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 lone individual does his best to avoid falling victim into this Midlevel void reserved for groups.
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. He documented this depth structure in no less than 100 organizations across 15 countries. 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) reserved for groups that unstaffed accounts for the instability.*
This instability seems anything but surprising, when you consider the role that this group position plays in organizations. First, the position exists at the hub of management and labor communication. Furthermore, the position holds the secret to learning and sustained growth, as epitomized in the work of William Glasser, M.D. in his 1986 book, Control Theory in the Classroom (Harper & Row, New York) and Martin Makary, M.D. in his 2016 interview by BMJ talk medicine on avoidable medical errors (“medical care gone wrong”) as the third leading cause of death after heart attack and cancer. In Glasser’s case, he pointed out how the ticket to an A was teaching the subject and students that did that behaved their way to A-level retention, just like their instructors did. A student team in doing the teaching amplifies that A to A+ with enthralling classroom presentations that, according to classmate evaluations, are most often better than their instructors. In Makary’s case, he knew that asking patients their medical status proves just as revealing as asking the physicians. So, questioning patients about their medical care holds the promise of catching otherwise deadly medical errors in the bud, as Makary stated in the 2016 interview. Generalizing Drs. Glasser and Makary’s findings to enterprise, the Midlevel holds the key to institutional learning and longevity, when staffed with a trained task group.
One response to this Midlevel is “Who ordered that?” It’s been around for millions of years as a remnant of our 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 this Midlevel, group position vacant 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 trained task group, which puts that group in a wave-like ≋ superposition with all the other management levels. Put in this superposition, the group promotes higher quality, which raises productivity, as W. Edwards Deming made quite 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 the intervention by Blue Organizational Solutions.
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 that accounts for 99.7% of the time spans; 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.