Discussion:

Question 1 
Are sixth-level persons unemployable, and if not, what are the organizations for them?

Dr. Graves' response: 
My experience is that third and fourth level organizations, particularly, think that sixth-level people are unemployable. For example, in a fourth level organization, the boss noted that there was a problem of morale. He asked his employees what the problem was. When they failed to reply he said, "All right. I’m now instructing my personnel man to take 15 minutes with each of you to find out what this problem is. Line up for appointments." When he called one of the men over to make his appointment, the man, a sixth level person just got up and left!

Sixth-level people are appearing in increasingly large number throughout our population. They are the very best people in an organization and you cannot afford to lose them. They are the best producers. They are the ones you can depend on to stand by you in a crisis. But if you’re not in a crisis, they will work when they want to, how they want to, where they want to. We must seriously consider how to re-organize industry to take care of these people. There is a movement in Union Carbide to try to create an organizational structure in which sixth-level people can work. Working on this problem is U.S. Steel in its safety program.

But the answer lies not in organization alone. For one think, mass production, as we know it, has to go. Work must be creatively reorganized, while maintaining the constancy of large production at low cost. This must be done through work enlargement, dropping the ideas of mass production, and getting the human being back to producing something on his own, not just doing a part of the total process. Secondly, we must reorganize our work so that the methods engineers and the industrial engineering specialists work not in developing ideas to change the methods of manufacturing, but in working out the details of the working man’s ideas. For example, a man with only a third grade education recently discussed the problems of his job with me. He definitely operates on the sixth-level of behavior, and complained that the layout engineer persisted in laying out the work without even considering how he, the person, had to perform it. He wanted the engineer to ask him how he wanted the job laid out, and then go back and work it out for him. The sixth-level person wants this same kind of treatment from his boss.

Occasionally one of my students will, at the beginning of the year, come and tell me that he isn’t particularly interested in Industrial Psychology, and will ask if I will help him to learn what he does want to learn. If I say no, he’ll sign up for some other course and study what he wants to know on his own. Then when he needs may help he will, for instance, ask me to get some information from the library for him. People look at this a bit askance, but this man, in effect, is saying, "You’ve had a lot of experience with psychological literature - I don’t. It is much more efficient for you to find this information for me, rather than for me to waste my time going through ten journals, when you could find the same information in ten minutes." The boss, too, must learn that he has to do what the sixth-level person wants him to do in order to get the job done. He must discard the idea that the prerogative of the boss is to organize the work and tell the person how to do it. This is going to be difficult for a lot of people and organizations to learn and to apply.

Question 2 
How or where can we obtain knowledge to assess the level of existence of the people with whom we work?

Dr. Graves' response: 
I’ll provide the answer if (and I say this with all due respect) people will let me get off the lecture circuit long enough to write it! My ideas have made a lot of sense to many people when I’ve had sufficient time to present them in their entirety. But these very people have asked me to present these ideas in open forums to such an extent that it is almost impossible for me to get the information published as fast as I’d like to. Also, it is difficult today to get material published without an awful time lapse. Although I have three manuscripts that are in the process of being published, all I have at present is some material in mimeograph form that is going to be published. Published literature has simply not caught up with the new material at this time.

Question 3 
If a Supervisor must deal with third, fourth, fifth, and sixth-level people, and ideally treat each differently, in what level would you classify the supervisor? It would seem he must stretch across all of them and be a superior human being.

Dr. Graves' response: 
No question about it. But we do not have to stop thinking at that level. We could consider reorganizing groups according to their levels of behavior so that only those of a certain level would be engaged in a particular operation. This is the matter of reorganization of work that I spoke of earlier.

Question 4 
How do you find out what a person’s level is? Are there any simple Psychological tests to determine a person’s level?

Dr. Graves' response: 
We are now in the process of developing such tests. We have two at the experimental stage. In the first test, we flash words representing a particular level on a screen. At first we begin by showing a word at a speed beneath the individual’s capacity to perceive it, and gradually decrease the amount of time that word is on the screen. We find that a third-level person recognizes third level words much more quickly than fourth, fifth, or sixth level words. So you can discover what a person’s level is by his time of recognition of the different level words. The questionnaire that we’re working on has been applied both on the individual and company level. We’ve gotten some interesting data that we hope to publish soon. This publication will show the types of questions that are used, and will also demonstrate that it is possible to typify organizations according to the predominance, or lack of predominance, of certain levels. Some companies are of a typical level throughout the questionnaire, while others exhibit a scattering of the different levels.

