognitively grounded world view that changes discontinuously over a person’s lifespan, thus following developmental shifts either in the social-emotional or cognitive domain or else their relationship to each other. When an individual’s Frame of Reference changes, an older world view gives way to a new one, rather than an older world view getting simply modified or updated. The older world view, now transformed, is dialectically included in, and transcended by, a more differentiated and comprehensive one that defines a higher level of vertical development. As a result, not only life, but work is seen differently at each level of adult development. Another comment is required on the term Capacity in Fig. 1.3. In CDF, a developmental assessment methodology, Capacity has been integrated in the form explored and defined by Henry Murray’s work on personality (1938). It was Murray’s student Moris Aderman who, in his Need-Press Questionnaire (1972) explored Capacity in terms of three foci that he called (a) self-conduct, (b) approach to tasks, and (c) interpersonal perspective. Following Murray, Aderman saw the foundation of Capacity in “psychogenic” needs that encounter two kinds of pressures: (a) “ideal” pressures having to do with an individual’s aspirations regarding self-development, and (b) “actual” pressures exerted by the social (thus also organizational) environment in which work is done. In terms of Aderman’s “Need-Press Questionnaire” (www.needpress.com), the way in which an individual agent manages internal needs and pressures determines his/her energy sink (loss of energy diminishing work capability) which, together

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with his/her frustration index (indicating gaps between ideal and actual press) defines his/her overall effectiveness of self-management at work (Effectiveness Index). Although pressures exerted on human agents by social and organizational reality cannot be measured in absolute terms, they can be assessed relative to how they are internally interpreted, thus responded to – addressed, circumvented, or subverted – in individuals’ internal conversations. Some more comments on the relationship between Capability and Capacity are in order here.

Further Comments on Capability and Capacity At this point a reader of the HR literature will notice the dramatic difference between the notions of “competence” and “capability.” While competence models reduce a worker’s Capability – thus potential – to Capacity, casting it in entirely static terms, the Capability model of work here proposed addresses that potential as evolving in a vertical – not a horizontal – dimension of adult development that determines the horizontal competence and learning dimensions. We can speak of a dramatic change in the notion of WORK that, for two decades after Jaques’ death, has given rise to concepts such as deliberately developmental organization, a notion grounded in the Capability model of work here elucidated. When a shift in the vertical dimension of consciousness occurs, the person’s Capacity (psychological profile) is harnessed to different ends than previously. The same personality runs on a different track. The individual’s strengths are pointing toward different goals, and her known challenges are re-calibrated, her capacities re-dedicated. This shift results in a different outlook on the world as well as on the self as part of the world. In making developmental shifts, capacities are motivators but can also function as brakes and obstacles. They act as a filter through which new potentials are released and new developmental resources flow into the person’s agency and world view, and consequently into work as well. As a result of developmental shifts, the capability that a person applies in work is developmentally upgraded and thus enhanced. In addition, the person’s potential capability (see below) is extended in ways that can be scrutinized and determined by CDF’s qualitative assessment methods. It is at this point in the argument for Capability over Capacity in defining WORK that Jaques’ diffidence toward behavioral psychology and conventional management science pays off in a big way. Despite having been educated as a psychiatrist, under the influence of J.  Piaget, Jaques became a genetic epistemologist. He schooled himself to look through the psychological trappings of work to its cognitive core. Omitting the social-emotional dimension of meaning making, he developed the vision that there is a fundamental difference between workers’ cognitive and psychological profile, such that the latter, describing what people “have” rather than “are,” is potentially resistant to development (as Freud surmised).

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Having distinguished a person’s psychological and cognitive profile, another distinction came into view for Jaques. It became evident to him that there was a difference between the capability currently available for use in learning and performance, and that part of that continues to emerge and can be expected to materialize in the future. Thinking dialectically, Jaques noticed as well that this emergent potential was nevertheless constitutive  – or the root  – of current potential that was being already applied. He therefore made the distinctions pictured in Fig.  1.2 between applied and potential capability on one hand, and within potential capability between current and emergent [potential] capability, on the other. In the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF) whose cognitive module called DTF (Dialectical Thought Form Framework) is presented in this monograph, the distinction between “what people HAVE” and “what people ARE,” introduced by Jaques, is articulated by the distinction between Capacity and Capability. Capacity, which points to behavioral aspects of work delivery, derives from a worker’s psychological (mental health) profile, while Capability is an epistemological notion that is based on the concept of Potential. Consequently, Current Applied Capability (performance viewed epistemologically) is based on Potential Capability, both current and emergent, and is measured (by Jaques as well in this book) by Order of Mental Processing (associated with equivalent Methods) and thus also with Level of Mental Complexity of a person’s thinking.

Why All of These Fancy Distinctions? The reader might wonder why so many fine distinctions are necessary when it comes to defining WORK comprehensively and free of social ideology, in terms of what is known about adult development now. What is their practical use, she might ask, from the point of view of a Director of HR? This is a valid question. The answer here given is partly historical, partly pragmatic. It shows that conceptual distinctions, when mindfully adopted, can have dramatic practical consequences. Historically, a great deal of confusion has been heaped on notions such as “performance,” “competence,” “talent,” “capacity,” “capability,” etc. Each ideological fad in “management science” (so-called) picks its own favorite sons among these notions, without much or any empirical research to back them up. Overall, this contributes to the lack of scientific rigor in management science. So far, the biggest controversy regarding the nature of work has arisen (but kept under wraps) due to the developmental sciences. In the twentieth century, these sciences have redefined the notion of “human being,” and thus also the notion of “work.” Overall, these sciences have critiqued the “reductionist” preferences of management (science) when it comes to acknowledging human potential, as well as the fact that management does its best to keep itself out of social science proper. Taylorism is a splendid example. Taylorism, associated with a radical reduction of human potential for the sake of short-term gains, is very powerful again today. Essentially, it completely disregards what is going on in human beings internally as

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well as epistemically, only to introduce (through the backdoor) a need for work “motivation” which is, in fact, an internal matter. The HR notion of motivation is a notion referring to Capacity, not Capability. This term is based on a category error by which different autonomous strata of human functioning are reduced to the behavioral manifestation of internally generated conversations regarding self-development. The false objectivation generated by HR-thinking clashes with findings of the developmental sciences that teach in an evidence-based way that human beings are fundamentally meaning- and sense-­ makers, not simply psychologically and physiologically driven organisms, − a fact due to their Reflexivity that results in unceasing internal conversations only qualitative methods can capture (Archer, 2007; see Appendix 1 and 2). The reductive and instrumentalist stance implied by the HR term “motivation” is in many ways counter-productive since it disavows capabilities urgently needed by organizations for the sake of their long-term effectiveness and survival. As De Visch and Laske (2020) show, a strictly behavioral stance, limited as it is to Capacity, hinders the formation and testing of new leadership and leadership development concepts, as well as blocking new avenues toward team collaboration. Jaques was one of the first to take a critical view of the reductionist vocabulary used by theoreticians of management. In his extended empirical studies of organizations (Gray et al., 2008), he was led to making distinctions unfamiliar to the management field. The fact that these distinctions were (and are) unfamiliar is rooted in his genetic epistemology of work making it evident that a theory of WORK needs to be grounded in insights into the structure and development of long-term mental processes over adults’ lifespan. Jaques looked at human capability as something that has a genesis, i.e., that undergoes development over the human lifespan. He saw clearly that this genesis was shaping the development of reflective judgment and discretion which define work in the epistemic sense of the term. Unbeknownst to himself, he began sketching an epistemological as well as meta-psychological big picture that overrides the piecemeal findings of behavioral research, not only on work but on leadership as well. With 40 years of research behind him, Jaques formulated the fundamental finding he had arrived at as follows (1994, 23): There is a fundamental difference between a person’s potential capability on the one hand, and values (interest/commitment) and skilled knowledge on the other. The difference is that his or her potential capability is an innate property of the person as a whole, whereas a person’s values and skilled knowledge are entities that have their own existence in their own right independently of any particular person, and which a person can acquire or shed.

The distinction made by Jaques, above, is revolutionary for a theory of work since it separates a person’s cognitive profile from the psychological and behavioral trappings typically heaped on “work” in the management of human resources. The distinction implies that potential capability (in the cognitive sense alone) is the root of applied capability (performance). In addition, Jaques’ holistic notion of

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capability enables him to separate out what is current or emergent potential from what is already manifest (applied) in an individual’s performance. As indicated in Fig.  1.2, Potential Capability determines both what part of their Capability individuals are ready to apply in work performance, and how they “use what they have” (i.e., their skilled knowledge, values, and psychological strengths). From the vantage point of Fig.  1.2, talent management best succeeds as Capability Management, under the condition that explicit assessments of developmental potential, whether cognitive or social-emotional, are made. Assigning individuals to a level of work complexity commensurate with their present level of applied – rather than potential – capability in no way guarantees that they can muster enough potential capability to perform at the level of work complexity their role holds them accountable for. This meta-psychological and epistemological point of view of work is elaborated by Jaques as follows (1994, 81): Our proposition is that in the absence of negative disruptive personal characteristics, and in work which we value and to which we can therefore happily commit our potential, there are no specific personal characteristics or patterns of characteristics that it is necessary to have in a specially high degree for given types of work. We all possess the same full range of characteristics (whatever the classifications of these characteristics we might use  – and there are many such classifications), and there are infinite possible combinations or profiles of degrees of these characteristics that may be effective.

Then, extending this proposition to leadership, Jaques states (1994, 82): Thus, despite what many people would say, even leadership capability does not call for specially high degrees of charisma, or initiative, or sociability. The outstanding feature of successful political, or military, or managerial leaders …is the enormously wide range of patterns of higher and lesser degrees of various personal qualities: in short, the most striking feature is just how much they vary as people, rather than fitting into a few neat combinations of traits. Our experience has been that it is very often the case that when people describe some particular personality qualities to explain that someone has shown outstanding capability in a role, they are unwittingly reacting to the fact that that person possesses a level of capability greater than that required by the ordinarily expected level of work in the role. Thus, (teachers, political leaders, principles …) are most likely to be so outstanding because of levels of complexity of mental processing (CMP), commitment and skilled knowledge, that enable them to function at unusually high levels. Others, with different patterns of personality qualities, but with the same levels of applied capability, would do just as well.

In the quote above, Jaques does more than discount the myth of “personality” as a core notion for understanding leadership. He demonstrates the difference between a psychological and an epistemological and developmental view of leadership. The latter is focused on Capability, while the former is fixated on what limits Capability, namely Capacity (see Fig. 1.3). While Capacity “limits” Capability in the sense that it may hinder its full potential to emerge into Applied Capability, Capability, in turn, can be seen as potentially limiting the degree to which an individual can learn something (Jaques, 1994, 80): Potential capability … plays a limiting role on this process of acquisition of knowledge. For, if information is more complex than the complexity of the mental processing of the individual (at a particular time point and thus developmental position, OL) then the knowledge cannot be acquired.

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 mbedding in Nature: Human Beings in Relation E to Pre-linguistic Organisms We have now acquired an initial understanding of Jaques’ re-conceptualization of human work, but there is more to understand. We need to understand “the big picture” into which Jaques placed human work, seeing it as a refinement of the mental processing of pre-linguistic organisms (animals). This larger view is important for understanding Jaques’ notion of the time-horizon in work which plays a fundamental role in his theory of organizational accountability and capability, thus of what is “requisite” in organizations. To highlight the characteristics of human work further, in “The life and behavior of living organisms” (2002), Jaques shows in what way animals, too, do “work,” although in a less developed way than humans. In the book, he grounds what he had long called levels of complexity of mental processing (CMC) in a broader conception of what, in his view, is “requisite” in nature. An important concept in Jaques’ theory of work has to do with the temporal scope of a project, or time horizon (more precisely, time horizon of discretion). Comparing the time horizon of animals and young children, that is, their ability of foresight, Jaques states (Jaques, 2002, 90–91): Let me draw attention to the similarity of time horizons that I have produced for my pre-­ linguistic organism examples, and for the infants at play. They derive from a mixture of rough and naturalistic data and systemic infant observation, influenced by an explicit hypothesis, a hypothesis that I claim to be both reasonable and interesting. This hypothesis is that human infants and pre-linguistic organisms are functioning at about the same range of levels of current potential capability. Given the above hypothesis, it is obvious that the adult pre-linguistic organisms are all capable of doing far more than the human infants are capable of doing. In particular, they are able to take care of themselves. The difference here lies not in current potential capability but in applicable capability, that is to say, the organism’s potential capability plus skilled knowledge and commitment [emphasis OL]. The adult pre-linguistic organisms have a rich supply of phylogenetically instinctual skilled knowledge, not linguistically articulated, but there to provide for building nests or dams or other shelter, or for hunting or food gathering within those time horizons of up to hours. Human infants with equivalent time horizons use their potential capability while engaged in play and resting. They do not possess the instinctual knowledge or the ­physiological development needed other than to enjoy the security of being taken care of by parents.

This somewhat fanciful description of potential capability in children – in particular of that part of it that is ready to be used, or “current potential” – makes the major point that, in contrast to animals, humans are defined by a potential capability that gets realized only gradually over their lifespan. As a result, having developmental potential and actualizing it are different things, for which reason we speak of adult development over the lifespan. For this reason, the work people do, whether as children or adults, is always based on a more or less large part of what they could do at a particular moment. Applied capability is always less than potential capability. It is therefore an error

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to judge people’s work capability based on their performance, and an even greater developmental error to mistake their presently applied capability for what they could achieve in the future, i.e., their emergent potential capability.

Three Aspects of Capability Jaques’ Assumptions Summarized Jaques is a brilliant conceptualizer who introduced into management science a new vocabulary regarding organizational functioning. The terms he introduced are based on his appreciation of humans’ full potential rather than a (neo-) tayloristic reduction of it. He began the journey to achieve what today is referred to as deliberately developmental organizations. Jaques’ new vocabulary makes it possible to ask new questions about work in organizations, review old answers, synthesize disparate approaches, and deepen organizational and social inquiry. In addition, his vocabulary makes management science a part of the social sciences, an integration that it continues to abhor, which explains that Jaques is still seen today as an apostate and outsider. In detail, Jaques’ assumptions about the work of human organisms (in his 2002) can be summarized as follows: 1. It is impossible to understand the uniqueness and limits of human work (and human agency generally) if the latter are not seen in a larger, phylogenetic framework of organismic life in which it is grounded, thus as a part of nature. 2. Human work is an extension and refinement of the work pre-linguistic organisms do. What makes it fundamentally different is the fact that it takes place in a language-suffused environment, which (according to Jaques) accounts for most of the organizational issues that arise. 3. Human work is based on capability, not competence (or a set of competences), the latter being aspects of what people “have” (and can decide not to use), but not of what they “are.” 4. Work designed based on what workers “have” rather than “are” is ultimately detrimental not only to workers but society in that human potentials are systematically reduced to what work efforts require over the short term. This can be remedied by a “requisite” re-structuring of organizations grounded in reconceiving of the nature of work. 5. Reconceiving of the nature of human work entails to acknowledge adults’ cognitive development as the core of work capability. 6. Work is based on work-capability which is innate, empirically measurable, and, based on assessment, predictable. 7. Work capability is not (primarily) a matter of performance (output) but of (current and emergent) potential, given that it is the “genetic” unfolding of poten-

Three Aspects of Capability

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tials, up to the point where they are exhausted (which defines the endpoint of adult maturation). 8. A requisite notion of organizations necessitates the adoption of a capability, rather than a competence, notion of delivering work. 9. The greater an individual’s overall potential, the later in life does it mature, and the longer the person will therefore need to manifest it. 10. Empirically, human capability is a matter of mental processing in real time, more precisely, of the structure of mental processing in real time that defines different kinds of cognition, and thereby co-defines different levels of work complexity (“strata”; Jaques & Cason, 1994). 11. Organizational levels of work complexity (referred to as strata) need to be designed in terms of current and emergent potential capability, not current applied capability. 12. Potential capability can be measured in terms of orders of mental complexity each of which consists of putting to use different methods of mental processing. 13. While human capability, as applied capability, becomes associated with psychological factors for the sake of performance, these factors only pertain to what people “have” but not to what people “are,” and thus are not primary in assigning individuals to specific organizational roles. 14. As social agents, people can always decide not to use capacities they “have,” while they can never decide not to use the capability they “are” (which is based on their cognition). 15. A person’s current potential capability (what s(he) could do at this moment) defines the person’s time horizon of discretion that is a decisive aspect of performance required in a specific role. 16. Addendum from Laske’s DTF: the present time horizon of judgment and discretion of a person can be succinctly measured empirically since it is determined by the person’s present fluidity of complex, dialectical thinking which can be measured by methods introduced and discussed in this monograph. When following Elliott Jaques’ developmental theory of organizational structure, we need to distinguish four Orders of Mental Processing (A to D) that reach from pre-linguistic organisms (animals) to human Genius. Human work properly speaking falls into the middle two Orders, the Second (B) and the Third Order (C) of Mental Complexity. According to Jaques (see my critique below), persons in category B and C realize their full potential in late adulthood, while those in D may die before they can do so. As seen, Jaques’ emphasis in Table 1.1 is twofold: (a) it is language that separates the work of animals from that of humans, and (b) the decisive step in human work is that into the conceptual domain of thinking. It is in the latter domain that Jaques defines Capability in contrast to competence.

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Table 1.1  Jaques’ four orders of complexity of mental processing Four orders of complexity of mental processing (CMP) (work complexity) D Fourth order: human genius C Third order: conceptual abstract order B Second order: symbolic verbal order A First order: pre-verbal and concrete verbal orders Table 1.2  Four orders of mental processing (in Jaques equal to Level of Mental Processing) seen from CDF Orders of mental processing Developmental description of the four orders D Fourth order: human genius Practical Wisdom. Logical thinking fully assimilated to dialectical thinking [Synthesis of Inquiring Systems] C Third order: conceptual Reason: dialectical thinking based on holism and preservative abstract order negation [Hegelian inquiring system] B Second order: symbolic Understanding: formal logical thinking based on “method,” verbal order separating structure from content [Kantian inquiring system] A First order: pre-verbal and Common sense: here-and-now perceivable, “tangible” entities concrete verbal orders [Lockean inquiring system]

As seen below, in my work with Jaques’ notions I take an additional step within the conceptual domain by distinguishing, in the “conceptual abstract” Third Order (C) two genetically and developmentally different ways of thinking: logical and dialectical thinking. As a result, I reconceive Jaques’ Fourth Order (D) as one in which logical and dialectical thinking become integrated, − a reworking of Jaques’ notion that has profound consequences for the nature of work capability

 eepening Jaques’ Four Orders of Mental D Processing Developmentally Up to this point, we have reviewed Jaques’ notions of work, spelling out that they are not only cognitive but also developmental notions that specify levels of work complexity. This fact is difficult to appreciate fully when operating in terms of Jaques’ “maturation bands” which split up cognitive development into separate behavioral pathways, with the result that the truly epistemic (trans-behavioral) character of cognition remains partly hidden. The fact that the highest levels of mental processing, flagged by Jaques as “Genius,” are the result of a dramatic developmental journey over the human lifespan becomes more highly visible when we set up a correspondence of Jaques’ categorization with the four orders of mental processing as they are seen as consequences of empirical research in CDF, the author’s Constructive Developmental Framework. The four equivalences introduced in the right column of Table 1.2, of Common Sense, Understanding, Reason, and Practical Wisdom, point to the successive

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Inquiring Systems humans have been empirically found to use as they progress through cognitive development (CD). The lowest order is that of Common Sense, an ability that, according to Jaques, humans share with animals. As Piaget found (1952, 1954, 1964), around year 10 humans transculturally begin to develop the rudiments of abstract logical thinking (Second Order or Kantian Inquiring System). A difference between Jaques and CDF appears as we get to the progression from the Second to the Third Order of mental complexity. While for Jaques this transition is entirely continuous, developmental research provides evidence that it is rather characterized by a dramatic shift from one mode of thinking to another around age 25, namely that from purely logical to dialectical thinking (thus the Hegelian Inquiring System). The step from the Third to the Fourth Order of mental processing has been clarified through research by Basseches (1984) which shows that in the Fourth Order a unification and integration of logical and dialectical thinking takes place. This is a finding that is further supported by the work of Bhaskar (1993), and Laske (2008). The latter, specifically, hypothesizes furthermore a “return to Common Sense.” This “return,” pointed to in Fig. 1.4, by the arrow leading from Practical Wisdom back to Common Sense, is experiential as well as metaphorical. What is meant is that logical thinking integrated with dialectical thinking becomes a kind of “Common Sense” for those, who have moved through all four Orders of mental complexity. Common Sense

Lockean Inquiring System Formal logic

Understanding

Kanan Inquiring System

DIALECTIC

Reason

Dialeccal Inquiring System

Practical Wisdom

Fig. 1.4  The four orders of mental complexity seen developmentally, as eras of adult cognitive development

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For any manager or consultant, the organizational and social entailments of the cognitive-developmental step from the Third to the Fourth Order, in the sense of a turn toward dialectic, cannot be exaggerated. Some of the entailments are (De Visch & Laske, 2020): • At higher organizational work levels, beyond that of “continuous improvement,” management thinking embracing dialectical thinking transcends abstract logical modeling that disregards social processes unfolding over time, and thus anticipates more succinctly, and thus can avoid, the unintended consequences any change management effort will produce. • In terms of team functioning at the value stream management and business modeling levels, team members’ openness to reflecting on the thought-form structure of their deliberations will potentiate collaboration beyond the limits of individual teams, enabling organizations to develop a network of teams, something until now fraught with obstacles. • By replacing “competence management” by “capability management” organization-­wide, HR is transformed into a decidedly more effective “recruiter” and “supporter” of contributors and can achieve better matches between human and artificial intelligence that has so far been reported. As these entailments show, Jaques’ first step into capability management, based on notions of cognitive development over the lifespan, is a revolutionary one that, so far, has not been sufficiently understood and appreciated. It is this lack of appreciation of Jaques’ theory of work that inspired the author of this monograph to deepen Jaques’ research through further inquiries into the cognitive development of adults and its impact on organizational functioning. Below, I review Jaques’ three aspects of Capability in the framework of CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework, that Jaques was unaware of. I also reflect on how the Jaquesian definition of Capability, assimilated to CDF, provides increased clarity about endeavors such as coaching and mentoring.

 verview of Jacques’ Definition of Capability O Assimilated to CDF In his attempt to transition from HR thinking to capability management, Jaques one-sidedly focused on a single strand of adult development, that of cognition. The main reason for his decision was that he came to mistrust overloading the concept of “work,” for which he undertook to establish a theory, with psychological factors that obscured what he felt was the “core” of work capability, namely cognition. Since Jaques was not intimately familiar with Kohlberg School research on human potential and development, he found it difficult to see the merit of including in definitions of capability what since 1982 had been referred to as the capability of “meaning making,” which in CDF is referred to as a “social-emotional” aspect of capability.

