Crucial Professional Path Change: Meeting with Elliott Jaques

Summary
- Warren Kinston was invited by Elliot to join him at the Brunell Institute of Organization and Social Studies in 1978 or 1979. He believes General Theory of Bureaucracy is the best book Elliot ever wrote. Other mentors included Rafe Robotom and Jimmy Algie.

Speaker A Well, I'm Warren Kinston. I'm based in London, although I travel a lot these days. But the most of the work that I did was actually done in London, in England. I was invited by Elliot to joi..

Speaker A Well, I'm Warren Kinston. I'm based in London, although I travel a lot these days. But the most of the work that I did was actually done in London, in England. I was invited by Elliot to join him at the Brunell Institute of Organization and Social Studies in 1978 or 1979. At that time I'd finished, I was qualified fully in terms of my being a psychiatrist and being a psychoanalyst and I had been involved in the family therapy movement and I was interested in work and it was quite clear that my life would have to move into some sort of new path. In fact, I was at that time involved in a very big research project which I'd been raised money for and was directing in psychosomatic medicine. When I came to Bias, I came primarily because I'd read General Theory of Bureaucracy and it was a truly impressive book. I believe it is the best book that Elliot wrote. It was a culmination of everything that had come before. I think it was superior to anything that came afterwards. I think it was my admiration for the book which I openly expressed Elliot that led him to invite me to join him. And he put me into one of the groups that was working with Health Services and shortly after started his departure and he came back for the last part of his life to America and Canada. I learnt about levels of work specifically besides any reading I did from Ray Frobottom. Rafe Robotom was very deeply into, had been very deeply involved, involved in Glacier, and he'd written books about it, he'd written books about the method and he had a very deep understanding and I was very fortunate. He was happy to work with me on various projects. He actually retired around 85 80 and was happy for me to find the projects and then the two of us would work on them. And we worked on expanding levels of work to take in more that existed in organizations. But he was really my mentor in regard to really getting to grips with it, both the way he thought about it and his experience. But also he understood Elliot very well. And Elliot's thought the other person I should mention is Jimmy Algie. Jimmy was very opposed to Elliot's hierarchical approach and often the way he was opposed. He wasn't against accountability, but he didn't like the way Elliot talked about it, which was always at the extreme, who was accountable, whereas organizations didn't run in that fashion. But he'd done work on decision making and together we worked through the literature and ran seminars and worked with managers to identify seven distinct ways of deciding. And here was the paradigm again in a different way. On the one hand, the way of deciding was a mentality. It existed inside an individual's mind and a person might be described, for example, as a pragmatist or as an empiricist. And at the same time it existed in the psychosocial realm in the sense of an approach to problems which you could actually, for example, take people through and you can write down on a bit of paper the steps that had to be followed in order to come to a decision. So you had an approach that could be taught, for example, hence existing in the psychosocial realm inside a textbook and it also existed as a mentality.

Country
UK
Date
2007
Duration
5:21
Language
English
Format
Interview
Organization
The SIGMA Centre Ltd.
Video category

Major organizations and consulting firms that provide Requisite Organization-based services

A global association of academics, managers, and consultants that focuses on spreading RO implementation practices and encouraging their use
Dr. Gerry Kraines, the firms principal, combines Harry Levinson's leadership frameworks with Elliott Jaques's Requisite Organization. He worked closely with Jaques over many years, has trained more managers in these methods than anyone else in the field, and has developed a comprehensive RO-based software for client firms.
Founded as an assessment consultancy using Jaques's CIP methods, the US-based firm expanded to talent pool design and management, and managerial leadership practice-based work processes
requisite_coaching
Former RO-experienced CEO, Ron Harding, provides coaching to CEOs of start-ups and small and medium-size companies that are exploring their own use of RO concepts.  His role is limited, temporary and coordinated with the RO-based consultant working with the organization
Ron Capelle is unique in his multiple professional certifications, his implementation of RO concepts through well designed organization development methods, and his research documenting the effectiveness of his firm's interventions
A Toronto requisite organization-based consultancy with a wide range of executive coaching, training, organization design and development services.
A Sweden-based consultancy, Enhancer practices time-span based analysis, executive assessment, and provides due diligence diagnosis to investors on acquisitions.
Founded by Gillian Stamp, one of Jaques's colleagues at Brunel, the firm modified Jaques;s work-levels, developed the Career Path Appreciation method, and has grown to several hundred certified assessors in aligned consulting firms world-wide recently expanding to include organization design
Requisite Organization International Institute distributes Elliott Jaques's books, papers, and videos and provides RO-based training to client organizations