At the moment, the best possible test for an individual in an organization is to put him under different kinds of supervision. This must be done or on an empirical basis – first direct him by authoritarian methods and watch his response, then use other methods and again check the response. If given the opportunity, he will quickly show you which method he prefers. Education also has the problem of serving various levels simultaneously. But it isn’t impossible to organize a college to take care of this: in fact, I have on paper an intercollegiate institution organized to take care of certain levels. I would organize the institution so that students of the same level would be in the same class, with a teacher also on that level. In experiments it has been shown that there is a higher relationship between grades achieved in a course and the similarity of the student and the professor in terms of level than there is between intelligence and training in the subject and achievement in the course. The attitude in educational institutions, which allow the student to make his own schedule and does not enforce his attendance, represents some recognition of levels. However, permissiveness is not adequate, for it suggests that the students are able to make their own decisions, and that they are free, but if the students are at the third or fourth level, they much prefer to be told that they must attend classes, and they are unhappy in a free system. So it isn’t a matter of having a free system, it’s a matter of having a system that distinguishes between students that need to be told what to do and those who don’t, and treats them accordingly.

Question 5 
Please be more specific on engineering education and its ills.

Dr. Graves' response: 
Most students just don’t like engineering because it’s too passively receptive. Many of the engineering students want to begin on the task of engineering earlier. Rather than learning value analysis from a book, the student should be given a problem of a small company, which can’t afford value analysis. Give him the company’s product and tell him to start learning the business. Let the student learn to be an engineer by solving engineering problems, not by studying a book in the hope that the information learned will be applicable to engineering in the future. Education is dead; we must make if more alive.

Question 6 
Are levels one through nine in any ethical order?

Dr. Graves' response: 
In a sense the levels are in an ethical order. As a person moves from one level to another, his ethics undoubtedly change, and he feels freer to make his own judgments on right and wrong in the world. The ethical decision made at the higher level is more humanistic in the sense that it allows the person to be a freer human being. So there is a hierarchical order, but I don’t know whether the higher levels are better or not. Many people feel that the problem with the world today is that new ethical systems are replacing the older (and they feel, better) ethical systems.

Question 7
Don’t you feel that most individuals lap over into more levels than only three, four, and five?

Dr. Graves' response: 
This depends on whether the person is growing or fixated. If he is fixated, the answer must be "No." But if he is growing, he shows evidence of three levels: the level he’s coming out of, the level he is dominantly in, and the level for which he is preparing himself.

Question 8 
Is it possible for a third-level person to be elevated to the fourth level by the application of human or managerial techniques, and if so, please cite some examples? Assume that job security of the long service employees is the key to the third level issue.

Dr. Graves' response: 
Yes, it is definitely possible, but the problems are enormous. In order to move people from the third level to the fourth, we must be able to provide full employment and a guaranteed annual wage. Society hasn’t yet solved the first problem, full employment, and industry isn’t ready for the second.

Question 9 
Have there been any successful techniques to obtain union support for value programs?

Dr. Graves' response: 
I would suggest to you that unions tried to initiate value programs before you people even existed, but they couldn’t get the message across to the management. The unions were trying to do work that they were proud of, that they felt was being done by the most cost-free method. Some unions do obstruct and fight against value programs, but this occurs because there are still organizations who feel that unions are just trying to cause difficulties. Any human being will make life difficult for any management that causes trouble for him.

Question 10 
Aren’t most companies a mixture of levels composed of people of a mixture of levels?

Dr. Graves' response: 
The answer is yes and no, depending on the company. I have data that shows that some companies are almost pure, and that others are mixtures. In large corporate industries operating under the concept of decentralized authority, one city’s plant may be managed very differently from a plant in another city. Thus one division of the corporate industry may be definitely at one level of management, while another may have mixed levels, depending on the managerial policy.

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