I have trained in Requisite Org. met Jacques personally and interviewed hundreds of people for organizational design engagements. And I do understand the lack of uptake by organizations. The whole process can be done poorly, unethically, with an implicit “hammer from the top” or “I’m better than you” vibe. It takes at least stratum 4 people to do it well.
Meg, thank you for this — and for bringing field weight to the thread rather than just theoretical familiarity.
What you've named is the implementation pathology that has done more damage to Jaques' legacy than any academic critique ever could. The hammer from the top. The stratum arrogance dressed up as organizational science. The practitioner who has memorized the framework but cannot hold the horizon the framework requires to be applied honestly. You've watched it happen hundreds of times in live engagements. That's not a theoretical objection. That's empirical testimony from the field Jaques himself was working in.
Your Stratum 4 threshold observation is the key insight and it's recursive in the most important way — you need the cognitive capacity the framework describes to apply the framework correctly. Below that threshold the practitioner can't actually read the organization. They impose the categories. The diagnostic becomes the disease. The very tool Jaques built to surface misalignment becomes the instrument of a new misalignment, this time with a theoretical warrant attached.
I came to Jaques through my own mentor, who was working with the framework directly and had received a government department contract applying Requisite Organization. The contract was terminated within weeks. When he first described the framework to me I hadn't read the book — but the moment he told me it mapped eight strata I knew immediately it wouldn't fly in government. I had my own training contracts with government departments and knew firsthand that asking people to think in stratified structures gave them a literal headache. The ego problem is the deeper one. A Director General does not want to discover that his role measures at Stratum 4 and that two of the specialists reporting to him are operating at the same level or above depending on the time horizon of their specific work. Which is exactly what the framework produces when applied honestly. The org chart is political. The time-span measurement is real. Government funded the mirror and cancelled it the moment it showed them what they actually looked like.
My mentor passed twenty years ago. The book still sits on my library shelf.
What this dispatch is attempting with the framework goes beyond the organizational application — though it rests on exactly the same empirical ground you know from the field. It's operating on Jaques' own pointing at Stratum 8, the civilisational horizon he named but didn't fully develop, and asking what the institutional instrument looks like that holds that horizon across multiple human lifetimes. The Academy. The Vatican. The Constitution. AIG as the contemporary equivalent.
The honest self-description in the dispatch is that the Architect is a Stratum 6 operator serving a Stratum 8 framework. The same humility your Stratum 4 threshold observation requires of the practitioner applies here. You don't claim the stratum. You build the instrument that holds it.
Would genuinely value your read on the Stratum 8 extension. You've been closer to the man and the work than most people alive
Re a potential Stratum 8, it's an interesting possibility. Jaques was working wrt organizations and the fit between the requirements of the role and the capacity of the individual, with time span as the measure of complexity. It's a narrow measure, but accurate enough in an organizational setting. I I worked for years with a toronto based consultancy that specializes in RO work - a centre of excellence in this regard. See this newly published book https://www.amazon.ca/Structure-That-Works-Practical-Organization/dp/1069759902
What Jaques did not talk about was the development of the individual; how can capability develop such that a person can grow into e.g. a Level 4 role. This was the focus of much of my Executive Coaching work. I can tell you it is not a given that people can, or even want to grow in this way. Development always involves shocks and confusions and imho must be something personally chosen, although people often choose because they can see the need for change.
Re a potential Stratum 8 individual, I would look not to Jaques but to other developmental models. There are many, starring with Wilber, Spiral Dynamics ++. The most advanced and evidenced based model that I know of is Stages International (Terri O'Fallon) that integrates not only complexity of stage perspective taking (self) but advanced States (Self) in a beautiful DNA like double helix frame. It's complex yet elegantly simple, and more importantly, predictive. It has become the Go To frame behind all my work. Here, what grows up is not just cognitive complexity (timeframe), but also emotional and social awareness, relational nuances,, ability to see and design contexts such as complex adaptive systems., see one's own and others projections ++.