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By the time that Jaques brought out the last revision of Requisite Organization during his lifetime (1998a), social-emotional development had long been shown to be, relative to cognition, a different but equally crucial strand of adult development. The reason for needing to take both cognitive and social-emotional development into account is that they represent two related aspects of the development of human consciousness over the lifespan and must therefore be seen in their interaction (Laske, 2005, 2008). While social-emotional development centers on how people internally position themselves toward each other (e.g., an employee vs. his boss or vice versa), cognitive development far transcends the social realm, focusing on how to conceive of reality at large in conceptual terms. Before entering fully into the details of Jaques’ definition of Capability, let us familiarize ourselves with the three aspects his definition comprises: applied capability (performance), current potential capability, and emergent potential capability. While applied capability obviously includes psychological factors (in terms of Fig. 1.3 factors determining Capacity), current potential capability can be seen as centering around a worker’s cognitive resources (as Jaques suggests). However, it would be impossible to define emergent potential capability by pointing to cognitive resources (CD) alone. This is so since potential capability unceasingly emerging in adults over their lifespan equally comprises social-­ emotional shifts in how people internally position themselves toward each other (ED). For instance, the higher the level of social-emotional development of a worker, the more self-authoring s(he) proceeds in his/her work, and this will decisively heighten work effectiveness, including when it comes to functioning in teams. What the intrinsic relationship between social-emotional (ED) and cognitive adult development (CD) amounts to is suggested by Fig. 1.3. Both strands of adult development impact how a worker manages his psychological (Capacity) profile, that is, his needs, aspirations, and frustrations at work, not to speak of other psychological factors such as temperament. Obstacles to work effectiveness always have both a social-emotional and cognitive dimension and therefore need to be considered in tandem. The three aspects of Capability introduced by Jaques are summarized in the two tables, Table 1.3 and 1.4. As seen in the right column of Table 1.3, Capability comprises both behavioral (psychological) and developmental (epistemic) factors. These factors are used in Table 1.4 which comments on the definitions of three types of Capability introduced by Jaques and assimilated into CDF, Laske’s Constructive Developmental Framework (1999, 2005, 2008). These definitions are visualized in Fig. 1.5. As is spelled out in Tables 1.3 and 1.4 and shown in Fig. 1.5, in CDF the three different types of Capability are viewed as anchored in a person’s cognitive development over the lifespan (CD), − more broadly in his/her Reflexivity (for Archer, 2003, the basis of human Agency). For specific task performances are viewed in terms of cognitive complexity that means they are delivered according to the complexity of a person’s “thinking.” Not only does this hold for “current applied

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Table 1.3  Ingredients of the CDF definition of work capability Components of the definition of capability I S/K (-)T CD

ED

Acronyms explained Interest in work (motivation) Skills and knowledge available (Dysfunctional) personal temperament Cognitive Development over the human lifespan that increasingly transcends logical in the direction of dialectical thinking (thus leading to higher levels of mental processing complexity); − a development that is itself based in the development of reflective judgment and discretion [in this book referred to as “epistemic position”] (King & Kitchener 1994; Basseches 1984; Bhaskar, 1993) Social-emotional Development over the human lifespan (Kegan, 1982; Laske, 2005) that leads to increasingly less ego-centric ways of meaning-making

Adapted from Jaques (1994) Table 1.4  Three aspects of work capability Type of capability (Current) Applied capability Current potential capability Emergent potential capability

Definitiona f(CD * I * S/K * −T) f(CD)

f(CD * ED)

Definitions spelled out Applied capability is a function of cognitive development over the lifespan as impacted by a person’s interest in work, available skills and knowledge, and dysfunctional personality traits that may hinder adult development Current potential capability is a function of level of a person’s level of cognitive development Emergent potential capability is a function of the intrinsic interrelatedness of cognitive and social-emotional adult development

Adapted from Jaques (1994) a f = “is a function of”

capability”; it is equally the case for potential capability, be it current or emergent. In short, Capability is never a matter of a person’s “personality” or any behavioral trait or accretion to a person’s work capability. It is tempting to see Jaques’ definition of potential capability as cognitive from the perspective of G.  Simondon (2020) who conceives of human individuation as anchored in a “pre-individual” potential that increasingly makes itself felt as human reflexivity develops over the lifespan. This cognitive potential is the core of Agency, thus “work” as well; it is what individuates a person in consecutive phases without ever being exhausted until death. While all types of Capability are anchored in the cognitive development of adults over the lifespan, each of them has its own peculiar character which is outlined below.

Three Aspects of Capability

25 Need/Press Questionnaire

f (CD * I * S/K * - T) f (CD)

Current Potential

Interview

Applied Capability

Emergent Potential

Capacity

f (CD * ED)

Fig. 1.5  The three aspects of Capability following Jaques

Current Applied Capability (CAC) Current Applied Capability is that portion of Potential Capability that is presently applied by a person in their work. From the fund of the person’s potential, a smaller or larger part has emerged into the social world. This part is different from the part of the person’s potential that is already available but not ready for use, either because it has not been recognized, or because no challenge to use it has arisen. In short, Current Applied Capability (CAC) describes what a person CAN do at a specific point in time, not what a person COULD do given circumstances that strongly challenge his or her capability. In Current Applied Capability, cognitive development (CD) is intermingled with such psychological personality aspects as “interest in the work” (I; i.e., motivation), “skills and knowledge” (S/K), and any qualities of temperament rooted in the person’s earlier life that may hinder optimal performance (−T). Jaques clearly saw that in this context it is imperative to focus on mental complexity, i.e., the complexity of a person’s mental processing in contrast to behavioral traits. Mental Complexity represents a person’s potential, not applied, capability. In no way is Applied Capability (performance) therefore a measure of a person’s innate maximum potential. An example of CAC is easy to think of. You are a young software engineer who has learned all the skills conventionally thought to be required for “writing code,” for instance by studying computer science. However, as a beginner in your profession, neither you nor your employer has an inkling of the depth of knowledge about software engineering you will be able to acquire through practice on account of

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your ongoing cognitive development. Consequently, judging your work based on what you can do presently would render a distorted view of what you can do in the future. You have a potential that needs to be actively supported, for instance through challenging work assignments, to fully emerge.

Current Potential Capability (CPC) Current Potential Capability is that part of a person’s potential capability that is currently available to the person, although perhaps unbeknownst to him- or herself. It indicates what a person could do if given the occasion and tools for it. For Jaques as in CDF, in this type of capability the person’s cognitive profile (CD) reigns supreme, being the ultimate determinant of a person’s agency in terms of what options the person is aware of and can act upon. CPC is not “up for grabs” but is empirically assessed in CDF based on a qualitative cognitive interview by following a professional interview protocol (see Appendices 1 and 2; Book 3, Section B). As explained in Appendix 1 of this book, among the four outcome scores an evaluation of the interview yields is the Systems Thinking Index that indicates the interviewee’s cognitive potential for transcending purely logical, and growing into complex, “dialectical,” thinking. The STI indicates pure potential, signaling the likelihood that, given a person’s presently applied cognitive resources, s(he) will over 2–3 years be able to take on tasks of higher complexity than is presently possible for her. The STI measurement in CDF is related to an important concept introduced by Jaques, viz., that of Size of Person (SoP). SoP is the size of a person’s potential capability and is an important variable when considering the person’s “Size of Role” (SoR). Whenever a person’s Size of Role is higher than a person’s Size of Person, a mismatch occurs that could be calamitous both for the person and the organization employing the person. The essential question to be asked by those who hire and promote is thus not “what can the person presently do?” or “what is the person’s experience?” but rather “what is the person’s cognitive Size of Person”? The STI measurement is especially important in cases where an organizational contributor is promoted or moved to another culture to work in. To measure the challenges that arise for the person in terms of their Current Applied Capability (CAC) instead of their Current Potential Capability (CPC) is entirely mistaken. This is so because none of the behavioral trappings and previous experiences of the person are predictive of what the person COULD DO (i.e., their CPC) under dramatically different organizational and cultural circumstances. Consequently, the crux in determining a person’s work capability lies in gauging his/her potential capability, whether current or emergent.

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Emergent Potential Capability (EPC) A person’s Emergent Potential Capability is not a part of anything but is rather the entire Capability of a person. It is the person’s absolute fund of capability, social-­ emotional as well as cognitive, if not also psychological and spiritual. For this reason, it would be a mistake to try to determine a person’s EPC by relying on a his or her cognitive resources alone. Emergent Potential Capability, the ultimate source of the person’s capabilities, cannot effectively be assessed without accounting for the fact (1) that there is only a single consciousness that comprises both developmental strands (ED and CD), and (2) that the cognitive and social-emotional strands comprised by consciousness are intrinsically related, although in ways presently not only unclear but embedded in a context that present-day researchers still have no cogent questions about. (This is so because if you don’t separate A from B, ED from CD, you cannot ask any questions about how they relate.) For the purposes of this monograph, then, ED and CD are autonomous and irreducible strata of consciousness closely related to each other but different in nature and conceptually separable. Their close relatedness is signaled by the fact that they are both mediated by a person’s epistemic position as outlined in Book 1, Chapter 2, viz., which has to do with how “truth” is constructed by a person (King & Kitchener, 1994). Another way of viewing emergent potential capability is to say EPC lies at the bottom of a person’s agency and undergirds both a person’s personal and social identity. For this reason, EPC will determine how the person will cope with gaps between the levels of his/her social-emotional (ED) and cognitive development (CD) and how s(he) will equilibrate them. In most cases, this equilibration occurs through a person’s spiritual development over the lifespan (https://interdevelopmentals.org/insights-­into-­spirituality-­based-­on-­cdf/). Regarding EPC, Jaques asserts (1994, 88): The higher a person’s [emergent, OL] potential capability, the faster is the rate of maturation and the later in life it continues. The higher-capability individuals are still growing in potential capability long after normal retirement age and may even die before they actualize their full potential.

This hypothesis of Jaques should be seen in the context of a second, related, one, in which he asserts (1994, 89): The hypothesis is that each person has a constitutionally established maximum future [i.e., emergent] potential capability and matures at a predictable rate from infancy to old age to reach that full potential. The age at which full potential is reached varies with the level of potential. The higher the level of a person’s full potential, the later in life will that potential continue to mature and the final maximum level be reached: the so-called mentally handicapped reach full maturity of potential in early adulthood, those with the potential to reach mental process categories B1 to B4 [i.e., the Second Order of Mental Complexity] reach full maturity in late adulthood; and those with potential to move into categories at C1 [Third Order of Mental Complexity] and above will have died before they reach their absolute peak.

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Whether Jaques’ intriguing hypothesis can be substantiated or not, it is an apt summary of Jaques’ revolutionary thinking about human Capability. While Jaques thought that EPC is predictable based on present cognitive measurements alone, developmental theory has shown that mental growth does not follow a continuous but discontinuous path, whether along the ED or CD trajectory. Accordingly, mental-growth estimates as made by Jaques must be called probable rather than certain. They can be refined based on longitudinal assessments but are never predictive.

Ways of Supporting Human Capability at Work We have now reviewed all three aspects of work capability: applied, current potential, and emergent potential. Together, they make up a coherent definition of what M. Archer has called Reflexivity, the ability to bend social and cultural structures to taking care of one’s concerns by way of launching life and work projects. In the case of work in organizations, these projects are based on concerns other than one’s own immediate needs and aspirations and assume the form of “assigned” projects individuals and teams make themselves accountable for. This happens in a “language suffused world” that is strongly determined by antecedents put in place by “people long dead,” even if there exist more recent versions of the “rules of governance” these people once formulated. The question that arises at this point is: in what way can the development of capability over the human lifespan, especially of potential capability, be supported (1) either by new technologies or (2) by humans through coaching and mentoring? What I read at https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-­digital/our-­ insights/what-­every-­ceo-­should-­know-­about-­generative-­ai [May 23, 2023] conveys a good impression of how instrumentalist thinking – that has no idea of adult development over the lifespan or dialectical thinking – conceptualizes generative A.I. for work in organizations (highlights OL): Generative AI can be used to automate, augment, and accelerate work. For the purposes of this article, we focus on ways generative AI can enhance work rather than on how it can replace the role of humans. While text-generating chatbots such as ChatGPT have been receiving outsize attention, generative AI can enable capabilities across a broad range of content, including images, video, audio, and computer code. And it can perform several functions in organizations, including classifying, editing, summarizing, answering questions, and drafting new content. Each of these actions has the potential to create value by changing how work gets done at the activity level across business functions and workflows.

When making a text analysis, it becomes evident right away that the authors of the above blog focus on the contents of human thinking, not its developmental or thought form structure. They convey that with generative A.I. such

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contents – whether images, video, audio, and computer code – can be “automated, augmented, and accelerated,” whatever that might mean. Focusing on activities typically performed by humans, they enumerate (1) classifying, (2) editing, (3) summarizing, (4) answering questions, and (5) drafting new content. Clearly, they are referring to the language-suffused world, not the real world in which work happens. All the functions they name fall into the domain of logical thinking, not of systems thinking, nor of dialectical systems thinking. Interestingly, the authors speak of these “functions” as “actions that create value,” seeing these actions as changing “how work gets done at the (human) activity level across business functions and workflows,” – as if they knew “how work gets done” in people’s internal workplace based on internal conversations about work projects. Clearly, the authors’ thoughts are a “far cry” from the topic of this book which would have us ask: can we build generative A.I. tools (such as chatbots) that can absorb and implement human thought forms, and what would the structure of their design have to be for them to be capable of emulating the Jaquesian “loosening and bifurcation process” that for him is the foundation of the reflective judgment and discretion by which humans launch and complete projects? A further question readers of this book might want to ask themselves is this: what would it take for chatbots to become good coaches, or even mentors, that could boost not just current applied capability but also current potential capability  – enhancing what people COULD do if they had the occasion and tools for responding to challenges presently beyond their ken? For this author, the most disturbing aspect of consultants like Kinsey is that they completely take the existing role matrix in organizations and their rules of governance for granted, never for a minute entertaining the possibility that for the sake of boosting human Reflexivity and Agency, the social and cultural constraints and enablements embedded in antecedent social structures would need to be changed, if not transformed. As a result, generative A.I. applications are fated to get bogged down in being integrated into pre-existing task- and management structures rather than functioning as potential transformers of such structures. What Bhaskar called “de-­agentification,” the denial of human agency, thus reigns supreme: generating “new” content is not revolutionary if that content is configured in antiquated forms and rhythmics.

 ractical Consequences of the Developmental Definition P of Capability As an example of how the threefold definition of work capability introduced above plays out in the world of work, let us consider the discipline of coaching. Not only is a coaching intervention itself a specific kind of work, except for life coaching it is also primarily concerned with work issues.

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Viewed in the context of this chapter, coaches are no different from coachees. Both are on a developmental journey for which their cognitive development and complexity of mental processing is of the greatest relevance. In fact, “helping” becomes ethically dubious if a coachee’s cognitive profile is more highly developed than that of the coach, at least in cognitively-directed coaching. (This situation is a replica of employee’s boss being cognitively and developmentally less developed than the employee which is a frequent cause for leaving a job.) Using the above-stated definitions of capability, let us distinguish four kinds of coaching: 1. Behavioral coaching 2. Cognitive-behavioral coaching 3. Cognitive-developmental coaching 4. Fully developmental coaching Essentially, the difference between the first two and the last two kinds of coaching lies in the fact that behavioral coaching is either focused on behavior (1) or the cognitive foundations of behavior (2), while practitioners of the third and fourth kinds of coaching pay foremost attention to how a client’s level of developmental maturity shapes his or her behavior, whether social-emotionally (ED) or cognitively (CD) or both. All kinds of coaching, in one way or another, address issues of consciousness and self-awareness. Therefore, the more comprehensive and holistic in its approach coaching is, the better. In fully developmental coaching (4) the coach, equally mastering behavioral (psychological) and developmental knowledge, views a client’s issues from a broad and holistic perspective. S(he) can switch attention not only between behavioral and developmental issues but can also alternatively focus on a client’s social-emotional (ED) and cognitive (CD) profile, and thus intervene on behalf of their relationship (CD * ED). Since developmental coaching is based on behavioral as well as developmental assessments, it is often referred to as evidence based.

Behavioral Coaching Type of capability (Current) Applied capability

Definitiona f(CD * I * S/K * −T)

Definitions spelled out Applied capability is a function of cognitive development over the lifespan as impacted by a person’s interest in work, available skills and knowledge, and dysfunctional personality traits that may hinder adult development

f = “is a function of” [Excerpt of Table 1.5]

a

Practical Consequences of the Developmental Definition of Capability

31

Table 1.5  Three aspects of work capability Type of capability (Current) Applied capability Current potential capability Emergent potential capability

Definitiona f(CD * I * S/K * −T) f(CD)

f(CD * ED)

Definitions spelled out Applied capability is a function of cognitive development over the lifespan as impacted by a person’s interest in work, available skills and knowledge, and dysfunctional personality traits that may hinder adult development Current potential capability is a function of level of a person’s level of cognitive development Emergent potential capability is a function of the intrinsic interrelatedness of cognitive and social-emotional adult development

Adapted from Jaques (1994) a f = “is a function of”

In terms of Table  1.4, behavioral coaching is restricted to a client’s current applied capability and thus unable to deal with his or her potential capability whose unfolding lies to the future. As a result, behavioral coaches take their clients’ developmental profile for granted, as well as their own. That is, they may commit the “developmental fallacy” which entails that they over- or under-estimate what a client can achieve developmentally speaking. Behavioral coaches are convinced that they and their clients live “in the same world,” which developmentally may not be the case. Unaware of their own level of adult development, they are by force focused on behavioral symptoms following which may not lead them to gain access to a coachee’s internal conversations in which life and work projects are hatched, developed, and launched. More specifically, in terms of Table 1.4, in behavioral coaching primary attention is paid to a mix of current applied capability (CAC), motivation (I), skilled knowledge (K/S), and the absence of clinical pathology (which coaching psychologists of a clinical persuasion tend to be highly concerned about). Due to the mix of so many different factors targeted in this type of coaching, many competing and overlapping approaches using many different assessment tools and nomenclatures exist, and confusion reigns. Working with a reduced notion of the client’s capability, the coach, while outwardly focused on the client’s future, is without tools to assess that future. In addition, the coach is unaware of his or her own developmental profile, and this sense “naïve.” S(he) does not realize that her relationship to clients is informed by her own maturity level and thus may do harm when working with clients more highly developed than s(he) is herself. Looked at closely, the differences between behavioral coaching approaches propagated in public are superficial. They leave the core behavioral base of coaching research and practice intact. For a long time now, this discipline has lacked a clear methodological grounding since in these approaches work capability remains undefined. The differences between these approaches are therefore largely logistic and pragmatic, not foundational. The same can be said of contemporary coaching research.

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Cognitive-Behavioral Coaching Type of Capability (Current) Applied capability

Definitiona f(CD * I * S/K * −T)

Definitions spelled out Applied capability is a function of cognitive development over the lifespan as impacted by a person’s interest in work, available skills and knowledge, and dysfunctional personality traits that may hinder adult development

f = “is a function of” [Excerpt of Table 1.5]

a

Cognitive Behavioral Coaching (CBC) is typically based on evidence-based psychological models (such as NLP, Natural Language Processing). The assumption is made that both the client’s motivation (I) and his use of skilled knowledge (K/S) are strongly hampered by, or put at risk by, clinical pathologies that hinder the client from fully applying his current capabilities. This kind of coaching is indirectly focused on a client’s agency but bypasses its cognitive-developmental base (CD). It tries to understand the client’s internal conversations, but only in terms of their content, not their social-emotional or cognitive-dialectical structure. Concretely, such coaching is geared to helping clients identify thoughts, feelings, and behaviors viewed by the coach (or even the client) as self-defeating in that they minimize the power of the client’s agency. CBC coaches can help clients manage their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but only to the extent that they acquire structural insight into how the latter arise in the first place and undergo developmental differentiation over time. This is greatly facilitated by acquiring knowledge of adult-developmental research. While NLP is a research-based protocol for cognitive coaching, its developmental blindness and restriction to logical thinking restricts its impact to clients’ behavioral issues. Hindered from enabling a holistic, potential-focused view of clients, this type of coaching differs from cognitive-developmental coaching in that it straightforwardly focuses on applied capability without considering clients’ cognitive resources that transcend purely logical thinking, such as dialectical thinking. “Potential” is instrumentalized as behavioral improvement potential, leaving the latter bereft of its developmental foundations visualized in Fig. 1.3. In focus are the pathologies of the client’s internal conversations, not the epistemic structure of these conversations or clients’ developmental potential. Cognitive Behavioral coaching is methodologically different from dialectical psychotherapy (Basseches, 1997), a discipline informed by insight into clients’ cognitive development over the lifespan. In dialectical psychotherapy, attention is focused on how a client’s work and life suffer from a lack of self-insight into his predicaments based on the absence of dialectical thinking or the lack of fluidity of that thinking. Making interventions of this kind is geared to clients’ emergent, rather than current, potential capability in that foremost attention is paid to the issue of how to boost existing cognitive potential.

