This Will Make You Smarter

by John Brockman

TIME SPAN OF DISCRETION PAUL SAFFO Technology forecaster; managing director of foresight at Discern Analytics; distinguished visiting scholar in the Stanford Media X research network, Stanford University HALF A CENTURY ago, while advising a UK Metals company, Elliott Jaques had a deep and controversial insight. He noticed that workers at different levels of the company had very different time horizons. Line workers focused on tasks that could be completed in a single shift, whereas managers devoted their energies to tasks requiring six months or more to complete. Meanwhile, their CEO was pursuing goals realizable only over the span of several years. After several decades of empirical study, Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with: what Jaques called “time span of discretion,” or the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake. Jaques observed that organizations implicitly recognize this fact in everything from titles to salary. Line workers are paid hourly, managers annually, and senior executives compensated with longer-term incentives, such as stock options. Jaques also noted that effective organizations were comprised of workers of differing time spans of discretion, each working at a level of natural comfort. If a worker’s job was beyond his natural time span of discretion, he would fail. If it was less, h...