# Requisite Organization **Elliott Jaques** | [[Action]]  --- > "We shall define a manager specifically as a person who is held accountable for the outputs of others, for sustaining a team capable of producing those outputs, and for giving effective leadership to that team." This definition cuts through decades of management fuzziness. A manager isn't someone with direct reports or a title. A manager is **accountable for others' outputs**. That accountability requires specific authority: veto on hires, task assignment, appraisal, and the power to initiate removal. Without that authority, you have responsibility without power—a recipe for dysfunction. **Organisational effectiveness is not about changing people; it's about designing the right structures.** 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. > "If you want to achieve effective and creative leadership and behavior 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." Requisite Organisation provides a scientifically grounded framework for structuring hierarchies, assigning roles, and matching capability to work complexity. **The longer the time-span of a role, the higher the level of work.** This gives you an objective way to measure role complexity, stratify organisations, and align pay—without subjective job evaluations or political games. --- ## Core Ideas ### [[Managerial Accountability Hierarchy]] Organisations are systems for getting work done through vertical specialisation—managers held accountable not just for their own work, but for the outputs of their subordinates. Accountability and authority cascade down through discrete organisational strata. Too many layers create "delegation disease": unnecessary complexity, reduced effectiveness, stripped creativity. The key distinction: managers are accountable for outputs of others. Only one person can be held accountable for your outputs—your immediate manager. ### [[Time-Span of Discretion]] The complexity of a role is measured by its time-span of discretion—the longest target-completion-time for tasks in that role. Longer time-spans require more complex mental processing and higher potential capability. Time-span provides an objective measure of role size, replacing subjective job evaluations. It's the foundation for stratifying organisations and aligning differential pay. > "The longer the time-span of a role, the higher the level of work." ### [[Managerial Authority]] A manager who is accountable for subordinates' outputs must have minimum requisite authority. First, veto on unacceptable hires—you cannot be forced to accept someone no one else wants. Second, task assignment—decide which types of work each subordinate carries out. Third, effectiveness appraisal and merit review—judge working effectiveness and determine merit. Fourth, initiate removal—after due process, decide that a subordinate shall no longer work for you. Without this authority, managers cannot add value to subordinates' work. Misplaced authority undermines creativity and morale. ### [[Trust as Structural Requirement]] Trust is the basic social glue. Suspicion is the prime enemy. > "Trust is the basic social glue: suspicion is the prime enemy." People don't need to love or like each other to work effectively. But they must be able to trust each other. Structures and processes must be tested by one criterion: do they foster trust or suspicion? --- ## Key Insights **The most dramatic changes in behaviour come from changes in organisation—structure and leadership practices.** Given half a chance, people are keen to get on with their work. What's missing is an adequate organisational framework. > "Given half a chance, people are keen to get on with their work, and to have work to get on with. What is missing is an adequate organizational framework within which to work and to cooperate with each other." **The "delegate down" mindset is harmful when applied to entrepreneurial work, policy development, R&D, marketing, design, or creative areas.** It forces the best individual contributors to become managers to get promoted, stripping organisations of top talent. High-level work should be done by high-level people in high-level positions—not delegated to lower levels. **Work is fundamentally about discretion, judgment, and decision-making, not just execution.** MAHs are human judgment systems. Exercising judgment is what you pay people for—everyone, not just executives. > "MAHs are human judgment systems. Exercising judgment and making decisions is what you pay people (everyone) for." If you can state all the reasons for a decision beforehand or afterwards, you didn't make a decision—you carried out a calculation. Decision-making involves values, purpose, and choice under uncertainty. Most reasons remain unverbalized and influenced by what you care about. > "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." **There are four ways individuals process information when engrossed in work: declarative, cumulative, serial, and parallel processing.** This quartet of processes recurs within higher and higher orders of complexity. Each process corresponds to a discrete step in potential capability. There's a .97 correlation between universal managerial layering and each discrete step in complexity of mental process. **Three basic human competencies shape work performance.** Potential capability is innate, maturing from infancy to old age. Values and commitment determine how much we value and commit to a particular role. Skilled knowledge encompasses the knowledge needed to carry out the work and knowledge about people. People seek work at a level where they can use their capabilities to the full, with fair differential pay for that work. The democratic dream: work that uses one's full capability, with scope for growth. **A universal disease of MAHs: too many levels of working organisation.** Unnecessary layers create complexity, slow decision-making, and dilute accountability. Organisation strata are not grades. You'll need more pay grades than organisation strata. **Time-span measurement is objective, gets rid of subjective job-evaluation ratings, and simplifies differential pay systems.** The main difficulty: most managers can't focus on specific tasks in terms of a what-by-when. They think in terms of activities (selling, typing, researching) rather than tasks (produce this report within 6 months). Once you learn to identify tasks as what-by-whens, time-span measurement becomes straightforward. **As MAHs grow, a sag often occurs at the top because the true level of work is underestimated.** People of insufficient capability are appointed to top roles, and quality drops. This happens in business units and divisions within corporations, not just at the CEO level. --- ## Connects To - [[Playing to Win]] - Lafley & Martin on core capabilities pairs with Jaques on aligning capability to role complexity - [[Nine Lies About Work]] - Buckingham & Goodall on manager-subordinate relationships complements Jaques on managerial accountability - [[Competing Against Time]] - George Stalk on time as strategic weapon connects to Jaques' time-span of discretion - [[Dead Companies Walking]] - Scott Fearon on organisational dysfunction --- ## Final Thought Most organisations assume the problem is employees: hire better people, train them more, change their mindset. Jaques flips this. The problem is almost always the structure—too many layers, misaligned accountability, managers without authority, roles that don't match capability. Fix the structure, and people flourish. Leave the structure broken, and even great people underperform. **Time-span of discretion is the most practical insight.** You can objectively measure role complexity by asking: what's the longest task-completion time for work in this role? A shop-floor role might have tasks measured in hours or days. A CEO role has tasks measured in years or decades. Time-span gives you a rational basis for stratifying organisations, setting pay, and matching people to roles—without political games or subjective evaluations. **Managerial accountability requires authority.** If you're held accountable for someone's output, you must have veto on hiring them, the power to assign their tasks, the ability to appraise them, and the authority to initiate their removal. Without that authority, you have responsibility without power—and that's organisational malpractice. Yet most companies routinely do this: they call someone a "manager" but don't give them real authority. Result: frustration, blame-shifting, mediocrity. Work is judgment, not execution. MAHs are human judgment systems. Everyone—not just executives—exercises discretion and makes decisions. If you can articulate all the reasons for a decision, you didn't make a decision; you ran a calculation. Real decisions involve values, purpose, and choice under uncertainty. Most reasons remain unspoken. This reframes what organisations pay for: not compliance or task-completion, but human judgment applied to complex problems. The challenge: trusting the framework over intuition. Jaques' system is rigorous, even scientific. But it requires discipline. You have to measure time-spans accurately. You have to resist adding unnecessary layers. You have to give managers real authority, not just titles. And you have to accept that people mature at different rates—some will reach their capability ceiling early, others will keep growing. That's uncomfortable for organisations that want everyone to be "high-potential." But it's honest. And it works.