Practical Consequences of the Developmental Definition of Capability

33

Cognitive-Developmental Coaching Type of capability Current potential capability

Definitiona Definitions spelled out f (CD) Current potential capability is a function of level of a person’s level of cognitive development

f = “is a function of” (Excerpt of Table 1.5]

a

Cognitive-developmental coaching focuses attention on the client’s current potential capability which is anchored in his/her cognitive development over the lifespan. It is therefore tuned to the structure of clients’ present thinking which shapes their actual movements-in-thought in real time. This kind of coaching is equipped to assess, as well as to boost, client’s dialectical thinking potential. By centering attention on movements-in-thought in the sense of dialectical thinking (see Appendices 1 and 2), the coach’s attention switches to the client’s current potential capability. This entails that what moves to the center of attention is what a client COULD potentially do NOW if the right challenges and tools were available to him. This includes attention to whether clients presently act from an appropriate cognitive stance in terms of their epistemic position (stage of reflective judgment in the sense of King & Kitchener, 1994). The benefit of an evidence-based cognitive-developmental approach is that the coach can raise the client’s awareness about how s(he) conceptualizes the workplace and herself as a part of it, which determines her present self-management and work effectiveness, and thus also how a strengthening of the client’s fluidity of thinking – through an awareness of thought forms used and not used – can lead to achieving increased self-management and effectiveness of work. The impact of cognitive developmental interventions is not restricted to the client’s work world but extends into her way of constructing the real world internally. In terms of Fig. 1.3, the effectiveness of this kind of coaching strongly depends on the coach’s own level of adult – and not only cognitive – development. It is only by improving his or her own cognitive profile (CD) that the coach can move clients into the Third if not the Fourth Order of mental processing complexity (in terms of Table 1.1). As the reader will have noticed, it is almost impossible to define “coaching” separate from the developmental profile of the coach. This is so since a coach can only be as helpful to clients as s(he) is aware of the level of her own adult development. In contrast to Jaques’ teaching, work with CDF would suggest that only a coach knowing her own developmental profile is able to focus on client’s emergent potential (EPC). This entails that the coach is able to focus not only on the integration of clients’ social-emotional and cognitive profiles but can also integrate clients’ psychological profile into his interventions.

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Fully Developmental Coaching This type of coaching is informed by insight into a client’s behavioral as well as developmental profile, thus able to link issues of clients’ Capacity to those of Capability. We can speak of the coach as using the three CDF dimensions – cognitive, social-emotional, and psychological  – as a triangulation device, where one perspective will reveal what another perspective cannot show or hides. In this comprehensive approach, the cognitive dimension of the intervention itself is very broad; it comprises not only the client’s epistemic and social-emotional position but also focuses on how far a client manages to transition from logical to dialectical thinking and how that transition can be strengthened by paying attention to the client’s level of social-emotional development and the psychological handicaps (Jaques’ “-T”) that stand in the way of the clients adult development. Even where developing the client’s emergent potential is not an explicit goal of coaching sessions, this type of coaching is “fully developmental” in that it employs all available developmental assessment evidence to help the client strengthen his Reflexivity and thus Agency.

A Developmental Look at Human Resources Another discipline that is deeply affected by the analysis of human capability in this chapter is HR. As a professional discipline, HR has radically reduced the aspects of human resources to be developed, in contrast to what naturally develops over a person’s lifespan through work delivery. The HR function has been reduced to paying attention to worker’s motivation (I), skilled knowledge (K/S), and lack of psychopathology (−T) which is falsely equated with Complexity of Mental Processing (CMP) and is more accurately rendered as “complexity of behavioral processing.” In short, HR knows of nothing but current applied capability and is ideologically tuned to averting attention from potential capability. As a result, all those developmental resources that according to developmental theory lie in waiting in those employed in organizations never become organizationally visible and therefore receive no human and technological support. The elimination of human potential capability from HR concerns has increasingly been shown to be a stark limitation for developing agile, sociocratic, and holocratic organizations, as well as strengthening leadership development. When looking for explanations of the reduction of notions of human capability in organizations, understanding the perspective of the balanced scorecard is helpful. This perspective is data-based and exclusively driven by logical, instrumentalist thinking. Therefore, only end-states and outcomes, not developmental processes, play a role. While this simplification makes logical sense it lacks organizational sense as well as meaning, since organizations are a part of social and cultural reality which are subject to a process of constant transformation. For this reason,

Practical Consequences of the Developmental Definition of Capability

35

data-­based snapshots alone are of very limited utility for business modeling and for optimizing management initiatives. Take as an example the Scorecard dimension called “Learning and Growth” (https://analyticssteps.com/blogs/what-­are-­four-­perspectives-­balanced-­scorecard [Jan 5, 2023]. Under this rubric learning and growth data is based solely on how well technologically pre-shaped knowledge is acquired and how successfully employees use that knowledge to achieve a competitive advantage in the market. The assumption is made that knowledge acquisition is nothing but a kind of information processing serving immediate, short-term advantage, and is solely an enrichment of organizational know-how rather than of personal development as well. Equally beyond consideration in the “learning and growth” dimension of the Scorecard is the well-known developmental finding (dating from Jaques’ work) that organizational work levels differ in terms of cognitive complexity, thus in terms of difficulty of knowledge acquisition. What constitutes “learning” on the level of continuous improvement, which is of lowest cognitive complexity of mental processing in organizations (De Visch & Laske, 2020), is dramatically different from what constitutes learning at the level of value stream management and business modeling.

Conclusion The perspective on work developed in this chapter prepares us for taking a very different view of human resources and their management. Three important notions for re-thinking HR management as Capability management stand out: 1. Competence 2. Capacity 3. Capability These three notions stand in a very clear and transparent relationship to each other. Capability is constitutive of both Capacity and Competence (and thus performance as well). This is shown in Fig. 1.6. As shown, competences are grounded in Potential Capability which gets filtered, as it were, through individuals’ Capacity (psychological or mental health profile). By “filtering” it meant that only those aspects of Potential Capability which become reinforced by adult-developmental steps toward higher levels of mental growth and are not counteracted by mental health issues can be counted on to manifest in positive work performance. However, since Capacity only comprises elements of what people “have” rather than “are,” it is a very weak foundation of optimal organizational as well as human functioning. As shown in Fig. 1.6, competences are nothing but the “tip of the iceberg” of workforce potentials. They float on top of much deeper human capabilities of which they are abstractions and outcomes. Where these deeper capabilities are disregarded or reduced to competences, we arrive at a vision of human potential such as articulated by the balanced scorecard: the “intangible assets” buried in human potential

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1  A Developmental Theory of Work Capability

Competences [skills, expertises, ‘experience’, aptitudes, what can be learned]

Capacities [subjective needs, ingrained attitudes, defenses; character disposition holding competences in place]

Capability [and resulting Frame of Reference] [ways of meaning making and of making sense of the self, others, and the world – what grounds capacities and competences and determines their USE]

Fig. 1.6  Pyramid of human capabilities based on contributors’ mental growth profile

capability are not, and cannot be, accounted for. Pragmatically that means that organizations, however much they try to “motivate” people, are left in the dark about effective ways to do so, namely, by supporting contributors’ Job 2 (their social-­ emotional and cognitive adult development).

Chapter Summary In this chapter, I have laid the groundwork for understanding the cognitive theory of work that E. Jaques started out formulating in the second half of the twentieth century. Starting from a distinction between Capacity and Capability, following Jaques critically I have outlined the differences between the three aspects of Capability he introduced, grounded in his own research as well as my own since 1950. In the process, I have adopted and extended his theory of work, defined by him as the use of reflective judgment and discretion in the pursuit of goals within certain time limits. Overall, I have intimated that Jaques’ notion of Capability is very close indeed to what M.  Archer, in her sociological work, refers to as Reflexivity (2007). Both Capability and Reflexivity are terms pointing to the epistemic root and core of human Agency of which Work is a major manifestation.

Chapter Summary

37

I have done so by taking the following steps: • Refining Jaques’ Four Orders of Mental Complexity (Table  1.1) by matching them to the structure of adult-developmental processes that procedurally underly them • Broadening Jaques’ notion of (potential) capability by assimilating cognitive to social-emotional capability, thus expanding Jaques’ notion of Complexity of Mental Processing • Showing that cognitive as well as social-emotional capability (together now often referred to as dimensions of “vertical development”) modify and stabilize an individual’s mental health profile, or Capacity • Showing (Jaques’) Orders of Mental Complexity to be anchored in processes of cognitive development over the lifespan (in the form of Common Sense, Understanding, Reason, and Practical Wisdom) • Linking Competence, Capacity, and Capability in a pyramid of mental growth (adult development) that defines the structural relationship between constitutive elements of Capability • [As a result] re-defining Jaques’ notion of “requisite” organization, in part by including the organizational support of human potential as “Job 2” in addition to “work” as defined by Jaques, which only comprises Job 1 (assigned, delegated, or volunteered-for work). The complexity of the distinctions I have made in discussing work capability may be compacted into the insight (first had by Jaques) that work capability is a developmental, not a behavioral, notion, thus irreducible to behavior. Jaques’ notions are meta-psychological just as developmental notions are, and thus remain uncluttered by the behavioral plethora typically heaped on notions such as “work,” “performance,” and others. It is this epistemic character of the notion of Capability (irreducible to psychological notions of Capacity) that makes Capability differ from the behavioral concepts used in the contemporary HR narrative. Seemingly, the developmental focus introduced comes at the cost of simplicity, but it is only the loss of an illusion that is involved. The simple truth is that human capability can be managed only to a certain extent, namely the extent to which one has empirical insight into adult development over the lifespan and its surfacing in terms of behavior. One cannot manage what one does not understand, although one may have much to say about it in endlessly evolving ideological debates. An important notion emerging from this chapter is that human potential for work is not something people have but rather defines what they are. This entails many things, such as: • One cannot define people by their performance, not even their competence. (People “are” not their competences.) • In their adult development, people outgrow all they seem to “have” in favor of what they “are,” namely, transformational potential.

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• People may have great cognitive potential, but their psychological profile and social-emotional development may set limits to how much of it they can actualize during their lifetime, as well as a function of the rules of governance under according to which they are “put to work.” • The more work is organizationally “scripted,” the more adult development is stifled in those who work in organizations. • Talent management outside of a developmental assessment of capability is more “talk” than “walk.” • New methods of assessment, such as those detailed in this book, are a necessity for managing human resources in deliberately developmental organizations. • Understanding human resources, given that they are in the form of transformational systems, requires dialectical thinking since such resources are composed of separate but inseparable dimensions forming a holon. Practice Reflections • What has so far been your way of distinguishing between what a client can presently achieve and could achieve if s(he) were mentored in using his/her current potential (which is cognitive)? • In attempting to facilitate new ways of thinking in the client, how in your interventions so far have you accounted for how far his/her logical thinking stretches toward post-formal, dialectical thinking? • In your day-to-day work, how have you sorted out issues pertaining to clients’ mental health (Capacity) profile from those pertaining to her Cognitive Profile and Social-Emotional Profile? • If you have so far mixed up all the distinctions made in this chapter, what are you concluding you could do better after reading this chapter? • If (in contrast to Jaques) you have drawn inferences from a person’s present performance regarding his or her emergent potential, how have you accounted for this leap of faith, and has been its outcome? • If so far you have not made distinctions between applied and potential capability, how have you been able to focus interventions other than by reducing potential to performance, or postulating some kind of “spirituality” to account for what goes beyond performance? • If you have so far mixed and merged Capacity with Capability, how have you balanced attention to behavioral strengths with attention to developmental potential, current or emergent? • If you find yourself exasperated by the many distinctions made in this chapter, how do you propose to do justice to the complexity of your client’s potential or your own? • If you think you now have a grasp of the facets of human capability, how would you begin rethinking your way of judging and working with people in organizations? • What would be your empirical justification for asserting that Emergent Potential Capability includes aspects of both cognitive and social-emotional development, rather than only cognitive development (as Jaques proposed)?

References

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Exercises 1. Define “performance” in terms of Jaques’ theory of work capability. 2. Give reasons for why performance does not exhaust people’s developmental potential. 3. What is the difference between current and emergent potential capability? 4. In what way does psychological balance (Capacity) have an influence on the degree to which developmental potential has been or not been realized? 5. What does it entail for management that human work falls between the Second and Third Orders of Mental Complexity and can extend to the Fourth Order? 6. Explain the term “Frame of Reference.” In what sense is it a function of the intersection of horizontal (behavioral) learning and vertical development? 7. What is your justification for restricting coaching to applied capability (performance)? 8. Discuss some of the managerial and institutional consequences of Jaques’ definition of work for managing human resources. 9. Why are competences only the tip of the iceberg of human (work) capability? 10. Interpret the HR policy of your company in terms of capability notions explored in this chapter.

References Archer, M.  S. (1995). Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. S. (2003). Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge University Press. Archer, M. S. (2007). Making our way through the world. Cambridge University Press. Basseches, M.A. (1984). Dialectical thinking and adult development. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Basseches, M.A. (1997). A developmental perspective on psychotherapy process, psychotherapists’ expertise, and “Meaning-Making Conflict” within therapeutic relationships: Part II. Journal of Adult Development, 4, 85–106. Bhaskar, R. (1993). Dialectic: The pulse of freedom. Verso. De Visch, J., & Laske, O. (2020). Practices of dynamic collaboration. Springer. Gray, J. L., Hunt, J. G., & McArthur, S. (2008). Organization design, levels of work, and human capability. Global Organization Design Society. Jaques, E. (1998a). Requisite organization. Cason Hall & Co.; (2021 edition of Requisite Organization Publishing, https://www.amazon.com/Requisite-­Organization-­Complete-­ Guide-­2021/dp/1867418932?source=ps-­sl-­shoppingads-­lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid= ATVPDKIKX0DER). Jaques, E. (1998b). Time-span handbook. Cason Hall & Co.. Jaques, E. (2002). The life and behavior of living organisms. Praeger. Jaques, E., & Cason, C. (1994). Human capability. Cason Hall & Co. Kegan, R. (1982). The evolving self. Harvard University Press. King, P. M., & Kitchener, K. S. (1994). Developing reflective judgment. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Laske, O. (1999). Transformative effects of coaching on executives’ professional agenda (PsyD dissertation). vol. 2, Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. Bell & Howell, Ann Arbor. (Order no. 9930438).

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Laske, O. (2005). Measuring hidden dimensions (vol. 1): The art and science of fully engaging adults. IDM Press, available as a pdf in Section C of https://interdevelopmentals.org/publications/; republished 2023 by Wolfgang Pabst science Publisher, Lengerich, Germany, together with its German translation, entitled Potenziale im Menschen Erkennen, Wecken, und Messen. Cited as ‘Laske 2023a’ (English) and ‘Laske 2023b’ (German). Laske, O. (2008). Measuring hidden dimensions (vol. 2): Foundations of requisite organization. IDM Press, available at Section C of https://interdevelopmentals.org/publications/ Laske, O. (2015). Dialectical thinking for integral leaders: A primer. Integral Publishers. Laske, O. (2023a). Measuring hidden dimensions: The art and science of fully engaging adults. Wolfgang Pabst Science Publisher. (forthcoming reprint). Laske, O. (2023b). Potenziale im Menschen Erkennen, Wecken, und Messen (German translation of 2023a by R. v. Leoprechting & Otto Laske). Wolfgang Pabst Science Publisher. Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. Basic Books. Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. Basic Books. Piaget, J. (1964). Relation between affectivity and intelligence in the mental development of the child. University Documentation Center. Simondon, G. (2020). Individuation in light of notions of form and information. University of Minnesota Press.

Bibliography Aderman, M., & Hershneson, D. B. (1967). Industrial personnel inventory. Illinois Institute of Technology. Archer, M. S. (1998). Culture and agency. Cambridge University Press. Bhaskar, R. (1979, 1989, 1998). The possibility of naturalism. Routledge. Bhaskar, R. (2002). Reflections on MetaReality. Sage Publications. Bhaskar, R. (2017). The order of naturally necessity. University College London Institute of Education. The Authors. De Visch, J. (2008). Managers’ mental highways: Introducing dialectical thinking in re-designing competence-based approaches. IDM Hidden Dimensions Newsletter, 4(5), October. See http:// www.interdevelopmentals.org/ezine/2008-10.html De Visch, J. (2010). The vertical dimension: Blueprint to align business and talent development. Connect & Transform Press. De Visch, J. (2017). Re-thinking. A powerful practice for complex times. www.connect transform.be De Visch, J., & Laske, O. (2018). Dynamic collaboration. www.connecttransform.be Jaques, E. (2002). A simple objective measure of size of roles in managerial systems. In Executive leadership certificate program course materials (pp. 1–20). Cason Hall & Co. Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (1994). In over our head. Harvard University Press. Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change. Harvard University Press. Kegan, R., et al. (2016). An everyone culture. Harvard University Press. Laske, O. (1966). On the dialectics of Plato and the early Hegel (Doctoral dissertation) (German). Munich, Germany. Laske, O. (2006). Leadership as something we are rather than have. Integral Leadership Review, VI(1). Laske, O. (2007). An integrated model of developmental coaching. In R. R. Kilburg & R. C. Diedrich (Eds.), The wisdom of coaching. APA. Laske, O. (Ed.) (2010a). Erwachsenenentwicklung und Arbeitsfähigkeit: Beiträge zur Messung, Unterstützung, und Management von Humanpotential. (Adult development and capability: Contributions to measuring, supporting, and managing human capital). Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftspsychologie. Pabst Science Publisher.

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Laske, O. (2010b). On the autonomy and influence of the cognitive line: Reflections on adult cognitive development peaking in dialectical thinking. Proceedings, integral theory conference, Pleasant Hills, CA. Laske, O. (2014a). Reconocer, Despertar, y Medir el Potencial Humano, Spanish translation of volume 1 of Measuring hidden dimensions. IDM Press & Ben Pensante, available as a pdf at https://interdevelopmentals.org/publications/ Laske, O. (2014b). 心の隠された領域の測定 成人以降の心の発達理論と測定手法. Japanese translation (Yohei Kato) of volume 1 of Measuring hidden dimensions. IDM Press, available as a pdf at https://interdevelopmentals.org/publications/ Laske, O. (2021a). CDF: A social-science framework for understanding human agency. CAD Lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gZSrQXXZgM Laske, O. (2021b). Dialektisch leben. Radio Evolve podcast found at https://radio-evolve.de/ podcast/dialektisch-leben/ Laske, O. (2022). The Osaka interviews. https://interdevelopmentals.org/the-osaka-interviewsregarding-cdf-the-constructivedevelopmental-framework/ Laske, O. (2023). Reshaping cognitive development as dialectic social practice via Bhaskar’s four moments of dialectic and Laske’s dialectical thought-form framework (DTF). In Metatheories of the 21st century. Routledge. Laske, O. (2023). Advanced systems-level problem-solving. Book 1: Approaching real-world complexity with dialectical thinking. Book 2: A cognitive theory of work. Book 3: Manual of dialectical thought forms. Springer Nature. Piaget, J. (1970). Structuralism. Basic Books. Piaget, J. (1972). Intellectual evolution from adolescence to adulthood. Human Development, 91, 133–141.