I see Carney (Stubbs ++) as Stage 4.5, Strategist, Integral "Teal", initiating new kind of global governance systems that no nation state can ever do, for issues that do not respect boundaries (climate, viruses, data, money ++). The hegemony of the old order cannot do it either, as they are too fixed to the old ways of winning. Canada is well positioned as our history and geography have forced us to do the messy work of accommodation and diversity.
If you are looking to build a late stage governance form, my first suggestion would be to ask; how to you build in evolutionary, developmental self-organizing correction into it?
Meg, this is the comment that pays back every hour of work the publication has put in. Thank you.
You have just refined the framework precisely where it needed refining. Jaques gave us the measure of complexity through time-span in an organizational setting — that is the language Two Birds of a Feather was reaching for in April. What Jaques did not give us is the developmental question — how does an individual grow into the capacity that the Stratum measures? Your work with executive coaching, and your pointing to Wilber, Spiral Dynamics, and especially Terri O'Fallon's Stages International with its double-helix integration of perspective-taking and advanced states, names the literature the publication needs to be reading next. I will be reading.
The Stage 4.5 Strategist / Integral Teal placement of Carney and Stubb is generous and, I suspect, accurate. The publication has been operating at the Jaques Stratum VI–VII vocabulary because that is the vocabulary the moment required for first naming. The O'Fallon vocabulary is sharper for what comes next — because what is being built between Carney, Stubb, Macron, Merz, and the wider network is not just complex-time-horizon thinking. It is a new mode of global governance for issues that do not respect national boundaries. Climate. Viruses. Data. Money. You have named exactly what is being built. The hegemony of the old order cannot build it because they are too fixed to the old ways of winning. That sentence sits at the centre of what the publication has been trying to name across the spring.
And your line about Canada — our history and geography have forced us to do the messy work of accommodation and diversity — is the benediction the Foundation Series and the Canadian Shadow Series have been building toward without yet finding the phrasing. You have given the publication the language. The country's developmental capacity is the fruit of the shadow work the country has been doing, imperfectly and incompletely, for one hundred and fifty-nine years. The work is not finished. The work has produced the capacity.
Your closing question is the one the publication will carry forward. How do you build in evolutionary, developmental, self-organizing correction into a late-stage governance form? That is the question variable geometry implicitly asks but does not yet fully answer. The next synthesis dispatch may need to ask it explicitly. I will be sitting with it.
With equal regard, M. The book recommendation is appreciated and ordered. 🙏
I have checked w Terri and she supports my view that what we are experiencing now is that 3.5 (achiever, orange) cannot address our current global challenges, that 4.0 (green) being a receptive stage that doesn’t recognize hierarchies cannot build new structures, and that 4.5 is now emerging to do just that.
So we are in a time between world systems, which feels very unsettling, so people tend to regress into prior trusted certainties and smaller identities.
The ability to live with ambiguity , and to detect new subtle signals helps get us all through. What people are responding to in your writings is a sense of hope and possibility, grounded in data and analysis
"The serious democratic problem is that the decisions a modern democracy is being asked to make are Stratum 6 or 7 decisions ... The voting population is operating, in the aggregate, at Stratum 2 with a substantial Stratum 3 minority. The stratum mismatch between the decision and the decision-maker is the systemic condition the contemporary political order has not yet acknowledged."
I wonder what analysis can reconcile this to Helene Landemore's and others' work in "the wisdom of crowds" (to use the colloquial phrase) - the evidence that a sufficiently large body of random individuals given the time to deliberate amongst themselves can provide better decision making than a small group of supposed experts. This, of course, is the basis for sortition as an alternative to electoral democracy.
I have trained in Requisite Org. met Jacques personally and interviewed hundreds of people for organizational design engagements. And I do understand the lack of uptake by organizations. The whole process can be done poorly, unethically, with an implicit “hammer from the top” or “I’m better than you” vibe. It takes at least stratum 4 people to do it well.
