Is time-span of discretion all you need when assessing levels of work?

Speaker A Assessing the level of the work in a particular role. Is time span the only thing you need? Right. You know the analogy Elliot made between level of complexity on the one hand and state on the other level, right. Being continuous and state being the change from Strat and the comparison he made between that and water h 20 going warmer and warmer, but changing in state. And the state of water is not totally dependent on temperature. Pressure also has an effect pressure also has an effect on the level of complexity of a roll versus time span. So you may have an example I use toyota usually builds a new model of car in three years. When the idea of the Prius came up, the CEO said, no, we need to be known as the leader in alternative energy. We have to build this car in 18 months. The guy who led that team, his longest task was 18 months. I can assure you he was not Stratum three capable. It took a five to do a three year task in 18 months.

Speaker B Okay.

Speaker A A question I have learned to ask when I'm doing a time span interview is I didn't do that earlier in my career, in part because I just wasn't sophisticated enough and thinking about the kinds of issues that you raised. But also, I think in a time of economic crisis, there are many more roles that are compressed. So I now also say, is this a compressed role in normal times? What would be the longest task in this role? And again, and I'm coming back, I'm.

Speaker B Generalizing from point that because there is subjectivity in all of this, two data always better than one. Three data are better than two. So I can get a sense of what's the kind of work that's that's going on and try to hear, all right, it's it's an 18 month time span. Is there anything in this that requires serial processing? How does this role compare to other roles? And again, there is still subjectivity, because what might pass for serial processing if I have 18 months, if I had a nine month time span roll, I might fall back. I might dismiss that, which again, is why the more data, the better. I'm going to talk a little bit tomorrow morning about how some of my beliefs about requisite have changed. And and there's a lot of it that has not changed. And so far, time span and strata to me, seem like a scientific truth and part of what goes on. And I'm not sure when you're talking about the frequency of change, exactly what you're talking about. But let me give you an answer, and then you can tell me if it's your question that I answered. I often hear from people, particularly when you talk about the longer time spans, you get up to high Stratum four. And I've heard a lot of people say, give me a break. The world is changing fast. There are no tasks longer than five years. That's impossible. And when they say that, you know that they don't understand work. One of the things that I do when I'm teaching requisite organization, the best single best exercise to give those of you who are new to do for yourself and those of you more experienced to do for people you're training is timestamp interviews. Because it's only when you get engaged in that detailed level of question when you actually find out what the work in the role is that you start understanding both what that work is and how little we generally understand what work is. The confusions. And Brian, I asked you this. This is probably five or ten years ago you were working with a grocery chain and I had wanted a Canadian example for some training I was doing. They asked you about your client's role and your client's role I believe was stratum six. And I said so what twelve year tasks would he have? I said when you spoke with him, he said there was stuff he knew that he had to work on that would be twelve years. But it never came up in conversations. It was more his sense of responsibility, what that role ought to be and that if twelve years had gone by and he hadn't done it he'd be in trouble. But it never came up in conversation. And so that happens a lot in the moment tasks. What also happens that changes? It seems to change time span. But the reason why things move faster and faster is because of automation. Well what automation does is also simplify the doing of a task. Remember what we're looking at is the demands for the employee within a role are what is the power of judgment that they can bring to that role? What is the power of dealing with uncertainty and complexity that they can bring to that role? Well skills, knowledge, automation it lowers the need for judgment in many cases. So the speed up people would say well, building a new piece of software used to take three years and now it can be done in six months. Yeah, and now it is a stratum two accountability and it used to be a high four accountability. I forget what time spent but the work can get simpler and that speeds things up and it also lowers the complexity work of the role. Well if that stratified role can really only work up to a three year time span that just proves there's compression. And now I start feeling like I'm trying to rescue my paradigm but that's the paradigm I'm working with. And it does seem to make sense but of course it will because it's my paradigm. But still I had a colleague who was starting his task was to start an insurance company, a joint venture insurance company in India so that it would be sustainably profitable and at the top two or three insurance companies in India in twelve years. Developing country now immense, immense uncertainty in twelve years. That's why you need someone capable at stratum six to deal with that. Nothing shortened in that there are many confusions about time span. And time span is something I have learned to teach with preemptive clarification. So you say it's the intended length of the longest task in the role. Now, that's a pretty clear statement. Half of the audience will say, yes, but my CEO of our company has a lot of work that only has one wit. No, not the typical task, not the shortest task, not what you consider to be the most important task, the single most longest task. The other thing that people will always go to is, oh, but I have to think, yes, my subordinate has to put together a five year plan. Question is, how long do you give her to put together the plan? She has to think five years out of it. It's very different from working five years out. So it's not how long does the thing typically take, it's how long is the manager intended to take. And the issue there is now because the subordinate, what you're doing a task is sharing your intention with your subordinate. Now your subordinate has to have the exact same intention. One of the things I want to make clear, if you give a high three task to a mid three capable subordinate, I'll make it easier on myself. You give a stratum four task to a stratum three subordinate, they will not work poorly on that task. They will not work on the task at all. And there's a real difference between not working well on the task. One example, my wife at one point ran a social service agency. They had a summer camp. And so for inner city kids, they were able to spend two weeks out of the city. Camp was on an island. There were four boats that took food and garbage and people back and forth, and there were always great dents. And my wife gave to the camp director the task of coming up with a strategy for dealing with the upkeep of the boats. And by strategy she had in mind, like her chart, so how's the maintenance of the various boats interconnected with the maintenance of the others? And he would come back to her and say, well, first we're going to take boat A and we're going to paint it, and then we're going to repair the motor on boat B, and then we're going to repair the hull on boat C, and by then we're going to need to repair the motor on boat A. And she said, no, I don't want to plan, I want to strategy. And you can see clearly what she was looking at was for both A-B-C and D, what was going to happen here and what were the interactions she was asking for parallel processing. He gave her serial processing. He didn't work poorly on this. He didn't work on it at all. It could not fit inside his hand. And that's what happens when you give too big a tag, a task that's bigger than the person you sam.