Chapter 2

A Cognitive Theory of Work in Organizations

Introduction Large organizations and institutions have come to shape people’s lives with a force not known in the twentieth century. It is evident that such conglomerations of people need structure, and that this structure is largely of a hierarchical nature, despite outer appearances to the contrary. The main issue for such conglomerations is that there are no naturally built-in feedback systems informing them of their “vital signs.” Rather, such feedback systems (which could include systems informing about ecological viability) need to be built from scratch by organization members. We live at a time where such systems are urgently needed, and old accounting systems will not suffice. Considering that organizations and institutions are based on large groups of people, all of whom develop over their lifespan, one would think that it would be common sense knowledge that the hierarchical structure of organizations is a reflection, simple or complex, of the levels of adult development of the people they comprise. This is, however, not the case. It took a genial thinker like Jaques to point out that the accountability levels in organizations reflect the levels of cognitive development of individuals who are the constituents of organizations. Jaques also pointed out that while an organization’s human capability architecture (human resources) is one of mental growth, its accountability architecture is one dominance (power). Since ultimately organizational success requires an optimal match between these two architectures, the fact that digital tools have largely been made to serve organizational dominance, rather than mental growth, architectures (human resources), while strengthening organizational control functions, has eroded motivation, which has reduced engagement with work and the realization of potential capability. Depending on the political and civic culture of a society, the human subsystems making up an organization are viewed and managed differently, as are the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 O. Laske, Advanced Systems-Level Problem Solving, Volume 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40985-1_2

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cognitive-­behavioral processes of the individuals that compose them. There is great freedom in choosing how to view and design organizations. One can view organizations based on a machine model or, in contrast, on analogies taken from the organic world. In each case, the cognitive-developmental processes are the same, while their interpretations and behavioral realization can differ considerably, depending on social structure, economy, and ecology (Nisbett, 2005, 33). A further complication (and potential obfuscation of cognitive-developmental processes) arises by way of the sociological categorization by which people are grouped as employees, managers, customers, etc. In this grouping, the common developmental denominator of human systems gets lost. When logical thinking gets reinforced by computer technology, and computer technology serves an organization’s dominance rather than capability architecture, little of the synergy of these systems comes into view. Their interweaving is siphoned off into “silos” that communicate in starkly different languages and therefore typically fail to understand each other. The big picture of what is going on in organizations in terms of the underlying cognitive-developmental processes of contributors cannot be effectively managed. Still, if there is a common denominator of people grouped in organizations and institutions, it is the adult developmental structure of their lives which in the workplace appears as “human resources.” Of the two strands of such development, the cognitive one is central when defining WORK. Work is based on hierarchical relationships that regulate organizational echelons and manager-subordinate exchanges, all fashionable camouflages to the contrary (Jaques, 1998a). When it comes to understanding the complexity of organizations beyond closed systems posing well-structured problems, formal logical thinking fails abysmally. For this reason, Bolman and Deal suggested almost 20 years ago (1991) that a consultant to organizations – as well as a manager – should be able to take at least four different perspectives on an organization simultaneously, to arrive at a holistic picture of “what is going on”: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The structural one of division of labor in terms of accountability levels The political one of competing stakeholders The human-resource one of workforce-management and customer relationships The symbolic one of culture and corporate climate

In Chap. 3, when exploring individuals’ internal workplace, I return to this suggestion. Another way of grasping the “big picture” of what is an organization or public institution is to think about organizations in terms of Wilber’s “all quadrants, all levels” view of the social world. As Fig. 2.1 suggests, we can view organizations as composed of four quadrants, each of which focuses on a particular dimension of the organization. The two quadrants on the left represent intentional (Upper Left) and cultural processes (Lower Left), while those on the right stand in for objectified (measured) behaviors of

Introduction

45

Left Quadrants

Right Quadrants

UL

UR

I-Intention

It-Behavior

LL

LR

We-Culture

Its -Environment

Size of Person

Size of Role

[Capability]

[Accountability]

Legend: UL = upper left; LL = lower left; UR = upper right; LR = lower right

Fig. 2.1  Map of four Wilber quadrants applied to organizations. Legend: UL upper left, LL lower left, UR upper right, LR lower right

organization members (Upper Right) and quantifications of the organizational environment at large (Lower Right). We can slice the quadrants in two different ways: • Left and right • Upper and lower In the first case, we encounter what in this book I refer to as the Human Capability Architecture (HCA) organizations embody, while in the second case, we are dealing with the Managerial Accountability Architecture (MAA) that defines organizational work. In terms of work capability, on the left we are looking at “Size of Person” (what a person is), measured in terms of capability, while on the right we encounter “Size of Role” measured in levels of accountability. Where both are in balance, such that a person’s applied and potential capability is equally engaged, we say with Jaques that the organization or institution is requisitely organized. Importantly, the term “requisite” refers not only to applied, but mainly potential capability, − a facet of work that lies completely outside of scorecard-like conceptualizations of human resources (which regularly comes to haunt organizations, in different disguises). The partitioning into upper and lower quadrants is clearly that between individual and group or community. In the upper part, we are dealing with the measured capability of individuals and their ensuing behaviors, while in the lower part, we are concerned with how an organization’s culture and its measurable “assets” can be seen holistically. It seems to me that the essential distinction introduced by this picture is that between qualitative issues of policy on the left, and quantitative issues of

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management on the right. However, the left-right quadrant distinction cannot be the last word. The fact is that organizations are distributed over all four quadrants. This means that to understand them one has to understand both their qualitative and quantitative aspects and the interactions between these. An effort to do so leads to a holistic point of view, regarding which questions like the following arise: 1. How can an organization’s human systems (mental growth architecture), grounded in the left quadrants of intentionality and (corporate and community) culture, be reconciled with the “objective” aspects of the organization that are seen in terms of quantitative (e.g., financial and performance) measurements required to optimize its accountability (dominance) architecture? 2. Are there measurements that can harness the richness of the left quadrants with an exactitude matching that of behavioral and operational assessments on the right? 3. If so, what is the relationship of qualitative measurements on the left with quantitative measurements on the right? 4. If the upper quadrants (UL, UR) regard individuals, and the lower quadrants concern either groups of people (LL) or sets of physical and organizational assets (LR), how, then, does an organization coordinate both lower quadrants? 5. How does an organization “manage” individual work capability (UL) and work behavior (UR), thereby coordinating qualitative, developmental, and quantitative, behavioral insights? 6. How can organizations achieve a match between the two left quadrants, or “Size of Person,” and the two right quadrants, or “Size of Role”? 7. How must “Size of Person” be specified and assessed to provide a match with the central aspects of “Size of Role”? 8. What is the nature of A.I. tools by which “Size of Person” can be assessed in interaction with individuals’ internal workplace rather than merely the competence and performance parameters established by scorecards? 9. How do A.I. tools need to be structured so as to account for and support contributors’ movements-in-thought that define not only logical but dialectical thinking? 10. Can A.I. tools account for the relationship between cognitive and social-­ emotional development of human resources, thereby avoiding that the organizational capability architecture is subordinated to the role-based dominance architecture? These questions, vital to any theory of organizations, are the topic of this chapter. They are the focus of the book as a whole as well. Aided by Jaques’ conceptualization of work capability outlined in Chap. 1, I will attempt to give new, and hopefully cogent, answers to these questions. Jaques, in fact, blazed the path to finding possible answers to the above questions. He saw organizational leadership as the linchpin in achieving Requisite Organization. In a book of this title (1998a, b, 1989) he introduced the following notions:

Introduction

47

• Left and right quadrants can be put in balance with each other as long as there exist leadership practices that are geared to matching each workforce member’s Size of Person (Capability and Capacity) and Size of Role (Level of work complexity and accountability). • Leadership practices form an integral part of Management, and do not constitute a separate “holy grail” accessible only to an elite. • Size of Person defines what a person is, which is determined by Potential Capability and is grounded in internal processes of adult development (for Jaques, especially cognitive development). • Size of Role defines what a person has, which defines Applied Capability, and is bound to behavioral and organizational processes that a person can acquire and shed. • The left-quadrant architecture that organizations embody make up the Human Capability Architecture (HCA), an extension of Jaques’ notion of capability pioneered in this book. • The right-quadrant architecture that organizations embody make up the Managerial Accountability Architecture of “Strata” (or levels of accountability), MAA for short. • Measurement of levels of MAA is based on measurement of task complexity and focuses on Time Span, while measurement of levels of HCA is based on measurement of potential capability both in its current and emergent forms. In light of Jaques’ notions, we can now interpret Wilber’s quadrants for organizations as follows (Fig. 2.2): While the Size-of-Role architecture (MAA) (right of Fig. 2.2) is fairly stable in the medium term and can be viewed from a behavioral perspective “in time,” the Size-of-Person architecture (HCA) (in the figure’s left) is undergoing constant subtle and potentially dramatic developmental changes, and therefore is best viewed from an “across-time” (developmental or transductive) perspective. It is in regard to the nature of the HCA and its long-term consequences that organizations need to adjust their views as to what is the essence of human resources, and how the dynamics of their Capability Architecture can be captured by leading indicators.

RIGHT Quadrants/MAA

LEFT Quadrants/HCA

Capability Accountability

Architecture:

Architecture:

Potential Emotional Development

Size of Person

Work Complexity Requisite Organization

Fig. 2.2  Two organizational architectures

Size of Role

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In the present context, we can ask: how do organizational and institutional agendas fit with the levels of meaning and sense making of the adult population they employ, and what is the least degree of societal coercion necessary to bring about a match of HCA and MAA? How can personal goals be made to meet with, or even coincide with, organizational goals in a way that satisfies requirements of adult development of the workforce? Conventional wisdom  – following a behavioral model  – says that the left and right quadrants of an organization just can’t be matched. From a formal-logical perspective, they represent different worlds, one of which must be false, thus negligible. From a dialectical perspective, however, they represent complementary worlds, none of which is false since both are in unceasing interaction with each other, and can’t even be defined separately. On the right side, everything seems to be entirely objective and based on measurement. Accountabilities are paid for in hard currency. People’s opinions are measured by surveys. The larger marketplace can equally be statistically sized up. One can use “balanced scorecards” to obtain an objective view of the right quadrants. But what of the left quadrants forming the HCA? The conventional wisdom is: “We have all the numbers we need, but we remain clueless as to how to link these numbers to information about developmental shifts in adult meaning and sense making.” (And frankly, we don’t think it’s worth it!). The argument stated above is an example of what Roger Martin (2007b, 124) calls “contented model defense.” Such defense implies that only a single model can account for reality, and we are already in the possession of such a model. And since we are comfortable with mistaking the model for the reality we are modeling, there is little more to say. However, from an epistemological point of view as outlined in this book, the justifications for separating the right from the left quadrants are all those of closed system thinking. In such thinking, in-time thinking prevails over across-time, holistic thinking grounded in dialectical thought forms.

Jaques’ Answers While at first glance, Jaques comes across as a stern formal-logical thinker, he in fact shows again and again in his writing that he is able to hold dialectical points of view. He is highly aware of the complexity of human systems and limits of managing them. To do so for him comes down to leadership in a sense much broader than present notions articulate. Leadership, for Jaques, is not the province of an elite, nor is it a psychological set of traits. It is rather a meta-psychological issue of capability, and an integral part of everyday management in which each manager, not only HR directors, has the mandate of developing his or her people. In contrast to present notions of leadership, Jaques gave much higher priority to the cognitive than the social-emotional development of leaders. He saw cognitive development from the perspective of Capability. Thus it was evident to him that there is a large cognitive potential most people have that awaits recognition and development. Having looked through to the core of what WORK is  – use of

Jaques’ Answers

49

reflective judgment and discretion – he thought he had new insights to offer, such as the difference between Capacity and Capability. His notions of Size of Person versus Size of Role clearly indicate this. Jaques’ idea of a cognitive typology of people based on “maturation bands” is a very original one. He was unsatisfied with the notion that everybody is moving along the same cognitive-developmental track. For this reason, he tried to establish a link between a person’s salary history and his or her level of cognitive development (1994, 85 f.). Jaques also thought that there was a hidden link between the methods of information processing a person was using and the time horizon, or level of foresight, of the person. Thus, if one could measure time horizon as a function of cognitive development, one could then attempt to match time span of roles people play with their time horizon, to see whether they can be held accountable for their work in the role. It is here that the notion of Size of Role as equivalent with level of work complexity comes in. Just as time span determines level of work complexity, level of work complexity determines, or at least should determine, Size of Role. In this regard, the difference between single-task roles and multiple-task roles was important to Jaques. Time span measurement of multiple-task roles is more complex than dealing with single tasks in a role. This is so because a person in a multiple-task role can “borrow against time” using appropriate discretion (2002b, 18). Therefore, multiple-­ task roles require a higher level of judgment and discretion. As a matter of fact, Jaques developed a method of time span measurement that, through interview, would determine the complexity of work in any role. The goal of Jaques’ theory and practice of capability measurement is easily understood. If by analyzing level of cognitive development it could be shown that a person’s time horizon indeed matches the time span of his or her role (defined by the temporally longest task in the role), then the person could be said to be qualified to work in that role, otherwise not. When we review Jaques’ thinking in terms of the four quadrants introduced above, we can say that on account of his notion of Accountability commensurate with Capability or Requisite Organization, he established a link between the left and the right quadrants (UL and UR). In Jaques’ equation of Size of Person and of Role, level of cognitive development and associated time horizon are located in the upper left quadrant (UL), while the role is defined in the upper right quadrant (UR), as shown below (Fig. 2.3). As shown, Size of Role points to an organization’s Accountability Architecture. Size of Role varies with work complexity in a role, itself a function of the “Time Span of Discretion” associated with the Role (Jaques, 2002b). Time span of discretion is also the main determinant of what Jaques calls Stratum, another term for organizational echelon or layer (Jaques, 1998a). Typically, a janitor would be working on Stratum I, while members of the Board of Directors work on Stratum VIII, as we will see below. To understand Jaques’ cognitive theory of organizations, we need to understand five aspects of organizational work:

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2  A Cognitive Theory of Work in Organizations

Size of Role (UR)

Work Complexity

Level of Cognitive Development

in a Role (UR)

[of person] (UL)

Time Span [of discretion]

Methods of Mental

Time Horizon

of Role

Processing [of person]

[of person]

(for the ‘loosening & bifurcation process’, that is ‘work’). Stratum of Role Fig. 2.3  Anatomy of Size of Role in CDF

• • • • •

Time span [of discretion] Stratum of Role (place of a role within an organization’s role matrix) Order of Mental Processing (complexity of mental processing) Method of Mental Processing (“type of work” engaged in) Time Horizon

Of these, the first two aspects concern an objective definition of the work itself. The remaining three aspects have to do with the ineffable process a person engages in at work, by using reflective judgment and discretion. Let’s attend to the first two aspects first.

Measuring Time Span of Role When thinking about work, either as a subordinate or a manager, we are frequently too pre-occupied with the specific competences it requires or the product it yields, to notice its more universal cognitive aspects. We do not think enough about the context in which work is done, and thus fail to appreciate the fact that work is done by people who are constantly changing and happens in environments equally characterized by unceasing change. Therefore, work cannot be scripted, as much as one may try.

Measuring Time Span of Role

51

In addition, we do not think about work abstractly enough, as an exercise of Capability, but get caught in specifics of performance or capacity, quite in contrast to Jaques, who says (2002b, 4): The essence of an assignment in managerial organizations is that a subordinate [i.e., a person reporting to some manager, OL] is expected to use his/her capability to overcome the unforeseeable obstacles that inevitably arise in working toward a goal.

Due to the constantly changing, thus unforeseeable, environments in which work happens, a worker needs to use judgment and discretion in bringing it to completion. There is always a compromise to be negotiated between the pace (or speed) of the work and its quality, and how to make this compromise is up to the worker. Being focused on capability, Jaques attends to generic features of work regardless of specific competences, namely features that speak to the cognitive load in a particular kind of work (2002b, 4): All work requires that the individual doing the work must continuously balance the pace at which he or she is working and the quality of the output being produced; i.e., must work just quickly enough and just well enough: not so quickly as to produce substandard quality; and not so preoccupied with quality as to be too slow.

In accordance with Jaques’ definition of work as the exercise of reflective judgment and discretion within certain time limits, negotiating the pace and quality of work in the midst of an unceasingly changing environment takes continued effort. It is the attention and mental processing needed in work that constitutes its cognitive core (Jaques, 2002b, 4): The time span of a role can be thought of in terms of the longest periods of time during which a subordinate’s (collaborator’s) tasks require him or her to be using his/her discretion in coping with the inherent uncertainties and complexities of each task.

It this context, the significance of Time Span is that it can be measured and thus can be compared to the Time Horizon of the people working in a particular role. Time Span gives a measure of (Jaques, 2002b, 17): • the longest period of time that the subordinate has to exercise continuous discretion in balancing pace against quality in producing satisfactory output, and therefore, • the longest period of time during which the manager has to rely upon the subordinate’s discretion (judgment and decision); and • the longer these discretionary periods of time, the greater is the complexity of the work in the role that the subordinate has to cope with. Regardless of whether the subordinate (collaborator) is responsible to a manager or to him- or herself, time span thus determines the discretion required in a role, as well as the cognitive size of a Furthermore, when engaged in work, we take on responsibility, and the weight of responsibility we feel is linked to the use of judgment and discretion needed to bring work to completion. Why, then, is it that time span seems to coincide with

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experienced “weight of responsibility,” or more accurately, with experienced level of work complexity? As Jaques sees the matter (2002b, 17). Role time spans have been discovered to give a measure of experienced weight of responsibility. Roles with the same time span “feel” about the same “size” regardless of occupation. They feel as though they are increasing or decreasing in “size” if the time spans are increased or decreased by changes in the tasks assigned.

The feeling of responsibility is shared by the manager to whom a worker is responsible. When not supervising work, a manager has to rely on the person in the role to exercise sufficient judgment and discretion to guarantee the right pace and quality of the work. Responsibility for work is shared between subordinate (collaborator) and manager, and is thus an organizational issue.

Single vs. Multiple Task Roles When trying to assess work complexity, it becomes evident that a distinction should be made between single-task and multiple-tasks roles. In the latter, the person works on an entire “task basket” (2002b, 17), such that the beginning and end of tasks may overlap. Therefore, in multiple-tasks roles the worker “can borrow against time” (Jaques, 2002b, 18), which is by definition impossible in single-task roles. This borrowing against time further increases work complexity since it requires additional discretion. Regardless of whether single- or multiple-task roles are involved in a task, in measuring time span one needs to be aware of two aspects: 1. The first aspect concerns the range of tasks a person pursues as part of his or her role. One can think about tasks in many ways, such as skill needed, experience, capacity, etc. Time span measurement requires focused attention to the time itself that it takes to complete a task or series of tasks, simultaneously adhering to quality standards. 2. The second aspect concerns the discretionary load of work. This load is determined by the responsibility one has taken on, which regards judgments as to both pace and quality of work. Evidently, the discretionary content of work varies with the task and the goals it pursues. Since goals are “what-by-when’s,” every task has a specific target completion time linked to specific quality standards, and to adhere to these is an object of the worker’s discretion. It is a crucial part of the worker’s capability to exercise such discretion. We can therefore say that “time span” stands for time span of discretion, or the span of time over which a worker needs to exercise discretion and judgment regarding the pace and quality of (his/her) work. As a result, the longer the time span of discretion, the higher is the level of work complexity a worker is settled with.

Level of Work Complexity in Single- and Multiple-Task Roles

53

Level of Work Complexity in Single- and Multiple-Task Roles Ultimately, then, what is judged for the sake of determining level of work complexity is the quality of the judgment and discretion the worker must use or has used to get the task done. Discretion is required in addition to judgment because there are many subtleties of decision making that arise when pursuing a task, given the ever-­ changing environment in which tasks are brought to completion. For instance, a janitor typically works in a single-task role, although the task may be extended to include related, ancillary tasks. The level of work complexity of such a task is easily reviewed, especially if it unfolds within a pre-set time period (such as a single work day or night watch). On the side of the janitor himself, the discretionary content of his task has to do with a judgment about all situations that could interfere with the safety of the physical premises of the company building. This content can easily be reviewed by a superior by judging the quality of the janitor’s work in terms of the safety of the company building, following standard criteria of safety. Essentially, what is judged is not the work as a thing in itself, but the judgment and discretion the worker has exercised in completing the work. Multiple tasks characteristic of more complex roles may not be as easy to review in terms of their assigned discretionary content, either by the worker or the superior. This is due to the following reasons (Jaques, 1998b 33–43): what constitutes a multiple task may not always be easy to determine without further analysis of the work involved, especially of the starting time of tasks involved. In more detail: • Quality standards and maximum allowable time for the completion of multiple tasks may not be easy to determine. • A multiple task may fall into the “general responsibility” of a worker, where a task is started only when specific conditions occur (that fall under the worker’s discretion). • It may be hard to distinguish the completion point of an entire project (task basket) from subtasks constituting project modules. • The subtasks involved in a multiple-task role may overlap with each other. • Multiple-task roles may require a program of tasks the beginning and end of which are difficult to ascertain. • To identify the assigned discretionary content of a complex task, it may be necessary to understand “what the effects would be on the work done if marginally sub-standard discretion were used in the course of doing the work” (Jaques, 1998b, 51). Importantly, in all of these eventualities, “time span is neutral with regard to the relative importance of any particular task in a role” (Jaques, 1998b, 64). It is a common denominator by which to determine degree of discretion and judgment required by the task, where “judgment” regards decision points, and where “discretion” regards the (intuitive and ineffable) processing of how to resolve obstacles and goal conflicts on the way to goal completion. Clearly, then, the core characteristic of any

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task is a cognitive, not a behavioral one (as is typically assumed). Nor does it primarily have to do with information load but rather the quality of the analysis that information is subjected to.

Summary of Time Span The reader may ask why a discussion of the cognitive structure of organizations should start with a consideration of the time span over which a worker is required to exercise judgment and discretion regarding the pace and quality of work. S(he) may have concluded that there is little or no objectivity in determining level of work complexity. This is not how Jaques sees the matter, however. He never committed the dialectical error Bhaskar called “de-agentification” which is made whenever “work” is talked about as if it didn’t happen in real time. Thinking strictly in terms of real-time cognitive demands on the worker rather than abstract competences, Jaques’ focus is on the cognitive load carried by those who work in a role comprising multiple tasks. Cognitive load is defined by him by time span of discretion. On this basis, Jaques is putting forward a cognitive theory of work in which the judgment and discretion used by a worker form the central tenet. It is this tenet that links Jaques’ theory both to Dialectical Critical Realism and to research on adults’ cognitive development over the lifespan. Given a real-­ time framework for discussing work we can ask: what difference does the phase of dialectical thinking a worker is in make for the quality of his/her judgment and discretion? Or else: how does the quality of a worker’s judgment and discretion change from one phase of dialectical thinking to another, and with what impact on the quality of work s(he) delivers? The time span Jaques ascribes to a role is not a psychological or epistemological quality – which he calls Time Horizon, but an objective requirement of a role (not of a task). In Jaques’ view, the time span of a role can be ascertained either formally or informally. Formally, it is ascertained by a special time span interview (Jaques, 1998b), while informally, it can be judged by people who are sufficiently far removed from the work process itself, either as supervisors or “managers-once-removed.” When such people judge the cognitive load of a role within a particular corporate or institutional culture, their judgment can be considered as an objective fact (Jaques, 1998b, 27–28). As a result, while a cognitive interview is certainly the most professional way to determine task complexity, a superior’s judgment of the tasks in a role can equally be considered as defining the complexity level of an individual’s work. When combined with the judgment of other supervisors, such a judgment helps define an organization’s accountability architecture at large. In summary, time span measurement hinges on judgments made by three different individuals who are part of one and the same organizational culture:

Summary of Time Span

55

• The worker • The superior or manager who reviews the worker’s performance in the role • The “manager-once-removed” who has enough distance from the discretionary content assigned into the role by the manager to be sufficiently objective in expertly judging a task’s time span A cognitive theory of work makes sense since individually or conjointly, manager and subordinate can arrive at a consensus about the cognitive load of a specific role. While interest in the work, skilled knowledge involved, and psychological profile of the worker are relevant, they are secondary to the complexity of mental processing that is involved for the worker. It is the structure of the worker’s mental processing that decides whether the worker’s developmental Size of Person matches the cognitive complexity of his/her role. This complexity provides a common cognitive denominator that transcends psychological and other personal differences. From what we have now heard about Jaques’ approach to work as based on potential capability, it is evident that for him “work” is a developmental concept. Distinctions between levels of work complexity have to do with discrete and discontinuous steps of cognitive adult development, as outlined for children and adolescents by J. Piaget. The cognitive perspective adopted by Jaques leads me to three hypotheses: 1. The more highly a worker is cognitively developed, the larger is his or her time horizon. 2. The longer a worker’s time horizon, the longer is the time span of roles s(he) can take on. 3. A worker’s time horizon is a function of the phase of cognitive development s(he) is presently in (which, in DTF, can be succinctly determined empirically). In contrast to the approach followed in this book, which measures individuals’ cognitive development in terms of degree of integrative and systemic thinking (see Chaps. 3, 4, and 5), Jaques measures cognitive development in terms of “methods of information processing” (see Table 2.2).