Meg, thank you for this — and for bringing field weight to the thread rather than just theoretical familiarity.
What you've named is the implementation pathology that has done more damage to Jaques' legacy than any academic critique ever could. The hammer from the top. The stratum arrogance dressed up as organizational science. The practitioner who has memorized the framework but cannot hold the horizon the framework requires to be applied honestly. You've watched it happen hundreds of times in live engagements. That's not a theoretical objection. That's empirical testimony from the field Jaques himself was working in.
Your Stratum 4 threshold observation is the key insight and it's recursive in the most important way — you need the cognitive capacity the framework describes to apply the framework correctly. Below that threshold the practitioner can't actually read the organization. They impose the categories. The diagnostic becomes the disease. The very tool Jaques built to surface misalignment becomes the instrument of a new misalignment, this time with a theoretical warrant attached.
I came to Jaques through my own mentor, who was working with the framework directly and had received a government department contract applying Requisite Organization. The contract was terminated within weeks. When he first described the framework to me I hadn't read the book — but the moment he told me it mapped eight strata I knew immediately it wouldn't fly in government. I had my own training contracts with government departments and knew firsthand that asking people to think in stratified structures gave them a literal headache. The ego problem is the deeper one. A Director General does not want to discover that his role measures at Stratum 4 and that two of the specialists reporting to him are operating at the same level or above depending on the time horizon of their specific work. Which is exactly what the framework produces when applied honestly. The org chart is political. The time-span measurement is real. Government funded the mirror and cancelled it the moment it showed them what they actually looked like.
My mentor passed twenty years ago. The book still sits on my library shelf.
What this dispatch is attempting with the framework goes beyond the organizational application — though it rests on exactly the same empirical ground you know from the field. It's operating on Jaques' own pointing at Stratum 8, the civilisational horizon he named but didn't fully develop, and asking what the institutional instrument looks like that holds that horizon across multiple human lifetimes. The Academy. The Vatican. The Constitution. AIG as the contemporary equivalent.
The honest self-description in the dispatch is that the Architect is a Stratum 6 operator serving a Stratum 8 framework. The same humility your Stratum 4 threshold observation requires of the practitioner applies here. You don't claim the stratum. You build the instrument that holds it.
Would genuinely value your read on the Stratum 8 extension. You've been closer to the man and the work than most people alive
Re a potential Stratum 8, it's an interesting possibility. Jaques was working wrt organizations and the fit between the requirements of the role and the capacity of the individual, with time span as the measure of complexity. It's a narrow measure, but accurate enough in an organizational setting. I I worked for years with a toronto based consultancy that specializes in RO work - a centre of excellence in this regard. See this newly published book https://www.amazon.ca/Structure-That-Works-Practical-Organization/dp/1069759902
What Jaques did not talk about was the development of the individual; how can capability develop such that a person can grow into e.g. a Level 4 role. This was the focus of much of my Executive Coaching work. I can tell you it is not a given that people can, or even want to grow in this way. Development always involves shocks and confusions and imho must be something personally chosen, although people often choose because they can see the need for change.
Re a potential Stratum 8 individual, I would look not to Jaques but to other developmental models. There are many, starring with Wilber, Spiral Dynamics ++. The most advanced and evidenced based model that I know of is Stages International (Terri O'Fallon) that integrates not only complexity of stage perspective taking (self) but advanced States (Self) in a beautiful DNA like double helix frame. It's complex yet elegantly simple, and more importantly, predictive. It has become the Go To frame behind all my work. Here, what grows up is not just cognitive complexity (timeframe), but also emotional and social awareness, relational nuances,, ability to see and design contexts such as complex adaptive systems., see one's own and others projections ++.
