I’m often asked, “Dr. Blue, what do you do?” It’s a tough question because, should employees ask this sort of question at work, they most likely lose their jobs. Isabel Menzies Lyth documented this job loss among problem solvers decades ago at a teaching hospital in London. In the drawing above, the man does his best to avoid falling victim into the hole. For organizations trying to fill this hole without assistance from Blue Organizational Solutions, to use an old expression, it’s like “trying to dig yourself out of a hole.”
Menzies Lyth’s colleague Elliott Jaques (“Jacks”) M.D.—a Canadian psychoanalyst with a Harvard PhD in social relations—discovered a depth-structure in organizations. He published and taught as a visiting professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and as an honorary professor at the University of Bueno Ares. Along with Menzies Lyth and others, he co-founded the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1946. In 1964 he founded the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University London.
Jaques maintained, as do his followers to this day, that if management hierarchies don’t conform to this depth-structure, they inevitably collapse. As he wrote in his 1986 book A General Theory of Bureaucracy in a flowerily flourish on page 127, “there is a consistent and definable depth-structure from which neither the manifest nor the extant structure can depart too far without collapsing.” Trouble is he had missed the vacant n = 6 Midlevel in the depth-structure (see the graph below) that accounts for the instability.*
One response to this Midlevel hole is “Who ordered that?” This hole has been around for millions of years as a remnant of our organizational rise as hominids from a meager prey species to a major predator. Anthony Jay in his 1971 book Corporate Man emphasized our inbred skills at this group level, going back to hunting bands. Today, founders form organizations in a group at this Midlevel, only to disband into individual positions, as the founding group reaches around 15 members. If you’ve been part of an organization, as it grows and loses its Midlevel group, you know just how disheartening this loss can be.
This exodus leaves a hole in the management structure at the Midlevel in organizations of all types from for-profit to non-profit, public to private, and service to manufacturing. So to stabilize the management structure, Blue Organizational Solutions staffs this Midlevel with a group, which puts that group in a wave-like ≋ superposition with all the other levels. Put in this superposition, the group promotes higher quality, which raises productivity, as W. Edwards Deming made crystal-clear decades ago. As Yoshikasu Tsuda from Rikkyo University wrote to Deming, “when we improve quality we also improve productivity, just as you told us in 1950 would happen.” Raise quality and soon productivity, and you have the makings of a moneymaking machine. With a successful intervention by Blue Organizational Solutions, this hole turns out to be a gold mine!
Footnote:
*Six months (a solstice span) is the longest time span of resource commitments at the Midlevel and the length of unsuccessful interventions. At six months the group participating in the intervention and the organization, as a whole, turn off the intervention like a light switch. The minimum Midlevel time span of three months (a seasonal span) is the minimum length of successful interventions. Using the n = 1 to 5 levels on the left side of the graph, the time-span trendline equals y ² = 537/e ⁰∙⁷⁶ⁿ months; where 537 months is an average career span of 45 years, e is the base of the natural logarithm, and 0.76 is the exponent in the E = M⁰.⁷⁶ energy to mass ratio for metabolic rates.