Table 2.2  Jaques’ four methods of mental processing Disjunctive (declarative) thinking [“or”] A number of separate ideas are brought forward, with no connections made between them

Conjunctive (cumulative) thinking [“and”] A number of separate ideas are brought forward, none of which makes a case but together they do

Conditional (serial) thinking [“if”] A line of thought is constructed from a sequence of ideas, each of which leads to the next, thus creating a chain

Bi-conditional (parallel) thinking [“iff”] A number of alternative positions (ideas) are investigated, each arrived at by conditional thinking, and held in parallel, going back and forth between the chains

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Accountability Architecture and Stratum of Role We have seen so far that level of work complexity can be defined and measured based on time span of role, or the longest time span during which judgment and discretion must be brought to bear on tasks taken on in a role. We now need to understand more deeply how the notion of time span enables us to distinguish different company echelons or Strata in terms of their respective work complexity. To understand Jaques’ argument regarding organizational structure in full, we need to put the notion of Strata into a broader context, namely, that of levels of work in the organic world (2002a). In this broader context, work done by humans occurs in a language suffused world (Jaques, 2002a 157–220), in contrast to work in the “pre-linguistic world” of other organisms. As shown in Fig. 2.4, infants older than 15 months develop a “verbal self” (Stern, 1985) that increasingly sets them apart from the pre-linguistic world of animals with whom they share important characteristics of mental processing. On account of their development of formal logic between ages 10 and 25, they fully transition into the Second, and potentially Third, Order of mental processing where high-level human work is largely done. Because of their development of a verbal self and – based upon it – of formal logical thinking, from infancy on human beings grow further and further beyond the pre-linguistic world. Language grounds their thinking. They move from formal logical to post-formal dialectical thinking (Basseches, 1984). As a result, the mental space within which work is carried out by humans  – Jaques’ Time Horizon  – increases in comparison to that of other organisms and less developed humans (2002a, 91) (Table 2.1).

Emergent Core self self (0–2

Subject ive self

Verbal self

(6–15

Fig. 2.4  Emergence of the verbal self in human infants (Stern, 1985)

(Lifetime, in months)

Accountability Architecture and Stratum of Role

57

Table 2.1  Development of time horizon in human infants Approximate age range Up to 3–4 months 4–9 months 9 months to 1 ½ years 1 ½ years onward

Time horizon Up to 60 seconds Seconds to minutes Minutes 1/2 hour to 2 hours

Method of mental processing Disjunctive Conjunctive Serial Parallel

When trying to explain cognitive development, Jaques remained a student of Piaget. He came to the conclusion that the widening of adult Time Horizon, concomitant with the development of formal-logical thinking, could be seen as deriving from the four logical copulas, namely, AND, OR, IF, and IFF (if and only if). Given what I have said about stance, or epistemic positioning to the world (for details see Book 1, Chapter 2), one might adopt rather the opposite hypothesis, namely that use of methods of mental processing is based on time horizon, not the other way around. In any case, Jaques thought that what he called methods of information processing could explain – rather than just categorize – cognitive development (1994, 69–70): The four logical or reasoning processes comprise two non-conditional processes: or (vel, v), disjunctive; and (ut, inverted v), conjunctive; and two conditional processes, if-then-then (conditional); and if-and-only-if (bi-conditional).

As a result, he proposed that adults follow the four following information processing methods (Table 2.2): In disjunctive thinking, unrelated ideas are brought forward, and the connection of ideas is never made. Increasingly, however, ideas, although not explicitly related, are sequenced in such a way as to make it easy for a listener to infer their relationship. Explicit connection of ideas has to await serial thinking, in its most obvious form, conditional thinking. When that type of thinking has been mastered, individuals gradually learn to entertain two streams of thought simultaneously, moving from one to the other. With each step in this sequence, individuals’ Time Horizon increases. In a short Time Horizon (typically using the first two methods), complex subject matter cannot be properly dealt with. To go back and forth between two streams of thought requires an even larger mental space. To make his categorization practicable, Jaques developed interview methods to tell these methods apart when listening to speech. His principles of listening are straightforward (1994, 131): 1. First, determine whether an individual’s thinking pattern is parallel, going back and forth between two separate but implicit trains of thought. 2. Second, if not, attend to the pattern of the development of the argument and observe whether the pattern is serial or non-serial (leads to another thought or not). 3. Third, if the pattern is non-serial, ask yourself whether it is disjunctive or conjunctive. 4. Fourth, if the pattern is serial (leading from one thought to another in a “logical” fashion), ask if it is composed of one or more unconnected series of arguments

2  A Cognitive Theory of Work in Organizations

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without a weaving back and forth between them; if so, it is conditional; otherwise it is parallel. 5. Fifth, decide whether the individual is using Second or Third Order processing. The last strategy, of distinguishing between two Orders of Mental Processing, is not well specified in Jaques’ work. (This marks the difference between his work and the dialectical approach of this book.) Although in Human Capability (1994), he gives discourse examples of differences between them that are common-sensical enough, not much more than “a higher level of abstraction” is proposed for the Third Order. Although highly aware of the fact that cognitive development leading to this order is focused on the development of systemic thinking (1998a, 69), Jaques proposes that the transition is simply a matter of using the same four methods of processing characteristic of the Second Order, only at a higher level of abstraction: Here [in the Third Order] we move into one of the most interesting and important of all orders of complexity. It is the level at which human beings construct unified whole systems … At Stratum V [where the Third Order begins, OL], you have to cope by means of direct action [i.e., disjunctively] with a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of events and consequences with far too many variables to map on a PERT chart. You must sense inter-­ connections between the variables in the organization and the environment and continually adjust them in relation to each other with a sensing of all the internal and environmental 2nd and 3rd effects.

Seen in terms of the subsequent chapters of this monograph and the Manual of Dialectical Thought Forms found in Book 3, Jaques’ characterization of higher-­ order thinking emphasizes the following points (for details see Table 2.3): • Third Order thinking entails constructing “unified whole systems,” leading to an expansion of one’s time horizon to between 5 and 10 years. Table 2.3  Organizational strata defined by their associated methods of mental processing Managerial accountability architecture (MAA) Order of mental complexity [Strata]a Third order of mental complexityb VIII Board Member VII CEO VI Executive VP V President Second order of mental complexity IV General Manager III Unit Manager II First Line Manager I Shop and Office

Human capability architecture (HCA) Method of mental Scope of time horizon processing 50 years 25 years 10–20 years 5–10 years

C4 C3 C2 C1

Bi-conditional Conditional Conjunctive Disjunctive

2–5 years 1–2 years 3 months to 1 year 1 day to 3 months

B4 B3 B2 B1

Bi-conditional Conditional Conjunctive Disjunctive

The labels in column 2 refer to familiar organizational job descriptions for purposes of illustration Third Order methods of mental processing, according to Jaques, are methods of Second Order Complexity exercised on a “higher level of abstraction” [the meaning of which remains unspecified] a

b

Accountability Architecture and Stratum of Role

59

• The complexity of the world encountered in this order is due to a perception of unceasing change and complex relationships in the world. • In the first layer of this order (Stratum V), the thinker confronts a world of complex interconnections between variables that were previously kept under wraps even in the low-level parallel thinking practiced at Stratum IV. Table 2.3 exemplifies Jaques’ notion that no more than four methods of mental processing are used by adults across organizational echelons (Strata). To justify this notion, Jaques has recourse to the notion that these methods are “recursive.” They recur at higher levels of cognitive development, only at a higher level of abstraction. However, this justification obliges one to define the difference between levels of abstractions as they influence the use of these methods. From a cognitive-­developmental point of view, Jaques’ justification begs the question it is meant to answer. Relying on the recurrence, in the Third Order, of the methods of mental processing used in the Second Order, Jaques defines the cognitive structure of organizations in terms of eight echelons or “Strata.” For instance, disjunctive thinking occurs at both Stratum I and V, and likewise for the other three methods. What differs between Strata is only the “level of abstraction” at which these methods are used, and this difference is never clearly defined in Jaques’ work. It is certainly not a developmental one as in this book. Importantly, as shown in column 3 of Table  2.3, Time Horizon, the ability to envision the future, and thus the mental space of thinking itself, increases, especially in the Third Order. In many ways, the boundary between the two orders is analogous to, and resembles, the social-emotional boundary between Kegan-levels S-3 and S-4 (see Table 2.4). Table 2.4  Requisite organization seen in terms of social-emotional, cognitive, and judgment development Social-­ Emotional Strata within Orders Stage of Mental Complexity [Kegan] Third order of mental complexity VIII 5 VII 5/4 – 5(4) VI 4(5) – 4/5 V 4 Second order of mental complexity IV 4/3 – 4(3) III 3(4) – 3/4 II 3 I 2/3 – 3(2)

Stage of Reflective Judgment [King/Kitchener]

Phase of Dialectical Thinking [Basseches]

Associated Fluidity Indexa [Basseches]

7

4

>50

6

3

> 30 < 50

5

2

> 10 < 30

4

1

50, more precisely it is 7 × 3 × 4 = 84. See Appendix 1 a

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In terms of my own assessment experience, it is the transition from Second to Third Order of Mental Complexity that frequently is the main stumbling block in executive and leadership development. When the zone of this transition is assessed in terms of the use of dialectical thought forms, as proposed in this book, the crucial difference between the two orders turns on the ability of systemic thinking that Jaques thought required for Stratum V. In the context of public institutions, I have referred to this transition as having to do with crossing the “post-bureaucratic boundary.”

Summary of Strata We have seen that both in his theory of work and of organizations, Jaques focuses on the cognitive load an individual carries when pursuing a particular kind of work. Rather than fixing attention on competences, personality, etc., Jaques focuses on the features of work in real time, regardless of its kind, proposing that work is an undertaking based on using reflective judgment and discretion. From this insight, he infers that a comparison is in order between the complexity of the work to be done and the complexity of thinking of the person who does the work or, as he puts it, between Size of Person and Size of Role. When considering the consequences of this train of thought for the Managerial Accountability Architecture (MAA) we can draw some cogent conclusions regarding the differences between work on different Strata, that is, different levels of work complexity. As we know, these differences depend on time span of discretion for both single and multiple tasks. From this notion follow a number of cognitively based “job descriptions” that we can state in the form of questions to ourselves as process consultants (Jaques, 1998a, 72): 1. Can the work be done by following an assigned plan to a goal, overcoming obstacles by direct-action trial and error as you meet them on the way? – Str-I. 2. Does the work to be done require the articulation and accumulation of data which are judged significant for the output, and a diagnostic judgment based upon linking those data? – Str-II. 3. Does the work to be done require the use of serial processing in the construction of, and choice of, a plan that balances future requirements against current activity, and a holding in reserve of other plans that might be brought into play if the selected plan does not work out? – Str-III. 4. Does the work to be done require a number of interactive projects to be undertaken and adjusted, each one in relation to each of the others? – Str-IV. 5. Does the work require a continual touch-feel sensing of how changes occurring anywhere in the project can impact upon the system to which the project is related, leading to direct actions that take into account the probable immediate and downstream consequences that cascade through the whole system? – Str-V.

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6. Does the work to be done require a continual screening of the relevant business environment to identify and favorably influence any and all developments there which might have significance for the projects in hand? – Str-VI. 7. Does the work to be done require the development of worldwide strategic options and the creation of business units, by growth, acquisition, mergers, joint ventures? – Str-VII. 8. [OL] Does the work to be done require the evaluation of a number of parallel developments (e.g., in global markets) that are likely to influence the future mission and planned operations of the company and all of its worldwide branches? – Str-VIII. What is striking in these questions is the steady increase in importance of apperception of unceasing change, “big picture,” internal and explicit relationships, and systems in transformation. Jaques’ worker is not a figment of the (neo-) tayloristic imagination in which s(he) shows up as a disembodied, de-agentified abstraction.

Review of Requisite Organization By now, it will be clear to the reader that Jaques’ notion of “Stratum” not only refers to different levels of work complexity and the accountability associated with them, but also implies a comparison between work assigned to a role and the capabilities of the person in the role. The notion of Stratum therefore defines a standard against which actual work capability can be measured. The standard applies to both the work and the worker. We can summarize Jaques’ notion of what it entails to balance the requirements of HCA and MAA as follows: 1. Organizations are composed of two Architectures, the Human Capability Architecture (HCA) and the Managerial Accountability Architecture (MAA). 2. In terms of capability, the first is referred to in terms of “Size of Person,” while the second is referred to as “Size of Role.” 3. The two architectures are subdivided into eight layers called Strata. 4. Each Stratum matches a level of organizational accountability in MAA against a level of cognitive development in HCA. 5. Accordingly, each subsequent organizational Stratum requires a higher level of cognitive development, commensurate with the level of organizational accountability in the role. 6. Wherever an individual is working in a role that is “beyond” his or her level of cognitive development, the individual is “in over his/her head” since s(he) cannot deal with the level of work complexity and accountability assigned into the role.

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7. In order to become requisitely organized, an organization or institution needs to match its HCA and MAA architectures. 8. In terms of human capital, Requisite Organization (RO) is a matter of matching Size of Person in HCA with Size of Role in MAA. 9. However, RO is also a matter of putting in place the right number of Strata, not too few and not too many, with no overlaps and replications. 10. If an organization or institution comprises too many Strata, its accountability differences are diluted and entire groups of positions don’t add value (except perhaps political value). 11. If an organizational or institution comprises too few strata, those working on different strata are “in over their heads” due to having been assigned more responsibility than a single individual can cognitively and otherwise muster.

Critique of Jaques’ Notion of Requisite Organization We saw in Table 2.3 that Jaques’ notion of bringing requisite organization into a company or institution exclusively relies on levels of cognitive development, and that these levels are one-sidedly defined by him in terms of a set of recursive methods of mental processing. What is more, Jaques’ work lacks validated empirical methods by which level of cognitive development in terms of methods of mental processing beyond logical methods of information processing can be accurately assessed. Simple typologies do not capture the richness of individuals’ thinking, and certainly cannot serve as tools in interventions geared to develop contributors as thinkers. Nevertheless, Jaques’ cognitive approach is highly original and promising, especially if attention is paid to the design of organizations in terms of the correct number of strata (http://www.globalro.org/). The main flaw in Jaques’ definition of RO is the same that comes across in his notion of potential capability. Because it is bound to Jean Piaget’s notion of the development of logical thinking, Jaques’ notion of developmental potential is not broad enough to account for the social-emotional strand of adult development, not to speak of the absence of dialectical thinking in his conception of potential capability. Another line of development Jaques does not empirically account for is the development of reflective judgment which is the topic of Book 1, Chapter 2. For these reasons, Jaques’ notion of the Human Capability Architecture (HCA) is not ample enough. It is also short-changed by his emphasis on the Managerial Accountability Architecture (MAA), a dominance hierarchy that leaves the HCA as a mental growth hierarchy out of account. By restricting potential capability to cognitive development in the domain of logic (Understanding) and excluding dialectical thinking, Jaques and his followers privilege the right (UR, LR) over the left Wilber quadrants (UL, LL), and this naturally skews their methods of “social engineering,” restricting it to closed systems.

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The Author’s Perspective on Jaques’ Work These limitations of Jaques’ thinking do not, however, diminish Jaques’ epistemological accomplishments. Nor do his followers, limited as they are to purely logical thinking and lacking developmental assessment methods, live up to his achievements (https://globalro.org/). Jaques’ notion of Requisite Organization is a first vital step toward evidence-based rather than fashion- and buzzword-driven management. When expanding our notion of Requisite Organization sufficiently to comprise lines of development other than formal-logical thinking, and include what is known today about social-emotional stages Inquiring Systems (Book 1, Chapter 1), stages of reflective judgment (Book 1, Chapter 2), and phases of dialectical thinking development (Book 1, Chapter 3), we arrive at the following overview of organizational Strata: Table 2.5 displays the theoretical foundations of assessment work, teaching, and consulting at the Interdevelopmental Institute, which is based on the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF; www.interdevelopmentals.org). The table displays the Capability Management Hypothesis that underlies work with (CDF). This framework grounds a decision theory for organizational human resources that transcends competence theories in that it points to what constitutes competences in the first place, viz., a person’s applied and potential work capability. As seen, Table 2.4 hypothesizes a relationship between levels of work accountability and associated methods of mental processing, on one hand, and levels of social-emotional, epistemic, and cognitive capability, on the other. This is further detailed in Fig. 2.5. The figure suggests that the best way to view adult cognitive development is to see it as a journey in which individuals develop a personal knowledge system (Martin, 2007b). One way to characterize the system is to view it as a feedback loop between three pivotal notions referred to by Martin as Stance, Tools, and Experience (2007b, 103, courtesy HBS Publishing). We can interpret Fig. 2.5 as follows: • Stance determines who I think I am, thus what stance I take in dealing with the social as well as physical world. Stance is rooted both in social-emotional and Table 2.5  Types of work in relation to level of epistemic abstraction (thus level of cognitive development), as Seen by Jaques Method of mental processing Disjunctive (declarative) Conjunctive (accumulative) Conditional (serial) Bi-conditional (parallel)

Treatment of abstractions Abstractions cannot be linked, thus remain disjunct Abstractions can be linked, but not coordinated Abstractions can be coordinated; abstract mapping skills Abstractions can be coordinated into systems; abstract systems skills

Stratum Type of work I, V Direct action II, VI

Diagnostic data accumulation III, VII Alternative goal paths IV, VIII Parallel goal paths

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Fig. 2.5  Interaction of stance, tools, and experience in a personal knowledge system (Martin, 2007a, b; Copyright Harvard Business School Press)

epistemic development and cannot be “taught” (Book 1, Chapters 2, 5; Laske, 2023a). • Tools determine what cognitive techniques and models I am able to use in constructing and acting upon the world, as a result of holding a particular Stance. • Experience (coinciding with Consciousness) is the continuously updated transformational system of consciousness in which Stance and Tools interact with each other and with Experience. As shown in Fig.  2.5 whatever we undertake as a social and cultural agent is based on our Stance, i.e., the way we presently position ourselves to the world of others and the world at large. Stance is defined by our social-emotional positioning which determines both how the world shows up for us, and how we decide to act in it. Our activities are based on Tools which, for the most part, are of a cognitive nature, not material tools, and may include psychological skills. However, the component of foremost important is “how we think,” meaning how, on account of Tools, we presently conceptualize the social and physical worlds. It is the interaction between Stance and Tools that shapes our Experiences in the world. Importantly, there is a pervasive feedback loop in that the three components of agency – Stance, Tools, and Experience – not only guide but unceasingly inform each other. For that reason, our adult development is informed by our experiences which, in turn, are guided by Stance and Tools. Figure 2.6 recasts Fig. 2.5 in strictly cognitive terms. It spells out more clearly how what is empirically known about meaning making, epistemic position, and sense making can account for how human experience shapes and is shaped as adult development unfolds over individuals’ lifetime. Above, consciousness is depicted as a feedback loop between social-emotional meaning making, epistemic position (stage of reflective judgment), and phase (amplitude) of dialectical thinking. The hypothesis implies that social-emotional

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Consciousness

Classes of Thought Forms P

C

R

T

Individual Thought Forms Speech Flow Concepts (Abstractions)

Formal Logic

Stage of Refl. Judgment Social-Emoonal Stage Fig. 2.6  Horizontal and vertical flow of thought based on stage of reflective judgment (epistemic position) and social-emotional stage

stage influences epistemic position, and that both together define an individual’s Stance, while the phase of dialectical thinking an individual is in determines his/her (set of) Tools. Depending on Stance (manifest in individuals’ internal conversations made explicit through speech), thinking move out of purely logical thinking (mature at age 25) into dialectical thinking to different degrees that indicate their cognitive level of development. Experience (Fig. 3.5) is shaped by both Stance and Tools, and recursively shapes re-shapes them, thereby developing them further (except if mental health issues intervene). Figure 2.6 implies that Stance and Tools are always in balance, in the sense that the cognitive Tools I am using are always commensurate with the Stance I am taking toward the world as an object of my knowing. In fact, Stance could be seen as a selective mechanism that determines what Tools I can presently use (logic only, logic and dialectic), and what Tools are not “at hand” for me. Stance and Tools together define my present cognitive profile which becomes manifest in speech. Suffusion in language makes both of them increasingly transparent (Jaques, 2002b; Liebrucks, 1964–1965). To summarize, below I spell out the hypothesis implicit in Fig. 2.6 as it is formulated in CDF: • The development of an individual’s consciousness is reflected in three interrelated dimensions: social-emotional, epistemic, and cognitive, all of which can be empirically researched by scrutinizing human speech by interview (see Appendix 1).