I see Carney (Stubbs ++) as Stage 4.5, Strategist, Integral "Teal", initiating new kind of global governance systems that no nation state can ever do, for issues that do not respect boundaries (climate, viruses, data, money ++). The hegemony of the old order cannot do it either, as they are too fixed to the old ways of winning. Canada is well positioned as our history and geography have forced us to do the messy work of accommodation and diversity.
If you are looking to build a late stage governance form, my first suggestion would be to ask; how to you build in evolutionary, developmental self-organizing correction into it?
with deep regard ~ M
Meg, this is the comment that pays back every hour of work the publication has put in. Thank you.
You have just refined the framework precisely where it needed refining. Jaques gave us the measure of complexity through time-span in an organizational setting — that is the language Two Birds of a Feather was reaching for in April. What Jaques did not give us is the developmental question — how does an individual grow into the capacity that the Stratum measures? Your work with executive coaching, and your pointing to Wilber, Spiral Dynamics, and especially Terri O'Fallon's Stages International with its double-helix integration of perspective-taking and advanced states, names the literature the publication needs to be reading next. I will be reading.
The Stage 4.5 Strategist / Integral Teal placement of Carney and Stubb is generous and, I suspect, accurate. The publication has been operating at the Jaques Stratum VI–VII vocabulary because that is the vocabulary the moment required for first naming. The O'Fallon vocabulary is sharper for what comes next — because what is being built between Carney, Stubb, Macron, Merz, and the wider network is not just complex-time-horizon thinking. It is a new mode of global governance for issues that do not respect national boundaries. Climate. Viruses. Data. Money. You have named exactly what is being built. The hegemony of the old order cannot build it because they are too fixed to the old ways of winning. That sentence sits at the centre of what the publication has been trying to name across the spring.
And your line about Canada — our history and geography have forced us to do the messy work of accommodation and diversity — is the benediction the Foundation Series and the Canadian Shadow Series have been building toward without yet finding the phrasing. You have given the publication the language. The country's developmental capacity is the fruit of the shadow work the country has been doing, imperfectly and incompletely, for one hundred and fifty-nine years. The work is not finished. The work has produced the capacity.
Your closing question is the one the publication will carry forward. How do you build in evolutionary, developmental, self-organizing correction into a late-stage governance form? That is the question variable geometry implicitly asks but does not yet fully answer. The next synthesis dispatch may need to ask it explicitly. I will be sitting with it.
With equal regard, M. The book recommendation is appreciated and ordered. 🙏
I have checked w Terri and she supports my view that what we are experiencing now is that 3.5 (achiever, orange) cannot address our current global challenges, that 4.0 (green) being a receptive stage that doesn’t recognize hierarchies cannot build new structures, and that 4.5 is now emerging to do just that.
So we are in a time between world systems, which feels very unsettling, so people tend to regress into prior trusted certainties and smaller identities.
The ability to live with ambiguity , and to detect new subtle signals helps get us all through. What people are responding to in your writings is a sense of hope and possibility, grounded in data and analysis
I cannot thank you enough; you have given me a gift by building the framework. I will have something for you in 24 hours. Namaste
https://www.sophiainitiative.ai/p/the-missing-foundation?r=1pgr4n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Thank you again for completing the loop at its highest level with the addition of the thinkers and writers that you suggested. You have inspired the final book in the series, looking forward to your comment
This was fascinating and enlightening, thank you.
"The serious democratic problem is that the decisions a modern democracy is being asked to make are Stratum 6 or 7 decisions ... The voting population is operating, in the aggregate, at Stratum 2 with a substantial Stratum 3 minority. The stratum mismatch between the decision and the decision-maker is the systemic condition the contemporary political order has not yet acknowledged."
I wonder what analysis can reconcile this to Helene Landemore's and others' work in "the wisdom of crowds" (to use the colloquial phrase) - the evidence that a sufficiently large body of random individuals given the time to deliberate amongst themselves can provide better decision making than a small group of supposed experts. This, of course, is the basis for sortition as an alternative to electoral democracy.