09/01/2018
“Could 'Size of Can' Have Something To Do With Time?”
You might be surprised to learn that the first hint of management science came from the old question: how do we pay people fairly? Pay is a very serious and emotional issue. Often people feel others are overpaid while they are burdened with a heavier weight of responsibility than their pay reflects. Maybe you have been involved in any one of a number of job evaluation schemes that attempt to achieve fairness in differential pay – the differences in pay scales from role to role? You will surely agree that job evaluation is not an exact science?
We know that it was an apple hitting Isaac Newton on the head that led to the sciences of physics and astrophysics, and – after a number of people were persecuted and jailed – to a widespread acceptance that the world is round. Figuratively, it was a can tied to a dog’s tail hitting a man nicknamed Doc’s mind – or perhaps I should say Doc’s entire living system - that is leading to widespread acceptance of management science.
Let me explain.
In 1952, at Glacier Metals Company in West London, England, a group of young engineers and professionals had been wrestling with the ‘size of can’ issue. ‘The size of can that can be tied to a dog’s tail’ was the local bit of slang for which there remains very limited phraseology to this day. It was being used to convey a sense of the size of a job, or the weight of responsibility and/or accountability, or any number of other variables of work that job evaluation systems then and now try to get to – but sadly never do. Anyway, the group were very concerned that the job evaluation system had not been treating them fairly when it rated and ranked jobs. For a number of months, they had been finding it difficult to come up with any meaningful measurement for roles – with or without Doc’s help.
So they did what many Brits do when they are wrestling with a difficult problem.
They went to the pub.
While they were hoisting a few pints, one of them wondered out loud if ‘size of can’ might have something to do with what eventually became the science’s first tool.
The next day three pub patrons entered the office of a researcher who was working on site and questioned him: “Say Doc, we’ve been thinking about this ‘size of can’ thing, and we wondered if it could have something to do with how we get paid.”
“What do you mean?” said Doc. (Doc being Dr. Elliott Jaques a 30-something at the time Canadian-born, University of Toronto, John Hopkins and Harvard formally educated, Canadian military veteran, British Psycho-Analytic Society member, and management expert - and “The Father of Management Science” in my humble opinion.)
“Well, you know, we have hourly-paid employees. Then there are those on administrative, technical and junior engineering staff who are paid on weekly and monthly salaries. And then there are the more senior managerial folks who refer to their pay as an annual salary. So we had a bit of a chat about this. And it seems the further up the organization the person works, the longer the time to which the pay is connected.”
Dr. Jaques stared into space for a moment.
“Say Doc, could ‘size of can’ have something to do with time?”
Over the years to follow, Doc found that ‘size of can’ had a very great deal to do with time. It took about 5 years to achieve a fair and equitable compensation system within Glacier. In the decades that followed Jaques and some colleagues worked out concepts of time-span of discretion, time of intention in tasks or intended time, and meshed these ideas with studies in levels of abstraction in how humans work. Jaques’ article: “Taking Time Seriously in Evaluating Jobs’ was published in the Harvard Business Review in 1979. All this work led to the big discovery in the 1990’s on the complexity of work processing (which we will touch on in the next story). Along the way “felt-fair” pay studies were done at various locations, including Honeywell Corporation - that drove home the fact that using time to evaluate jobs was the most accurate method.
It took a while – and decades of dedicated work - for these things to get sorted out. But 50 years after the pub run, Jaques was to say he was “forever grateful” to the little gang who went to that British pub, and surfaced with what was to become the first true measurement tool of management science.
Science Displayed through “What-By-When”
By the late 1950’s Elliott Jaques had already extracted from actual managers a great number of the time spans of roles of their direct reports.
(Some explanation is probably appropriate now. At the very point at which you, as my manager, are assigning me a task, you will not only be asking me to do a something (a “what”); but it will be a something within a certain time (a “by-when”). Conditions may change that may make it easier or harder for me to deliver my “what-by-when” but at this moment in time this is what you need and the by-when that you need it.)
The quickest and most accurate route to uncovering a what-by-when or having a role time spanned involved Elliott assuming the role of the direct report as he interviewed the manager.
In 1993, after he had done thousands of “time spans” or “what-by-when” exercises in virtually every industry in all parts of the world, I saw him display this first tool of the first management science for the first time.
I was both amused and awestruck.
“Okay Boss, what is my name and what is my role?” Elliott opened.
The manager told Elliott his role-play name and his actual position or role in the company for the exercise, it went something like this.
“Describe to me a task that you are assigning to me. It may not be the most important task I perform. But rather, select one that has a maximum target completion time that is furthest out in time. It’s a task that you are counting on me to deliver - either on my own or with the help of others (my direct reports or others if a special project team has been assembled) or whatever. The point is, you need a “what” from me in my role. Can you please describe to me what the “What” looks like?
The manager thought briefly about it and then described the “What” that he needed to help in the accomplishment of his longer term goals.
Elliott asked some more questions to be sure that the task was the one with the longest in-role target completion time, and to get completely clear on the assignment he was being given at that moment. There was some back and forth on exactly what made up the “What”.
Then Elliott waded boldly into the “By-When” arena by suggesting a maximum target completion time that was either ridiculously too long or too short.
Not Just the Mind, but the Manager’s Entire Living System or Organism
The manager had a visible knee-jerk reaction, and when pressed, stated empathically a very definitive period of time. For purposes of helping you picture this, the manager stated “26 months“.
Jaques then almost teasingly went through a bracketing process of longer and shorter time spans with statements like:
- “Well surely boss, you will give me 3 years to perform this task?” to which the manager’s entire demeanor, and then his words clearly said ‘NO’.
- “If things go well, surely you’ll accept the results I hand you in, say, 18 months,” to which the manager’s complete organism strongly suggested a strong suspicion of substandard performance is what Elliott-in-role was proposing to deliver.
The amusing part was to witness how the manager's entire being definitely was more and more impatient with “Elliott-as-the-subordinate” in his NOT recognizing that it was a 26-month task that was needed from the role. One wondered if the manager was not about to physically deal with his “subordinate” to get him to see the ‘By-When”. The bracketing process continued but it soon became more than apparent to all in the room that the “By-When” was exactly 26 months.
Then Dr. Jaques repeated the same exercise for other tasks in the role until the manager and Elliott were satisfied that the task with the longest target completion time had been uncovered for the role.
Then the same was repeated for all other roles directly subordinate to this same manager, with Elliott-in-role as each of these subordinate team members.
This was not a long and tedious task. Once the manager and Jaques-in-role got by the first couple, it was both amazing and funny how quickly that each role’s measurement was completed. We are talking maybe an average of 4 minutes tops to get a measured time-span for each of the roles. I couldn’t help recalling to myself all the endless hours spent in methods such as assessment centres, all to arrive nowhere near a science-based solution. And this was being accomplished in minutes!
You will need the knowledge shared in the next stories. But getting the maximum target completion times for all the upper roles in an organization is the beginning of a scientific diagnosis of the health of that organization. It also involves getting confirmation from the manager’s manager (the Manager-once-Removed or M-o-R) – an exercise that surprisingly is not that difficult. There is something about putting first science-based tool to work - such as the one Jaques displayed for us in 1993 - that has executives who have worked with it agree: “It is science, but it works like magic”. You know, it is not so different than taking body temperature and blood pressure to make medical diagnoses that would have seemed magical to a patient who had just had his barber slash and blood-let him.
And guess what? No need to involve you in sketchy job evaluation schemes or to strategically place you under an apple tree.