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• The social-emotional development of “subject-object relations” (Kegan, 1982; Kegan & Lahey, 1994) has a direct impact on the stage of reflective judgment (King & Kitchener, 1994), thus the Stance an individual takes regarding certainty of knowledge and truth, and the way they justify beliefs. • Stage of reflective judgment is an “epistemic” issue in that it determines the limits of knowing for an individual. Specifically, it determines what cognitive tools (such as concepts, models, frameworks) can be acquired, first through the development of formal logic between ages 10 and 25 (Understanding), and onward through the development of dialectical thinking starting in late adolescence (Reason). • Formal and dialectical logic communicate via classes of thought forms and individual thought forms such that formal logic operates as an integral element of post-formal, dialectical thinking. • Reason in the sense of dialectical thinking is based on four classes of thought forms – Process, Content, Relationship, and Transformational System. They are reflections in consciousness of the four Moments of Dialectic and articulate four dimensions of reality conceived in a holistic and systemic manner.

Updating Jaques’ Notions Revisiting Potential Capability We now have some interesting tools for revisiting the notion of Potential Capability introduced by Jaques. Speaking in terms of Fig. 2.5, Jaques one-sidedly emphasizes Tools and neglects the Stance that characterizes personal knowledge systems. (Research in adult development typically emphasizes Stance over Tools which, in the end, comes to the same: reduction of the complexity of mental processing.) As a result, what Jaques sees as cognitive development is somewhat impoverished, since it remains restricted to formal logic tools, excluding further developments toward dialectical thinking. At the same time, he calls for integrative and systemic thinking for work in roles beyond Stratum IV, but cannot properly articulate its nature and thus cannot teach it either. As a result, Jaques fails to explain how adults move from one Stratum to another just as Loevinger as much as Kegan fails to explain how adults move from one social-emotional stage to another. Jaques simply issues a maturational fiat, that of “maturation bands,” thereby usefully critiquing the equi-linearity of the two best-­ known lines of adult development, cognitive and social-emotional maintained by Loevinger and Kegan. In Jaques’ case, these bands are generalized from behavioral observations regarding salary history, and then turned into meta-psychological categories by him. Since social-emotional and epistemic notions are excluded from Jaques’ theory of capability, he gives us no clues as to what guides an individual’s choice of methods of mental processing, and how such methods, when applied, influence Stance (including time horizon).

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However, the fact that Jaques thought of decision making and problem solving as ineffable (2002a) shows his sensitivity to what is stance. Nobody can ever spell out her epistemic position, as little as one can spell out one’s level of meaning making or cognitive profile. Figures 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6 usefully remind us that notions like “problem solving” or “decision making,” touted by those who write about the Managerial Accountability Architecture (MAA), rest on very shallow, strictly behavioral grounds. Most of those who write about MAA are unaware of the grounding of these human activities in the unfolding of adult consciousness over an individual’s entire lifespan, never making cogent distinctions between the components involved.

Revisiting Complexity of Work We saw that complexity of work in single- as well as multiple-task roles is a function of Time Span, an aspect of Role. We also saw that Time Horizon (foresight), the subjective correlate of Time Span, grows with level of cognitive development. The more complex a particular kind of work, the larger is the required Time Horizon. As Jaques the constructivist states (1998a, 64): The complexity of a problem does not lie in the complexity of the goal, but in the complexity of the pathway that has to be constructed and then traversed in order to get to the goal.

Pathways to a goal undergo historical shifts. For instance, getting from St. Louis to San Francisco in the nineteenth century on the first wagon train was much more complex than flying a plane between the two cities in the twenty-first century. The goal, “getting to San Francisco,” remains the same, but the pathway to the goal is much simplified (at least for the traveler). This goes to show that historical developments, especially in technology, reduce work and role complexity, pushing a particular task to a lower Stratum over time. In short, work complexity is a notion that is relative to the dominant technology, and so is the time span of tasks in a given role. But not only is work complexity in terms of Tools a relative notion, it is also relative in terms of Stance, in the sense of my position in the real world. Depending on my Stance as to who I am in social-emotional and epistemic terms, what is complex for me today is a very different thing from what was complex for me a decade ago. As my consciousness develops, the complexity of certain tasks decreases for me, simply because I can hold in mind a bigger picture of my world and task environment than previously. As this shows, Tools and Stance stand in an always shifting relationship to each other. An increase in complexity of my own consciousness simultaneously decreases and increases the complexity of what I am encountering in the world. On the one hand, I now have a surer grasp of tools by which I can decode and understand what I am encountering. But, at the same time, given my advanced Tools and Stance, I am now able to spot implications in problems that previously were invisible to me and

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that complexify my awareness of complexity in the world. I am more developed but never better off. Jaques’ notion of work includes “inner work” and implicitly honors this dialectic. He makes these important points in regard to complexity of work (1998a, 64): • Complexity of work does not lie in the complexity of the goal, or of the task, but in constructing and traversing paths to goals (which are moving targets). • Work consists of choosing existing goal pathways and constructing new ones, as well as modifying them as one encounters unforeseeable difficulties in traversing a particular goal path. • Constructing and traversing goal paths requires “thinking” as a “loosening and bifurcation process,” and the higher the level of cognitive development, the more differentiated is this process. • Obeying known rules, scripts, and regulations is not WORK in the sense of exercising reflective judgment and discretion, but rather equals the behavior of a machine, mechanical or digital. In short, human work is by nature based on people’s internal conversations that no “job description” can capture. These internal conversations are structured developmentally, fusing social-emotional, epistemic, and cognitive components in a way presently beyond our scientific reach. External factors cannot describe work, however important the context is in which work is done. When looked at closely, even menial-seeming jobs show unexpected complexity.

Strata and Their Associated Types of Work A short summary is called for at this point. We have now discussed the following topics: • Organizations are based on two architectures, one representing the left (HCA), the other the right, quadrants (MAA). • The Managerial Accountability Architecture (MAA) can be defined in terms of Strata. • Strata determine the complexity of Roles whose complexity can be defined in terms of social-emotional and cognitive scores, thus in terms of HCA, the Human Capability Architecture. • “Work” (delivery) is based on the worker’s internal conversations that are the basis of his/her external conversations with others. • Following Jaques, “work” is, at its core, a cognitive pursuit in which Stance and Tools are of equal relevance. • Stance and Experience together determines what Tools are withing a worker’s reach.

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• Stance is determined both social-emotionally and in terms of epistemic position (stage of reflective judgment). • Tools are a matter of methods of mental processing; such methods are broader than envisioned by Jaques in that they transcend logical, and extend to dialectical, thinking. • Second Order Mental Processing tools differ from Third Order tools not in terms of “level of abstraction” but in terms of the complexity of dialectical thinking the user of cognitive tools is capable of. We saw in Table 2.3 that Strata, in Jaques’ mind, are associated with recursive methods of mental processing, named after the four logical copulas. We also saw that this characterization of Strata is one-sidedly focused on tools, leaving out of consideration not only epistemic stance, but also social-emotional level. Despite these shortcomings, Jaques has given us additional means to understand the uniqueness of individual Strata, by associating them with a particular approach to work. This topic is taken up below. Since a particular method of mental processing, seen in light of both Stance and Tools, influences the way work is approached and carried out, one can distinguish types of work based on the method of mental processing used. In correspondence with the four methods, Jaques distinguishes four such types, described in Table 2.5: • • • •

Direct action Diagnostic data accumulation Alternative goal paths Parallel goal paths

As seen in the table, one and the same method of mental processing is thought to apply to different Strata, depending on the “level of abstraction” of the decision maker’s thinking. In terms of Table 3.4 this entails that as we move from Second to Third Order of Mental Processing at Stratum V, we are moving to another level of abstraction. This is an insufficient characterization of the fact that we are actually moving from formal logical to systemic and dialectical thinking as implied by Jaques himself (1998a, 69; 64–72). In the context of recent thinking about work design, e.g., the replacement of “vertical” governance rules (that Jaques had in mind) by either “horizontal” or “heterarchical” rules (e.g., sociocracy), one needs to remember that social governance rules per se do not change the core structure of mental processing required in the pursuit of tasks. Horizontal or heterarchical governance rules have to do with communication “about” work rather than the mental processes by which work is delivered; they are of a social rather than an epistemological nature in that they link the dominance architecture (MAA) to the capability architecture (HCA). However, adepts of one or the other concept of governance rules never discuss this important link, untouched by developmental and dialectical thinking as they are.

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While in the language-suffused organizational world of work, new governance rules do change the way of how work is communicated about by collaborators, they do not alter the structure, only the content of the mental processes by which work is carried out. These rules do, however, determine the degree to which work is “scripted,” to a point where work stops being “work” in Jaques’ sense simply because it is over-scripted. Over-scripted work deteriorates into routine, especially when purely instrumentalist use is made of work support tools such as today’s generative A.I. Of course, verbal communication “about” work is part of the tasks work comprises and requires. However, verbal communication about work, whatever governance rules workers may follow, is guided by people’s internal conversations in terms of which they deliver work, and these conversations, once externalized, are a developmental and social matter rather than an epistemological one. Also, while switching from hierarchical to heterarchical or horizontal governance rules changes the MAA power structure within which work is done, as such it does not alter the “growth hierarchy,” of stages of meaning making and phases of dialectical thinking that defines the Human Capability Architecture (HCA). The first is of a social and cultural nature and habitually conceptualized in strictly behavioral terms, while the second is adult-developmental and of an epistemological nature, and so far has been of no relevance in management science.

Jaques’ Four Different Categories of Work A. Work as Direct Action (Str-I and V) Disjunctive Thinking [based on the logical “or”] A number of separate ideas [or actions] is brought forward, with no connections made between them.

Wherever tasks assigned tasks are formulated in terms of outputs one can concretely illustrate by way of examples, there is certainty that one can reach one’s goal simply by taking action (“direct action”). In such a case, a goal path and associated methods are specified (implicitly or explicitly), and the only problem is how to overcome obstacles along the way. When obstacles occur, one must leave the prescribed pathway and cry for help from the next higher stratum. Therefore, lengthy considerations of what the goal should be, and of how to plan for reaching the goal become unnecessary (Jaques, 1998a, 65 and 69). Today, more and more work in organizations, on account of digitization, is of this scripted type, which, one might say, violates Jaques’ notion of work and, more principally, sets limits for work as a medium of adult development, at least in the cognitive dimension. The worker’s main effort in this type of work is simply to “go ahead” based on a simplistic script, relying on outside help if things go wrong. This

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GOAL

Help!

obstacle

Fig. 2.7  Work of type “direct action” (disjunctive judgments)

procedure is clearly more suited to single-task roles since in those one can simply do what one is told. When this type of work is applied in multi-task roles, major problems arise, however. In terms of cognitive development, the disjunctive thinking practiced is myopically formal-logical, without any inkling of the complexity of the world it is applied to. This case is illustrated in Fig. 2.7. A scripted or disjunctive-thinking approach to work becomes even more problematic when applied at a higher accountability level such as Stratum V, regardless of whether work is done according to vertical or horizontal (sociocratic) governance rules. Here we are dealing with what Jaques called Unified Direct Action, where “unified” is meant to convey the higher order of complexity encountered in the Third Order of Mental Complexity. On this Stratum “you must take higher order intangible variables into account, in contrast to the directly observable situation dealt with at Str-I” (Jaques, 1998a, 69). Here we move into one of the most interesting and important of all orders of complexity. It is the level at which human beings construct unified whole systems. It is the first level of operation where the full-scale business unit needs to be located. (Time span of role, 5 years to 10 years.) At Str-V the person must judge the likely impact of changes or events – both from outside the business unit system and from inside it – on any and all parts of the system, to pick out those parts where the impact is likely to be important, to trace the likely 2nd and 3rd order consequences of those impacts, and to sustain an active anticipation of what changes are likely to unfold.

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As Jaques is attempting to convey, work at Stratum V requires systemic thinking. The thinking on this Stratum is “unified” in the sense that it is based on holding a more systemic picture of situations, and also on seeing relationships that disjunctive thinking proper cannot fully do justice to. As he indicates, without the ability to think systemically and in terms of process, a worker on Str-V will be unable to fulfill his mandate. As shown in this book, systemic thinking is properly called “transformational,” in that a system, seen in dialectical terms, is by definition identical with itself only by unceasingly transforming itself, just like an organism does. This ability is what defines living systems, including human systems which are constituted by the human beings that compose them. For this reason, all systems show limits of identity, durability, and maintainability.

B. Work as Diagnostic Data Accumulation (Str-II and VI) When work to be delivered can no longer be completely specified by example or script, and therefore requires interpretation, the problem arises of what is the “right” information to get a job done. Although you may know linear pathways to the goal, you have to know what is the significant data, to be able to choose one over the other (Jaques, 1998a, 66): At Str-II, an individual not only overcomes immediate obstacles by direct action as they are encountered but must be able to reflect on what is occurring so as to note things that might indicate potential problems and obstacles; and must accumulate and consciously sort such data to diagnose emerging problems, and initiate actions to prevent or overcome the problems identified.

Conjunctive Thinking [based on the logical “and”] A number of separate ideas [or actions] are brought forward, none of which makes a case but together they do.

As a result, the scope of discretion, as well as the associated time horizon, grow. Missing or significant information requires more room for reflection, and decision making is no longer straightforward. Missing information must be recognized and obtained, following one’s own judgment. While removing obstacles along the way remains an important objective of work, judging what is missing or significant data requires more highly abstract thinking and thus, a longer time horizon (Fig. 2.8). At Str-VI, we fully enter the realm of the Third Order of Mental Complexity. Here, more than a single system comes into play. As Jaques states (1998a, 70): Up to Str-V, tasks take place inside the boundary of a unified system. At Str-VI complexity is not so readily contained. We have moved across the great organizational divide into the corporate world. (Time span of role, 10 years to 20 years.) At Str-VI, you must develop networks so as to accumulate diagnostic information. The focus of the work is on worldwide networking in any and all areas likely to be significant to the corporation in a given field of endeavor. … You must accumulate significant data (as in

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GOAL

Important data

obstacle

Fig. 2.8  Work as diagnostic accumulation (conjunctive judgments) task complexity at Str-II, but conceptual abstract in complexity, worldwide and unbounded), and screen out the less significant.

In sum, the “loosening and bifurcation process” that is thinking is more complex than on Stratum V.  The strands that were easily unified previously have become more diverse. A larger time horizon and more highly systemic ways of thinking therefore become a necessity. In terms of dialectical thinking, there needs to be more thought-form coordination leading to transformational thinking.

 . Work Based on Finding Alternative Goal Paths C (Str-III and VII) Serial (conditional) thinking [based on the logical “if”] A line of thought [or action] is constructed from a sequence of ideas, each of which leads to the next, thus creating a chain.

Constructing alternative pathways to a goal is a serial process. One must be able to envision alternative ways of achieving a set goal and understand the complexity of the goal path with sufficient foresight. This requires a higher-order understanding of processes, contexts, and relationships. To measure up to work of this complexity (Jaques, 1998a, 67): You must not only use direct judgment plus diagnostic accumulation but must also be able to encompass the whole process within a plan that has a pathway to goal completion that

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GOAL A1

A2

C2

B2

C3

C1 B1

A

B

C

Split ting of goal path into alternative paths

Fig. 2.9  Work as the pursuit of alternative goal paths (serial judgments)

you have worked out in the first place– and have pre-planned alternative pathways to change to if need be. Proceeding down one of a number of previously constructed pathways is … a serial process, for you must keep in mind the possibility of switching to an alternative choice if you run into difficulties.

In this mode of work, in addition to conquering obstacles and accumulating significant data, it now becomes crucial to be able to discern opportunities for following alternative goal paths. Once goal paths split up, as in Fig.  2.9, the need to coordinate such paths becomes evident. Strictly logical thinking may not suffice since without a systemic view of the envisioned goal (as something undergoing transformation), not much progress can be made. The existence of more than a single goal path may actually put formal logical thinking into a subsidiary position. Foremost becomes the need to attend to divergent goal paths simultaneously, in parallel. This invites or requires an even higher type of work, based on bi-­conditional (parallel) thinking. Even when exercising this kind of work on Stratum III, in the Second Order of Mental Complexity, short- and longer-term goals must be held in balance. How far they should overlap becomes a topic of discretion (which is mightily empowered by using dialectical thought forms which call up alternatives). As a result, one must exercise contextual knowledge filtered through criteria of reflective judgment

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(King & Kitchener, 1994, 15) and in addition use relational if not transformational thought forms. This way of working necessitates a further broadening of time horizon in which a “big picture” of problems associated with a task can arise. While formal logical thinking remains important in the context of this type of work, there are more and more aspects of the work that require dialectical thinking. When serial (conditional) thinking is practiced on Stratum VII, we move to the level of executive leadership – the CEOs, COOs, and presidents of large corporations. Cultures, values, and economies push to the forefront (Jaques, 1998a, 71): At Str-VII, the corporate CEO must develop and pursue alternative world-wide strategic plans, producing Str-V BUs [business units] by development, acquisitions, mergers and joint ventures, drawing upon internationally supported financial resourcing. Each option [available on this stratum] constitutes a pathway that in turn is made up of a series of possible choice-points (as at Str-III). At the corporate level, these choice points are optimally set for strategic planning at 1-year, 3-years, 7-years, and 10-years to capture the short-term, mid-term, and long-term consequences. Each of these strategic option pathways must be construed as a series of conceptual abstract intangible sets, since even the near-term choice-points have to be construed in terms of their long-term intangible context, and all of the sets making up a pathway have to be analyzed in relation to one another. By possessing a range of optional pathways, a CEO can adjust quickly and flexibly to the fibrillating vicissitudes of international business life.

As we will see in following chapters, while Jaques’ characterization of knowledge required in work at levels beyond Str-IV does not make it clear that dialectical knowledge is an absolute requirement, problems encountered at these Strata pose the most powerful challenge to practice dialectic, that is, holistic and systemic, thinking in a way that far transcends purely logical thinking.

D. Work as Pursuit of Parallel Goal Paths (Str-IV and VIII) Parallel (bi-conditional) thinking [based on the logical “iff”] A number of alternative positions (ideas or actions) is investigated, each arrived at by conditional thinking, and held in parallel, going back and forth between the chains.

The most complex type of work, associated with the longest time span of discretion and therefore requiring the largest time horizon, is found in work in which several different projects are pursued simultaneously. The coordination of projects required is comparable to that achieved by the conductor of an orchestra, who manages many different players on many different instruments. The conductor function required is one that deals with the coordination of transformational systems. Such a function is only weakly possible in the Second Order of Complexity since in that order formal logical thinking prevails. Therefore, use of dialectical thought forms is feeble, with thought forms remaining uncoordinated (Fig. 2.10).

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Goal Path 1 (Project 1)

Goal Path 2 (Project 2)

Goal Path 3 (Project 3)

GOAL

Goal Path 4 (Project 4)

‘Conducting Function’ Fig. 2.10  Work based on pursuing parallel goal paths (Jaques, 1998a, 68)

The situation is entirely different at Stratum VIII, populated by Board Members with a meta-systemic understanding of systems. Here we encounter full-fledged transformational systems requiring fully dialectical thinking. All existing resources – temporal, financial, human, and others  – are distributed among different projects (activities) that must be kept in balance. Each project is itself an open and transformational system that has to be coordinated with other systems. As in an orchestra, there exists an evolving equilibrium of all players following a shared plan based on the musical score as the common ground. The called-for “conducting function” requires systemic thinking of the highest order, with a plan and an overall goal firmly in mind as all workers involved follow a composite path to the goal.

Chapter Summary In this chapter, I have presented a cognitive theory of work in organizations, extending Elliott Jaques’ writings. As did he, I have focused on the notion of work as the exercise of reflective judgment and discretion and, avoiding de-agentification (Bhaskar, 1993) as Jaques did, have dealt with work as something that happens real time. In contrast to Jaques, I have made a clear distinction between the Human Capability Architecture (HCA) and the Managerial Accountability Architecture (MAA), in order to define more clearly the challenges posed by the notion of Requisite Organization. In light of this distinction, work capability and Size of Person are a matter of HCA (Wilber’s left quadrants), while work complexity and Size of Role are a matter of MAA (Wilber’s right quadrants).

