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, the man does his best to avoid falling victim into the hole and losing his job. Her colleague, Elliott Jaques (“Jacks”) M.D. with a Harvard PhD in social relations, discovered a depth-structure in organizations.
He maintained, as do his followers to this day, that if management hierarchies don’t conform to this depth-structure, they inevitably collapse. However, he had missed a vacant Midlevel in the depth-structure that accounts for the instability (see the grey column with six months for the maximum length of resource commitments).*
This missing Midlevel represents a “Huge Hole” in a management structure (in every organization) 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 position, 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 him, “when we improve quality we also improve productivity, just as you told us in 1950 would happen.” Raise quality and soon after productivity, and you have the makings of a moneymaking machine.
As it turns out with a successful intervention, this deep, dark hole is a gold mine! In fact, we all were born to work at this level, as our distant ancestors did in their rise from a meager prey species to a major predator and to win out over other hominids in competition for survival.
Footnote:
*Six months is the maximum length that unsuccessful interventions last in failed attempts to staff this Midlevel. That’s when the participating group and the organization as a whole turn off the intervention like a light switch. On the other hand, three months at the next lower n = 7 Supervisory level is the minimum length of successful interventions. On the left side of the diagram (from levels n = 1 to 5) the trendline coefficient of determination is R² = 0.997 for a trendline that represents 99.7% of the maximum spans of resource commitments. On the right side of the diagram (from levels n = 5 to 8) the trendline coefficient of determination is R² = 1.000 for a trendline that represents 100% of the maximum spans of resource commitments.