Peter Friesen

I have lectured on RO as basis for insight into philosophical, legal and economic issues, have developed a capability assessment program, and have developed an application of RO into Agile theoretical constructs. I have developed humanitarian projects for the delivery of water to the poor, and have developed a design model for judicial governance systems.  

Below I have summarized my involvement with the use of logical forms in the description of "levels" of capability, and the use of those forms as a tool in the understanding of a number of philosophical issues. (See below)

My work with Jaques’ research began while his field of study was still being called “stratified systems theory.” I was a graduate student at the University of Southern California attending a seminar being taught by Elliott Jaques in January 1979. Jaques persuaded me that his research touched on something deep and edifying about human beings.

During the seminar, I spent all night writing a paper for Jaques' review that compared work levels to logical levels, using an information processing metaphor, and using information processing symbols. After reading the paper, Elliott invited me and Marice Bisheff (who had organized the seminar) to lunch to talk about it. He seemed excited, and wanted to discuss it with one of his intellectual collaborators, R. O. Gibson—a logician and logical theorist. We agreed to stay in touch.

Though I changed my field of study from organizational theory to law, I continued to think about hierarchy and to develop a descriptive vocabulary of "levels" within hierarchy. In the summer after my first year of law school, I spent all of my time writing.

The work produced a manuscript of about 150 pages.  In the manuscript, I used an information processing metaphor (search within a field of spaces) to express a cyclic concept of logical development that moved upward through orders of complexity. I discovered that processing forms resembled the four mythic plot forms (mythical genre) used to communicate and reproduce moral sensation. I also discovered that one might model language and law by recognizing how states of attention shift between levels situated within a model of consciousness.

When I was about to graduate from law school in 1982, I applied for a grant to finance a year of writing, to expand these ideas yet again. It was approved.  I suspect that many who presently use “information processing” along with Requisite Organization may find the following anecdote interesting.

Within this time frame I was invited to attend a lecture to be delivered by Jaques on the recent development of his work in Los Angeles, and I attended. At the lecture he laid out a path for organization movement from one order of complexity to the next. Following five levels, a sixth level would mark the emergence of a new order of complexity. I liked the presentation, but after the lecture I had to tell him that he was wrong about something important. The use of a fifth to sixth stratum as a marker for the emergence of a new order was logically incoherent. The fifth level serves as a pivot, i.e., it completes a cycle as it begins another. This is how one order of complexity connects to another.

Elliott responded first with puzzlement, and then with laughter: “Gibby has been telling me for a while the same thing. Are you saying there are only four processing forms?” I hesitated and said “yes.” Elliott’s reference to Gibby (R.O. Gibson) did not surprise me, as I had been studying and adapting my own work from R.O. Gibson’s essays on logical levels. A few weeks later, I received a paper in the mail correcting the error. There were four processing forms with a fifth level assuming a dual role of cyclic completion and initiation.

The anecdote is offered not so much to assign credit for the formulation of a quatripartite cycle to R.O. Gibson (or myself) as to emphasize that it was a breakthrough that attracted a number of people, and included a reflective process occurring over more than a few years. It speaks to questions that have hovered about logic and various theories of the mind for centuries. It also helps in the assessment of “level” to what someone is doing, and makes it much easier to assess capability, especially at very high levels.They are not loose descriptions, and are central to the last 15 years of Jaques’ work.

The work attached to this internet address ought to be valuable source material not only for the development of a “levels” technology, but for its extension into other disciplines. As grand as Jaques' work was, it was a lot to put on the shoulders of a single person, and it continues to need more in the way of broad academic attention and the clarification of its precepts.

I worked on Requisite alongside my law practice until the year 2000. Then I left my practice in San Diego, California and lived for three years in South Carolina to work full time on RO. I had never stopped working on the ideas deriving from Jaques’ research, but my interests had shifted from organizational design to a more generalized work on the nature of “freedom.” Human development, it seemed, was about freedom because growth involves the affirmation of a value that breaks through perceived restrictions. It therefore resonates ethically.   

In March 2003, I completed a draft of “On Freedom” and submitted a copy to Elliot. I was later contacted by his office with the news that he had passed away. Then I began frequent conversations with Elliot’s wife, Kathryn Cason, who invited me to serve on the Advisory Board of Requisite Organization International. As a result of many days (at time continuing for weeks) of conversation with Kathryn, the ideas expressed in the book benefited greatly.  I was quite sad to hear of her passing.

In 2008 I suspended my law practice again in order to pursue a humanitarian project using Requisite principles to establish sustainable supplies of clean water to impoverished areas of the world. At the same time I served on the board of a water purification company capable of designing and delivering the hardware adequate to satisfy and service regionally established service systems. Though the experience was quite rich, international complexities undermined several different funding commitments. I abandoned the project in 2012 and secluded myself within an amicable Central American community to write a second book, applying Requisite principles to a theory of law and economy—the two of which, from an organizational perspective, are inseparable.

Upon return from Central America, I joined a law firm in Denver, Colorado, while arranging for the publication of the books On Freedom: Organization Science Examined Philosophically (2017), and Law and Economic Order: A Theory of Requisite Economy (2019).