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I have also distinguished between social governance rules, whether pertaining to vertical or horizontal governance, on one hand, and methods of mental processing, logical and dialectical, on the other. Much of the chapter has focused on outlining a set of highly original concepts introduced by Jaques that inform the discussion throughout this monograph. Among them is the notion of “work” itself, but also “time span of discretion” as a determinant of work complexity. Through these and other work-related concepts, Jaques introduced a cognitive perspective on organizations that is typically sacrificed to the many competences and psychological traits thought to determine role holders’ organizational performance, on account of which an understanding of mental processing gets lost. My goal has been to be fair as well as critical regarding Jaques’ work. When attempting to account for the transition from one Stratum to another by way of Methods of Mental Processing, I came to the conclusion that they are more of a logical stratagem and a matter of categorizing end-states than a truly developmental mechanism that unfolds over people’s lifespan. Consequently, I pronounced them insufficient for explaining the process that carries an individual from one level of accountability, or Stratum, to another. Subsequent chapters will shed further light on this issue of cognitive growth through work. Most important perhaps for those who know Jaques’ work is the new perspective on Requisite Organization that this chapter introduces. Rather than focusing this notion on cognitive development alone, as Jaques does, the chapter provides a glimpse of the broader set of parameters that set apart one Stratum of organizational accountability at work from another, specifically: • The concept of a requisite organization as the balanced fusion of a Human Capability Architecture (HCA) and a Managerial Accountability Architecture (MAA), and the notion that the first is a “growth hierarchy” while the second is a “dominance hierarchy”; • A broader set of parameters of cognitive development than called up by Jaques, including stages of reflective judgment and of social-emotional development; • A hypothesis as to the intrinsic link between stages of reflective judgment and social-emotional meaning-making; • Empirical evidence of the asymmetry of social-emotional and cognitive adult development in terms of the conditioning of one by the other. This chapter can best be summarized by restating Table 2.6. The table relates different dimensions of work delivery, such as work complexity (strata), stage of meaning making, epistemic position, phase of dialectical thinking, and degrees of thought complexity expressed in the form of a “fluidity index.” It articulates a hypothesis about how empirical measurements in the dimensions mentioned correlate with each other. For instance, the table hypothesizes that delivering work on Stratum V requires stage 4 of social-emotional development, level 3 of reflective judgment, and

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Table 2.6  Requisite organization reconceptualized in CDF Strata within Orders of Mental Complexity VIII VII VI V IV III II I a

Social-­ Emotional Stage 5 5/4 – 5(4) 4(5) – 4/5 4 4/3 – 4(3) 3(4) – 3/4 3 2/3 – 3(2)

Stage of Reflective Judgment 7

Phase of Dialectical Thinking 4

Dialectical Fluidity Indexa >50

6

3

> 30 < 50

5

2

> 10 < 30

4

1

 UL). 6. An agent’s professional agenda falls into both the UL and LL quadrants, being based on the self’s meaning and sense making (UL), which is embedded in a particular culture (LL). 7. An agent’s role is based on an organizational agreement in LL, and how it is played depends on the agent’s applied as well as potential capability in UL. 8. The agent’s role behavior can be measured. It is part of the UR quadrant and thus falls into MAA. 9. The agent’s intentions for delivering work (UL) can also be measured, but only through social-emotional and cognitive assessments by way of CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework. 10. Measuring role behavior (UR) without accounting for its root in subjective consciousness (UL) is no more than an expedient that deeply masks the role carriers’ developmental profile. From this masking derive all human resources issues discussed in this monograph. 11. Organizational management is complex; it cannot be reduced to the right quadrants (UR, LR) but equally comprises both lower quadrants (LL; LR), thus partaking of the agent’s self as well as role (not to speak of the manager’s self and role by which the subordinate in part defines him- or herself, depending on developmental level). 12. Depending on an organization’s governance rules, resident in LL & LR, agents’ internal conversations in UL, partly rooted in LL, will determine how they use their “judgment and discretion” (epistemic position) to deliver work, and how far they are able to develop themselves as adults social-emotionally and cognitively. All recent attempts to soften the rigidity of governance rules derived from F. Taylor’s work, such as agile design, sociocracy, and holacracy, have struggled with the situation depicted in Fig. 3.3 viz., the quandary of how to concretize, practically and effectively, the connection between the LR and the LL Wilber quadrants that circumscribe organizational work. Below, this quandary is further elucidated by the metaphor of the Three Houses, which distinguishes between the “Three Houses”: Task House, Organizational House, and Self House.

The Arbitrariness of Sociological Distinctions It is easy to understand why the HCA is not in the foreground of agents’ and managers’ awareness, and in most cases not even on the agenda of Human Resources departments. For one thing, the HCA is invisible. Organizationally, it is seen only as

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an intangible asset, without any attention paid to the developmental grounding of work in the UL (agents’ judgment and discretion). In terms of culture, “seeing” the HCA is made difficult by the handy use of common-sense sociological classifications that pervade business thinking, a way of thinking which follows MMPs of Jaques’ Second Order of Mental Complexity (i.e., purely logical thinking and data science). The conventional way of thinking about organizations is to focus entirely on the MAA, in what Archer would refer to as a “downward conflation” in which MAA > HCA. This focus allows for separating different groups of people in terms of being employees, managers/executives, and customers. What is forgotten when using such formal logical categories is that the human systems composing an organization together form a transformational system that is in constant flux in both its MAA and HCA dimension, and also that these two architectures unceasingly interact. Harmonizing the two architectures is therefore a cultural challenge only a true management science could contemplate. Among the main things typically forgotten when thinking and writing about organizations are the following: 1. Agents, whether employees, managers, or customers, “work” in the sense of exercising reflective judgment and discretion. 2. The level of reflective judgment and discretion gradually increases over the lifespan but remains deeply stratified developmentally. 3. Role distinctions do not capture the evolving self’s ongoing progression toward higher social-emotional, epistemic, and cognitive levels. 4. All members of the workforce have a measurable potential capability irrespective of their present role and their competences that permit them to move from one group to another, or out of these groups entirely. 5. Contributors have not only a current but an emergent potential capability, the latter being foreshadowed by the former. DTF is a set of tools for assessing current potential, not primarily current applied, work capability. (See the two Appendices.) 6. Agents called “customers” are delivering “work” that deeply embeds them in both the LL and LR quadrants of the MAA, thereby mediating these quadrants’ dialectic. From an HCA-focused point of view, then, which might be seen as one of “upward conflation” (HCA > MAA), there is no empirical evidence that would justify the segregation of people into three different, largely unrelated behavioral systems. Their commonality is not only one of the human condition and thus indisputable, but is a developmental one at the same time (which is part of the human condition) (Fig. 3.4).

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Local Performance Bands [of Teams] Performance [Differences] Employees

Managers

Customers …

“Competences, Talents, Experiences …” Cognitive

Social- Emotional

Development

Development

ADULT CONSCIOUSNESS/CAPABILITY Fig. 3.4  Behavioral differences between groups that share common ground with adult development (UL + LL)

 mpirical Evidence Regarding Stages of Meaning Making E (Kegan, 1982) I have proposed that the metaphor of the Three Houses – Self House (UL), Task House (UL + UR), and Organizational House (LL + LR) – can illuminate the anatomy of the HCA. To demonstrate this in a little more depth, let us consider two examples that show stark differences in how two agents, or the same agent at different developmental levels, make(s) sense of his self (UL) versus his role (UR) in the context of work. We will present a social-emotional progression from the “instrumental” stage S-2 to the “other-dependent” stage S-3. Most young employees (or even managers) function at the latter stage. Example 1: Social-Emotional Stage S-2 (Adapted from Lahey et al., 1988) I really want to get a better salary. Therefore I am really sad that my colleague lied to me. As a newcomer to this environment I had asked him how much of a difference it really makes if you work hard around here as regards your salary. But it is clear to me now that he lied to me when he said it didn’t matter much. Now that I know he lied I can never be sure whether he’s telling me the truth. This makes me sad since I feel he let me down. We’ve always promised to tell the truth to each other, and he didn’t follow through with that. So now I don’t know if I can count on him. And I don’t know why he did lie to me, or why he might again. Like maybe he lied because of something I did or said that made him angry. Of course I wouldn’t have done whatever it was that made him angry had I known he would lie to me. I would then always remember that I need to keep certain things to myself, or risk being lied to. And although that would be awfully burdensome, I would do the best I can to keep myself safe in controlling what I say. The speaker is a teenager (13–16 years of age). He argues in terms of a social-­ emotional two-world hypothesis according to which he lives in one world, and his colleagues in another (Kegan, 1982). The colleague’s internal world is entirely

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opaque to the speaker. There is no interest in exploring why the colleagues might have lied to him, except for the hunch that he might have done so because of anger toward the speaker. No attempt is made to explore this hunch further. The speaker is positioned at a developmental level where socialization has only begun. The speaker’s stance is close to the instrumental stage social-emotionally (S-2); it indicates a level of judgment and discretion close to epistemic position 3 where knowledge is assumed to be absolutely certain, or at most temporarily uncertain. Accordingly, the speaker’s cognitive tools are those of very concrete, factual thinking along formal logical lines. The colleague addressed is seen and treated as an instrument of keeping oneself safe, and truth is a right answer. The speaker’s expectation is that a person knowing the organizational environment would also know “the truth” about salaries paid therein. If that truth is not revealed, a lie is spoken. The consequences of this combined epistemic, social-emotional, and cognitive stance for the speaker’s Professional Agenda are predictable. The speaker’s internal workplace is primarily a place for him to get his needs and desires met in the easiest way possible and with the least effort. In the Task House, no inner standards for serving a particular function exist except for the expressed expectations of others, and these expectations will be scrutinized for their usefulness for the speaker’s immediate needs. As a result, the Organizational House is constructed by the speaker as a social trap one has to be very careful getting into, for no other reason that receiving some income. (Today, the speaker could choose a “gig” without any than direct-action obligations, thus without much accountability.) Example 2 of Social-Emotional Stage S-3 (Adapted from Lahey et al., 1988) I have just been gathering data for the decision I and my boss have to make, rather than going ahead with the decision on my own, or waiting for the boss to come in. He really prefers to delegate, and I just didn’t take up the challenge to make a decision on my own. But now I realize that he really doesn’t mind if I make a decision that has to be made, and that he really likes me to do that because then he doesn’t feel as if he’s depriving me of authority, or as if he really should be making the decision. Before, it really was a strain between us, because we didn’t get to make decisions as much as I really found necessary and wanted to, or else I harassed him about making the decision, and then felt guilty about it. Making the decision by myself occasionally makes both of us happier, and even makes things between us a lot smoother. The second speaker has matured social-emotionally from his initial stance (articulated in Example 1) a decade or so ago. He is now able to identify with his internalized Other, the boss, and in fact is entirely one with this Other. (“I and my boss” precisely expresses this social-emotional identity which amounts to “other-­ dependence” in UL.) In the excerpt, the speaker focuses on his role as a decision maker subordinate to his Other, the boss. He vividly demonstrates how an individual at his developmental level is focused on the role in favor of the self, unable to tell the two apart, and further unable to distinguish between his authentic self and the voices of others in his internal workplace.

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The relationship of self and role in the excerpt is not conflictual as much as it is confused. The self is experienced as something that has trouble going along with the role against which it is measured, as it were. This is so since it does not yet define itself by internal standards that could guide its actions. The speaker’s self has to cope with various shifting insights, most of which are insights into what is taken to be “himself.” However, these insights are being projected into the Other, the boss whose imagined expectations of the speaker define what the speaker is perceiving as “self.” While the projection of the self on an Other bankrupts the two-world hypothesis and thus brings both parties into the “same” social world, it introduces an uneasy merger of the two worlds, his own and that of the Other. Being subject to his developmental level (rather than in control of it), the speaker is not aware of how painful this merger can become. Consequently, he does not realize how enmeshed Self and Role actually are. He truly lives “within the confines of the professional role” (Haber, 1996, 20–21), more so than a self-authoring individual would, who would have, rather than be, a role. The second excerpt also says a lot about how the speaker constructs the Task House, specifically how he understands his own function and authority from which his role as a decision maker flows. While the speaker could define the outward trappings of this role and function, and speak of “accountability,” s(he) would most likely mistake following others’ expectations for the stance of a self-authorer working from an embodied value system. In a perspective on teamwork, the speaker’s personal process clearly dominates his task process, which does not bode well for the speaker’s ability to collaborate (Schein, 1999). According to the excerpt quoted above, the speaker internally constructs his “boss” as someone who likes to delegate and therefore does not mind if somebody else makes decisions that need to be made for him (which, of course, also says a lot about the fuzzy mental representation of the MAA implied here). The boss appears as a soft-hearted wimp who feels he is depriving others of their authority if he makes decisions himself, and thus as someone for whom decision making is generally difficult. The speaker therefore gives the boss a helping hand. He congratulates himself as someone who occasionally makes decisions himself (for the boss) and feels that his doing so improves the relationship with his boss which is really one to himself. Both he and his boss seem to like the division of labor they have silently adopted which does not speak too well of the real boss either. Because of this silent truce, there is no further need to harass the boss (who is very busy) or feel guilty about being a bad employee. Given what we now know about the speaker’s social-emotional position (in terms of Kegan’s “meaning-making”), as dialectical thinkers we would be curious about the speaker’s cognitive developmental level, as well as his epistemic position. Keeping close to what speaker 2 has been saying, my hypothesis would be that he is functioning from an epistemic position between 4 and 5 which align with an instrumental and other-dependent social-emotional position, respectively (Table 3.1).

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Table 3.1  Characteristics of epistemic positions 4 and 5 Epistemic position [Stage of reflective judgment] 4 Understanding (“quasi-reflective”) Phase 1 of Dialectical Thinking 5 Understanding Phase 2 of Dialectical Thinking

Assumptions about knowledge and truth Knowledge and truth are abstractions idiosyncratic to the knower; and characterized by ambiguity and relativity. Abstract mapping skills allow for comparing and contrasting abstractions across contexts but without holding an integrated view of different domains.

Approximate social-emotional stage S-2/3 to S-3

S-3(4) to S-4(3)

Of course, not knowing the true state of mind of others such as the boss makes for ambiguity in one’s own judgment and discretion. Accordingly, knowledge is uncertain and knowledge claims thus idiosyncratic. Use of abstractions such as strain in “there was a strain between us because we didn’t get to make decisions …” remains hypothetical, and the process of using abstractions only slightly transcends the speaker’s immediate experience. When comparing an earlier state to the present one as two different contexts – “before, it really was a strain between us” – the speaker is beginning to compare and contrast abstractions – the situation then and now – thereby signaling he is on the move to epistemic position 5. In harmony with this position, the speaker’s cognitive tools are still largely those of formal logic (as in epistemic position 4 or Phase 1 of dialectical thinking).

A First Introduction to Dialectical Thought Forms (TFs) As a way of exemplifying dialectical thought forms (TFs), further elucidated in the two Appendices and the Manual in Book 3 of this monograph, we can expand our diagnosis of “how speaker 2 thinks about his role” in the Task House a little further. The speaker apparently has no structural insight into what he shares with the internally constructed boss. Thus there is no awareness of constructing the boss in terms of a constitutive relationship that defines his identity (TF #21). No relational or transformational thought form is yet on the horizon. There is, however, some process thinking in terms of TF #5 [practical/active character of knowledge] and context-bound thinking in terms of TF #8 [contextualization of part within a whole with emphasis on the part]. The speaker holds forth on collaborations with the boss with an emphasis on his taking the lead in making decisions. In declaring that the speaker occasionally makes decisions himself presumably approved by the boss, there is an inkling of TF #12 [the stability of systems functioning], in the sense that such decisions uphold the stability of the system in which both the speaker and his boss are embedded and bring about a certain equilibrium (TF #9). This stability extends to that of the speaker’s own system as a person. Overall, the speaker

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describes relational intricacies in terms of Context thought forms (especially TF #10), with a very weak understanding of Process. Since the speaker’s cognitive profile largely determines his Professional Agenda, it also determines the level of his performance quite regardless of the quality of his competences, educational background or “interest in the work.” The second speaker’s professional stance is more mature than I have demonstrated in Example 1. Speaker 2 more deeply owns his Professional Agenda (Self House). His cognitive functioning is more removed from immediate needs and desires and is built upon others’ expectations. Therefore, the roles and tasks deriving from his function in the MAA are no longer entirely dependent on external standards provided by unknown others (as in Example 1). They are rather defined by the well-­ understood expectations of specific others, and the speaker’s engagement with these expectations reflects a deeper socialization and identification with the Organizational House, as well as more highly developed personal meaning making in the Self House. As the two examples above show, we encounter in the Self House a complex amalgamation of: • Social-emotional stance • Epistemic position • Phase of dialectical thinking, thus of Stance and Tools These developmental determinants are quite independent of the individual’s applied capability in terms of which skilled knowledge, motivation at work, and temperamental difficulties would matter (see Chap. 2). When we disentangle the fusion of these different lines of adult development, rich insights regarding the quality of work a manager or employee is presently capable of await us. We can then predict to a large extent how the individual involved will play his roles in the Task House, and what the internal workplace looks like for him in terms of the Organizational House.

Understanding the Three Houses of Work The metaphor of the Three Houses helps understand an agent’s internal workplace, in contrast to the external workplace that HR practitioners are focused on. The internal workplace is the mental space in which employees as well managers, CEOs, and Board Members conceptualize their “work.” This conceptualization is more than a mere reflection. It entails reviewing not only one’s external workplace but indirectly also one’s life and professional history. For this reason, agents’ internal workplace is the place where they encounter the social and cultural constraints and enablements that shape their work and work delivery. Needless to say the internal workplace is developmentally as well as psychologically structured which dramatically differentiates one contributor from another. How “work” is conceived by an agent as role holder is a function of the agent’s

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social-emotional and cognitive level at the point when they engage with their work. In CDF, the Constructive Developmental Framework here in focus, the internal workplace is the focus of the cognitive interview, demonstrated in Appendix 1. The interview is evaluated in exclusively cognitive terms in order to get insight into the interviewee’s current potential, and indirectly, his/her emergent potential, work capability. Any kind of work, conceived of as the exercise of reflective judgment and discretion in the pursuit of goals within certain time limits, takes place in a mental space of some kind, a space conceptually located in the HCA, and referring to the MAA only through its mental representation in the agent’s mind. This holds for employees, managers, board members, consultants, practically all who are organization members. This space is the workspace in which moves-in-thought occur that, in the form of judgment and discretion, underlie performance, decision making, and the exercise of talent. Etc. In each of the three behavioral systems involved – employees, managers/executives, customers – the mental space of work is experienced differently, depending on the focus of attention privileged in each. But all mental workspaces, based as they are on human consciousness, have the same developmental structure of unfolding cognitive and social-emotional potential which lays them open to focused intervention at the individual or group level. In most cases the mental space of work is structured to exclude both the First (A) and the Fourth (D) Orders of Complexity (in the sense of Jaques). The first order (in which we find infants) is not complex enough for human work, while the latter (of complex dialectical thinking) is reached only by a small minority of contributors. While animals and infants, forming part of the First Order, can be said to “work” (Jaques, 2002a), they stand outside of the “language-suffused” world that characterizes the other three orders of methods of mental processing (MMP). Beyond the Third Order, where Practical Wisdom reigns, work is close to play and therefore is not focused on “performance” but rather on creating surprise and initiating self-­ transformation. As a result, the Orders of Complexity central to work are the Second and Third Orders (Jaques’ Stratum I-IV and V-VIII, respectively). In Fig. 3.5, the mental space of work of which we have spoken above is partitioned into three separate but inseparable mental subspaces, called the Self House, the Task House, and the Organizational (Environmental) House. As the bold arrow on the left of the figure indicates, the way Task and Organizational House are constructed by agents ultimately points back to their Self House, the way they presently make meaning and sense of their own life and work. All that can be known and said by an individual about his or her roles, tasks, professional agenda, and relation to an organization, is the result of a mental process firmly anchored in the individual’s subjective consciousness (UL). As most cognitive interviews show, agents are rarely aware of the partitioning of their internal workplace in three Houses. However, most of them find it immensely helpful to become aware of the partitioning. For one thing, being aware of what House s(he) is speaking from makes the speaker aware of relationships heretofore not noticed, both in herself and in what s(he) is speaking about. It also helps making distinctions that without a knowledge of the Houses would be difficult or impossible

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Fortunately, the use of dialectical thinking is unlimited. Self House

(Haber, 1966)

Task House

(Mintzberg, 1989)

Personal Culture

Formal Authority

Professional Agenda

Interpersonal Roles

Work Context

Informational Roles

Evolving Self

Decisional Roles

Self-and Other Awareness

Role Integration

Organizational House (Bolman & Deal, 1991)

Symbolic

Human Resource Political

Structural (Frame)

Integrated Leadership

Fig. 3.5  The anatomy of organization members’ Internal Workplace in which their Movementsin-­Thought assemble in Internal Dialogues [For the design of the Houses, see Haber, Mintzberg, Bolman & Deal]

to make. For instance, when I say, “I am not getting along too well with my supervisor,” am I speaking from the Self House or Task House, or even the Organizational House in myself (UL)? In the first case, I am probably speaking of experiencing frustrated intentions I am presently unable to realize, while in the second case I am voicing frustration about my decision-making options or scope of my present role, while in the third case I may be referring to the supervisory relationship I have with the person I call “boss.” Then also, I may realize that what I call “my boss” in terms of the Self House is my own responsibility, and that I could conceptualize “boss” entirely differently if I where only more advanced social-emotionally, so as to envision myself as self-authoring rather than other-dependent. While the Self House comprises an agent’s intentions, for instance as expressed in her professional agenda (i.e., the goals to pursue and values to realize), the Task House is focused on an agent’s role and decision-making power, which depends on the timespan of the role s(he) is in. The Organizational House comprises the relationship in which an agent’s work stands to the larger social environment, minimally within a peer group or business unit. We can assign the “Three Houses” to Wilber’s Quadrants as follows: • Self House: Upper left quadrant (UL) • Task House: Upper right quadrant (UL + UR) • Organizational House: Lower left and right quadrants (LL and LR)

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The Houses thus outline the inner workplace in which an individual’s performance at work takes place. Whether they are managers, employees, or customers, agents are acting from within the Self House from which they are projecting themselves in the other two Houses, From this vantage point, an “organization” is the creation of its members’ social-emotional meaning making and cognitive sense making combined. It is something they design based on their thinking and personal values as a function of their level of adult development. What they call “the organization” is a structure guiding agents in answering two questions simultaneously: • What should I do and for whom? (social emotional) • What can I know and do, and what are my options? (cognitive) Once an agent has “designed” his/her “organization” internally, s(he) “walk into” her design as if it were something outside of her while in reality they stay right where they are, namely, at wherever developmental position they presently find themselves. There are of course large content differences – in contrast to structural differences – between how employees, managers, and customers experience the Three Houses. This is because they follow different professional agendas in their Self Houses. This even holds for customers. Customer relationships are determined by how employees and management view customers as members of the organization and convey this view to customers. Wherever customers are not part of an individual’s professional agenda in the Self House, they simply do not exist. In what way customers themselves construct their Organizational House will depend on several factors: • Customer’s social-emotional profile, (e.g.) their need to identify with a company to boost their self-image or keep up with internalized others. • Customer’s cognitive profile, their ability to think in process (P) and relationship terms (R) rather than only in terms of “products” that objectify their relationship to a company. • Customer’s epistemic profile, their ability to use their judgment and discretion to question what a company offers them or refuses to grant them.

