# Requisite Organization **Elliott Jaques**  --- _Organisational dysfunction is almost never a people problem. It's a structure problem._ Jaques spent decades studying how organisations actually work, and his central finding is uncomfortable for anyone who prefers simpler explanations: when levels of work, accountability hierarchies, and time-spans align with human capability, people flourish. When they don't, you get bloat, mistrust, and mediocrity. Not because the people are bad, but because the structure produces those outcomes reliably and predictably. "If you want to achieve effective and creative leadership and behaviour in managerial systems, you do so by changing the managerial systems and not by trying to change the people or by applying spurious single-step solutions." The most dramatic changes in behaviour come from changes in organisation structure and leadership practices, the same insight behind the [[Execution trap]]. Given half a chance, people are keen to get on with their work. What's missing, almost always, is an adequate organisational framework. --- **A manager is a person held accountable for the outputs of others, for sustaining a team capable of producing those outputs, and for giving effective leadership to that team.** That definition cuts through decades of management fuzziness. A manager isn't someone with direct reports or a title. The accountability has to be real, which means the authority must also be real. Four elements of minimum requisite authority: veto on unacceptable hires, the ability to assign tasks and decide which types of work each subordinate carries out, appraisal and merit review, and the ability to initiate removal after due process. Without that authority, you have responsibility without power, and that's a recipe for dysfunction that eventually corrodes everyone in the structure. --- **The complexity of a role is measured by its time-span of discretion.** This is the longest target-completion-time for tasks in that role. A role with a one-week horizon is genuinely different in kind from a role with a three-year horizon, not just in subject matter but in the cognitive demands it places on the person filling it. Longer time-spans require more complex mental processing and higher potential capability. This gives an objective way to measure role complexity, stratify organisations, and align differential pay without subjective job evaluations or political games. Think of this as a structural version of [[Pace layers]]: different strata of the organisation operate on different time horizons, and the confusion arises when people working at different time-spans are placed in the wrong layer relative to their actual capability. The most common disease in managerial hierarchies is too many levels of working organisation. Unnecessary layers create complexity, slow decision-making, and dilute accountability. Organisation strata are not grades. You will need more pay grades than organisation strata. --- **Trust is the basic social glue. Suspicion is the prime enemy.** People don't need to love or like each other to work effectively together. But they do need to trust each other. Every structure and process should be tested against one criterion: does this foster trust or suspicion? Structures that produce suspicion will produce bad behaviour, even from people who are individually trustworthy. One of the more counter-intuitive findings: the "delegate down" mindset, when applied to entrepreneurial work, policy development, R&D, marketing, and creative areas, is harmful. It forces the best individual contributors to become managers in order to get promoted, stripping organisations of top talent at exactly the level where that talent is most valuable. High-level work should be done by high-level people in high-level positions. Delegating it downward doesn't develop people. It produces bad work. The underlying point about decision-making is worth holding onto. "If you can state, whether beforehand or afterwards, all the reasons why you made a decision, you did not make a decision, you carried out a calculation." Decision-making involves values, purpose, and choice under uncertainty. Most reasons remain unverbalised and are influenced by what you care about. Organisations that forget this and reduce management to a calculation are building structures that will fail predictably whenever conditions become genuinely novel. ---