Difference of Emphasis in the Three Houses When beginning to absorb the metaphor of the Three Houses (Laske, 1999) as a pointer to different mental spaces within oneself and one’s clients, whether as interviewer, coach, manager, or other professional, it is important to understand the specific emphasis of each House. This emphasis can be expressed as a question to an interlocutor, as shown below: • Self House: what is your motivation for engaging in the work you are doing here and how does it support your self-concept?

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• Task House: what are the roles that flow from your present function in this environment and how do you integrate them as you play them? • Organizational House: how does your work fit into the larger organizational environment in which you find yourself, and how does that environment make an impact on your performance? Accordingly, one can distinguish in each of the Three Houses a different point of emphasis: • Self House: Self-awareness and awareness of others. • Task House: Integration of self and role. • Organizational House: Ability to take multiple perspectives on the organization. In the Self House, individuals articulate their relationship to themselves and others. Therefore, their degree of self-awareness in the sense of social-emotional development plays a central role in this House. In the Task House, the overall focus falls on the integration of two aspects of an agent, namely Self and Role, which do not always live in an easy relationship with each other. Complexity of dialectical thinking is central for achieving this integration which, in turn, supports social-emotional development. While typically the role receives more attention than the self, the self may fail in his or her role due to lack of peer or managerial attention. As Haber points out (1996, 21): The role receives more credence than the self. … The self is frequently left to manage on its own and consequently is more primitive, unconscious, unconventional, and mysterious than the professional role. The self uses the language of dreams, metaphors, feelings, symbols, intuition, and physiological responses to represent its reality.

Because of this, the fact that the Self as a knower engages with thought forms to construct and interpret the world is of the highest importance. Thought forms are high-level abstractions that bridge the gap between the self’s egocentricity, on one hand, and the accountability of the professional role, on the other. The way thinking informed by dialectical thought forms is used decides how emotions are experienced, interpreted, and put to use, and whether meaning-making conflicts can be successfully reframed or not.

Changes in Agents’ Professional Agenda As indicated on the bottom floor of the Self House in Fig. 3.5, an adult’s professional agenda is determined by the quality of her social-emotional and cognitive self (Size of Person) more than by “experiences” which themselves are a function of the self. Developmental Size of Person also determines the degree of excellence of work an agent can deliver. Cognitively considered, an agent’s view of the broader context of his/her work is foremost a function of her level of cognitive development, not just of her experience or skills.

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Table 3.2  Changes in agents’ organizational Frame of Reference as a function of their development of dialectical thinking Changes of Organizational Frames of Reference Over Phases of Dialectical Thinking Phase of Second order of complexity Third order of complexity development of Phase 1 of Phase 2 of Phase 3 of Phase 4 of dialectical dialectical dialectical dialectical thinking dialectical thinking thinking thinking thinking Social-emotional Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stages >4 levela [instrumental] [other-­ [self-authoring] [self-aware] dependent] View of Institutions to Assemblages of Interpersonal Self-transforming organizations “walk into” people & networks organisms based materials on human agency View of Those who “call Those who Potential People who value management level the shots” need to be collaborators potential pleased View of customers Revenue A constituency A constituency to A constituency to channels to cater to make proud of impassion about being linked to the the organization organization Level of Incipient Low Moderate High organizational learning See Laske (2023)

a

This is demonstrated in Table 3.2, which spells out a hypothesis regarding the impact of phase of dialectical thinking on agents’ professional perspective in terms of their view of: • • • •

Their organization Its management Its customers The quality of organizational learning

The predictions stated in the table concern the development of dialectical thinking over four phases (see Book 3, Manual). To pick an example, as long as agents view customers (row 5) as mere “revenue channels” or “a constituency to be catered to” (Phases 1 and 2 of dialectical thinking), without being able to imagine their feeling and thinking, customer relationships remain largely undeveloped despite training. Employees at low levels of cognitive development show low systemic thinking. It is only beginning in Phase 3 of dialectical thinking – most likely aligned with Stage S-4 of social-emotional development – that truly professional work can be expected of adults, including professional relationships with customers. As seen in the table, what Jaques refers to as the Third Order of Complexity is here understood as comprising Phases 3 and 4 of dialectical thinking development, although one might surmise that Phase 4 is actually closer to Jaques’ Fourth Order, − a mere issue of categorization.

Intermediate Summary

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Although somewhat crude, the table conveys the idea that changes in level of cognitive development are not simply changes in “thinking skills.” Rather, such changes modify an agent’s world view as much as does progressing to a higher social-emotional stage of meaning making.

Intermediate Summary I have presented the Three Houses concept as a way of structuring in more detail what an agent’s internal workplace can be said to look like. Depending on the specifics of agent’s professional activity, the Houses might look different. Therefore, the Houses should be seen as a template for structuring the internal workplace, rather than a stipulation of universal relevance. For instance, an agent working by herself, e.g., as a consultant, would be working from a different concept of the Organizational House than an agent who is an employee. However, it makes sense in all cases to divide the internal workplace into the triad here proposed: Self, Task, and Organizational or Environmental House. The concept of the Three Houses as a “map” of agents’ internal workplace has important entailments, both theoretically and practically. According to my hypothesis, the Houses are also the ground on which the four Moments of Dialectic play out. By this statement I mean that the internal workplace is intrinsically dialectical, not simply logical, − a proposal that acquires its full importance when team functioning is at issue (De Visch & Laske, 2020). On account of this, it is important to clarify the relationship between Moments (Bhaskar) and Quadrants (Wilber) in somewhat more detail. • While the Moments of Dialectic comprise the total epistemic object, Wilber’s four quadrants only comprise the epistemic object of the social world. The Moments are therefore intrinsic to, and presupposed by, the Wilber’s Quadrants (Bhaskar, 1993, 272). • While the Moments of Dialectic define the structure of consciousness, Wilber’s four Quadrants (here mapped into the Three Houses) define the multidimensionality of the social world from a highly left-quadrant perspective, i.e., subjectively, and thus incompletely. • For employees, management, and customers alike, “work” is a complex interweaving of left quadrant intangible processes of individual sense and meaning making (UL, LL) with right quadrant quantifiable processes of performance and business operations (UR, LR). Such work is, moreover, always embedded in social-world antecedents (Archer’s Structure) rather than being suspended in a virtual organizational sphere without an anchoring in social reality. • The UL quadrant constitutes the developmental ground from which organizational work develops which itself is situated in LL. Disregarding them in human resources management eliminates the very basis of intangible assets.

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• Methods of measuring the left, intangible quadrants are developmental; they are commensurable with behavioral methods when integrated into a comprehensive capability management strategy which cannot be designed other than by taking into account rules of governance. • The “dialectic” between rules of governance (e.g., agile design), on one hand, and rules of organizational operation, on the other, is presently an open issue that determines the relationship of HCA and MAA. The more “horizontally” governance (and thus the MAA) is conceived of, the more it tends to become indistinguishable from rules of operation, and the more the HCA remains invisible. (Private communication with Nathan Snyder, February 2023). Below, I am proceeding to a discussion of each of the Three Houses.

Discussion of Each House Individually It would be no more than a formalistic exercise to speak of the dialectic of each of the Three Houses. The dialectic of movements-in-thought can be determined only by cognitive interview based on which it can be seen as the internal structure of Agency (in the sense of Archer). Epistemologically, “dialectic” is always specific to an individual agent or a group of agents. It is by way of a meta-analysis of a group of agents’ Houses that one can arrive at a bird’s-eye view of the experiential dialectics defining a specific organizational environment (De Visch & Laske, 2020). While in work with CDF, the Three Houses are primarily used as the protocol to follow in cognitive interviews, it stands to reason that they would be equally beneficial in social-emotional interviews done for the sake of coaching and mentoring (rather than assessment). These two uses differ from each other in that in cognitive interviews the “structure” an interviewee is assessing is that of DTF moments of dialectic and their associated “thought forms” (TFs), while in the social-emotional case the “structure” focused on is that of Kegan-stages. In what follows, I discuss each of the Three Houses by itself, beginning with the Self House in which, since it represents the upper left quadrant (UL), all Houses are anchored epistemologically. I emphasize the influence of phase of dialectical development on how these Houses are constructed in the minds of organization members. My outline is meant to give managers, consultants, and coaches hooks by which to intervene with their clients with an awareness of the level of clients’ present developmental profile. In subsequent chapters, I will show how information elicited in the Houses, e.g., from managers, is evaluated so as to determine an agent’s cognitive profile, and is to be given feedback on.

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The Self House The Self House comprises all moves-in-thought having to do with an individual’s Professional Agenda. The agenda is more than a list of goals to accomplish. It is a set of assumptions an individual is making about the relationship between self and role, and the personal values and self-developmental mandate (Job 2) to follow when pursuing work in the role. Given that an individual’s Self House is extraordinarily complex, it is helpful to distinguish three different but related dimensions: • Cognitive (including epistemic). • Social-emotional. • Axiological (value system). All of these dimensions are beyond observation but yield to developmental assessment scrutiny. The Self House is the hardest of the three mental spaces of work to fathom, and the easiest to misconstrue and neglect.

The Difference Between Self and Role In all types of work, whether organizational or not, an experiential difference exists between Self and Role, in the sense of Fig. 3.1. As Haber (1996, 20–21) says: The Self lives within the confines of the professional role. Our uniqueness—personal history, personal style, strengths and weaknesses, gender and cultural perspective, emotional responses, physical and characterological capabilities and limitations—comprises our singular version of humanness.

Optimally, self and role coexist in an acknowledged, functional, creative, and respectful union (Haber, 1996, 21). However, such a union is not a given, but an achievement of adult development over the lifespan. Consequently, a behavioral (or clinical) notion of self needs to be amplified by a developmental one as discussed in this monograph. In detail, the Self House can be understood as composed of four dimensions: 1. The Evolving = self-level of social-emotional and cognitive development which determines how the agent makes meaning and sense of her life and work 2. The Work context level (often not under the control of the agent) that decides how the agent constructs her internal workplace, emotionally and cognitively 3. The Professional Agenda level which comprises the individual’s assumptions about how the work to be done is relevant for maturing the professional self 4. The Axiological level that comprises the values an agent follows that may be more or less attuned to organizational values, and thus determines agent’s attunement index relative to the organization.

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Understandably, the way an agent’s self relates to his or her role differs depending on the level of adult development. Developmental level sets limits to how well a role can be understood, embodied, and “played.” Experiencing work in an organizational role is determined by shifts in orientation following the development of the self, both in the social-emotional and cognitive sense. This fact is made more explicit in Table 3.3 in which cognitive Frame of Reference and social-emotional Orientation are shown in separate parts of the table. Just as the social world at large, the evolving self, represented on the bottom floor of the Self House, is stratified in the sense of TF #11 (see the Manual in Part 3). The stratification is that of human consciousness. It manifests cognitively and social-­ emotionally in different but related ways that are neither aligned in a one-to-one fashion nor in terms of linear causality (TF #7). The remaining three floors of the Self House – Work Context, Professional Agenda, and Personal Culture – subsume a host of adult-developmental factors that determine how an employee, manager or customer will function on each floor of the Houses. Depending on dialectical Table 3.3  Change of orientations in adults’ Self House due to differences in level of social-­ emotional and cognitive development Second order of complexity Phase 2 of Phase 1 of dialectical Cognitive frame of dialectical thinking thinking reference View of Institutions to Assemblages of organizations “walk into” people & materials View of Those who Those who need management level “call the shots” to be pleased Incipient Low Level of organizational learning Social-emotional Stage 2 Stage 3 orientation Instruments of Needed to View of others contribute to own need (“emotional own self-image gratification intelligence”) Level of Self Low Moderate insight Values Law of jungle Community Needs Overriding all Subordinate to others’ needs community, work group Need to control Very high Moderate Communication Unilateral Exchange 1:1 Organizational Careerist Good citizen orientation

Third order of complexity Phase 3 of dialectical Phase 4 of dialectical thinking thinking Interpersonal Self-transforming networks organisms Potential collaborators Moderate

People who value potential High

Stage 4

Stage 5

Collaborator, delegate, peer

Contributors to own integrity and balance

High

Very high

Self-determined Flowing from striving for integrity Low Dialogue Manager

Humanity Viewed in connection with own obligations and limitations Very low True communication System’s leader

Some of the notions above derive from experience in using M.  Aderman’s Need-Press Questionnaire found at www.needpress.com

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thought form fluidity (see Appendix 1 and 2), the floors will be variously linked and integrated, and knowledge transfer from one House to the other will be more or less systemic. In this context, the relationship of social-emotional and cognitive development is a highly salient but regrettably not well-researched factor. Therefore, hypotheses must take the place of empirical findings. Here, Phase 1 of dialectical thinking – the first step out of purely logical into dialectical thinking – is considered broadly commensurate with Stage 2 of social-­ emotional development. Agents at this level follow an instrumentalist stance centered on gratifying their own needs first, with little ability for true dialogue and only the faintest grasp of systemic thinking. Their level of organizational learning is very low. They hold views of customers as interchangeable “objects with attributes” rather than systems in their own right. Phase 2 agents are other-dependent (Stage 3 of social-emotional development). They derive their self-worth from following others’ expectations with a beginning ability to separate out their own authentic self from that of internalized others (such as my boss). Their cognitive grasp on reality is more highly accommodating than assimilatory so that dialectical thought forms lack real depth for them, especially in the “Relationship” and “Transformational” categories. As a result, their degree of organizational learning is relatively low. They begin to offer customers an internal hearing, but only to the extent that serving customers “pays off for the team,” which will not suffice for delivering sustained customer service due to lack of principle. Truly professional work only begins in Phase 3 of dialectical thinking and is based on Stage-4 self-authoring ability (Kegan, 1994). Here, the level of self-insight is high and professional values are self-determined. Need for control is low and dialogue with customers and managers is becoming a possibility. Customers are viewed as peers, not as subjects under one’s control or individuals to cater to. They are regarded as highly as one’s own self, demanding one’s professional integrity to come into play – not just loyalty to the company one works for. For most agents, Phase 4 of dialectical thinking, linked as it is to a Stage 5 self-­ aware position, will be out of reach for most since less than 10% of employees ever reach Stage 5 and commensurate dialectical thinking. At this juncture, level of organizational learning is high simply because self-insight is very high and need for control very low. For managers, this phase is the crucial one in terms of leadership of self and others. Self-awareness is at its peak and others, including employees and customers, are viewed in terms of their potential rather than merely their performance. Dialectical thinking makes the agent appreciate what is not there but could be there, as well as what else is there, and speeds up the discovery of one’s own potential awaiting realization. Sadly, human resource managers rarely enter even into Phase 3 of dialectical thinking, with deplorable effects on capability management.

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Work Context Work Context articulates how an agent views his or her relationship to the organization in practical, action-oriented terms. In this context, social-emotional degree of maturity has immediate consequences for the way in which agents construe their Work Context. Topical on this floor are the rules and conventions agents (employees and managers) employ to construct their Professional Agenda, as well as the organizational support systems in place that either sustain or fail them. Of course, work context is determined by agents’ understanding of their own accountability and the level of work complexity they have to manage, thus their MMPs. Work Context also comprises the images of sponsor, boss, and colleagues an agent follows, that is, the agent’s understanding of the social network that supports his or her work.

Professional Agenda An individual’s Professional Agenda is a set of theories in use (Argyris & Schon, 1987), that is, a set of assumptions professionals make about their work, including motivations for doing the work. Such theories are often espoused, with a concomitant gap between what is said and done. Theories-in-use are different from applied theories, which describe what an agent actually does. They summarize how the agent thinks and speaks about the organization in contrast to his/her actions. The greater the gap between the two, the more the individual lacks authenticity and attunement to professional standards of the organization. Here, we encounter issues having to do with how an employee or manager construes his or her mission and job description, and how, consequently, s(he) sets goals, approaches assignments, and pursues tasks. The relationship between this floor and the Task and Organizational Houses is entirely determinative in the sense that whatever does not exist on this floor will not materialize in an agent’s performance. This is because an agent’s workplace is an internally constructed one where sense is made of the work, while the outer workplace is only the physical and social scenario through which the agent’s internal sense making manifests in concrete, observable terms. Clearly, both phase of cognitive development and social-emotional stage have a direct and lasting influence on the Professional Agenda, aside from an individual’s psychological balance (e.g., absence of clinical symptoms), work habits, ability of risk taking, and ease of affiliation with others all of which form part of the individual’s applied capability (see www.needpress.com). An agent’s cognitive profile (current potential capability) determines to what extent the Professional Agenda includes attention to realizing one’s own potential (emergent potential capability; Job 2).

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Personal Culture Personal culture differs from organizational culture as much as “self” differs from role. Personal culture is unique to the agent’s capability and determines the unique ways in which s(he) pursues tasks and generates outcomes. Best practices implicitly aim at eliminating differences between the internal workplace of agents, by making them interchangeably script-based, and thus by definition are inimical to Personal Culture. On this floor of the Self House, the cognitive fingerprint and social-emotional balance of the individual have great salience. Where organizational culture opposes or differs from personal culture, measurable energy sinks and frustration occurs (Aderman & Hershneson, 1967; Murray, 1938). As a consequence, an agent’s potential capability cannot manifest. Depending on the agent’s developmental profile, such culture clashes easily depress whatever capability there is in the agent. While this is not felt very strongly on social-emotional level 3 where co-dependence is the rule, on the self-authoring level (S-4), where it is associated with a better systemic grasp of organizational mission and cultural climate, clashes between personal and organizational culture can be severe and costly to both the individual agent and the organization. As an example of a clash of personal and organizational values, consider the following excerpt from the cognitive interview discussed in depth in Appendix 1. In the context of using TF #25 (evaluative comparison of systems in transformation), in order to systematically compare his own system of values to that of the company he is working for, the speaker says: One of the things that I felt that frustrated me and caused me to throw my hands up and say “What am I doing here?” had to do with the ability to solve problems, or the inability to solve problems. I felt like, after a certain point, the real point of the work was not to solve the problem—or not to solve the real problem, the actual problem that was causing all these other problems such as not paying…. [I had] a feeling that you were only working on the surface and that you weren’t working on the actual cause. That definitely turned me away from the work, because I felt it was ineffectual, it was just wasteful…. I’ve come to the experience and realization that I want to feel that I’m actually working toward, working on causes instead of only on effects. … Basically, I’m looking for the cause of justice and how to do that…. It’s also at least an entryway into looking at it from a more whole approach. We’re dealing most of the time, at least in the world of business, with externals. Like I was saying, I’m looking for what causes justice. Obviously, the external components are happening there, but the internal components are something I want to look into now.

Of course, only an agent close to self-authoring stage (in this case S-4(3) with a Fluidity Index and Systems Thinking Index of 24 (%); see Appendices 1 and 2) would be able to distinguish business as usual from the underlying ethical issues that his company, a financial services firm, has no real interest in looking at. From the speaker’s perspective, his own Professional Agenda has outgrown the company’s mandate, and he is consequently going to leave the company behind given that

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it does not contribute to his further development. His construction of the internal workplace has surpassed the resources offered him by the company.

The Task House In contrast to the Self House, the Task House addresses the Role of an agent in MAA, and how cognitive sense is made of it. Moves-in-thought in the Task House therefore reveal how the agent construes level of accountability (Stratum), work complexity, and the tasks that flow from the Role, as well as how her different roles interrelate. Capturing these moves via interview and the associated Fluidity Index will make it clear how systemic is an agent’s grasp of his or her performance in the role, and will shed light on the comparative size of self and role. The agent fails in the role if size of role > size of person. Since, as Haber (1996, 21) says, the Role receives more public credence than the Self, the fact that it is the Self that determines the individual’s interpretation of the Role poses a central issue for capability management. Whatever attention is heaped on the Role will not sway the Self to let go of its needs and abandon its true capabilities. To the extent that these needs and capabilities are not recognized, they will stand in the way of fulfilling role requirements. The reader has been aware since Chap. 1 that roles are defined in terms of organizational strata. This verity has a decisive influence on the four aspects of role performance as distinguished, for instance, by Mintzberg (1989, 15–16): 1. Formal authority and status 2. Interpersonal roles 3. Informational roles 4. Decisional roles (Table 3.4) At each stratum, a different level of work complexity obtains and, consequently, a different level of responsibility exists. For this reason, in terms of Requisite Organization, only those agents who have a commensurate cognitive and social-­ emotional profile can accomplish the work assigned into the role, regardless of what Table 3.4  Contributors’ developmental profile at different Jaques strata Strata VIII VII VI V IV III II I

Conventional job descriptions Board member CEO Executive VP President General manager Unit manager Line manager Shop and office

Fluidity index required Social-emotional stage required >50 5 5/4–5(4) >301020 10 < 30 50 30 10