The prophecy: Peter Drucker knew it all
This is one post of a series about Peter Drucker. Start here if you want to get the whole story.
It fascinates me that so many of Peter Drucker’s insights from the last century relate to our contemporary life and society. As far as I know he was not the person who researched all those things or contributed to the tedious task of scientific progress. But he seems to have been a great receptor of other great people and he destilled and sensed the essence of what was going on. And he didn’t fear to articulate how things were and what needed to get done. So his relevance for today stems from his foresight about major trends as well as the timelessness of the topics he wrote about. He is modern and conservative at the same time.
I have picked four topics where I am impressed by his prophecy. The first two topics are of the kind „history repeats itself — haven’t we learned anything?“. The other two topics show his foresight about the future.
Propaganda
In 1969, Peter Drucker wrote a paper called „From information to communication“. In it, there are insights that are still, almost 50 years later, not common intellectual knowledge, and even less embodied knowledge, i.e. lived behaviour.
Peter Drucker said [1]:
- „Communication is perception
- Communication is expectations
- Communication is involvement
- Communication and information are totally different, but information presupposes functioning communication“
Communication depends on the recipient. Only what he perceives, can be communicated. If something is out of the recipient’s range of perception, it won’t be heard nor understood. As Clayton Christensen apparently said: you can only be helpful with an answer insofar there is a coresponding question already in the head of the recipient.
Peter Drucker continued that most of the time only what is expected is heard. In general, we are deaf towards anything that doesn’t fit to our existing beliefs. Thirdly, real understanding needs an investment of effort. And a lot of times, we go the easy way and avoid this involvement.
Information is a difference that makes a difference — by being chosen as a difference that is told to somebody else. Once this information is perceived as such this act between two people becomes communication. So Peter Drucker described the nature of communication in a way others have done as well: as a process of two (like the Zen koan of the sound of one clapping hand), as the variety of potential messages (like Schulz von Thun) and as the double contingency of communication (like Niklas Luhman).
These observations lead to two major insights that are relevant for us today.
On an individual or community level, it shows directing through communication without authority is an impossible task, a paradox. It cannot „work, first, because it focuses on what we want to say“ [2]. And second, „one cannot communicate downwards anything connected with understanding, let alone motivation“ [2]. „But ‚listening‘ does not work either.“ [2] It „first assumes that the superior will understand what he is being told. It assumes, in other words, that the subordinates can communicate. It is hard to see, however, why the subordinate should be able to do what his superior cannot do.“ [3] So communication is a process that needs the patience to create something together, the perseverance to nudge the direction while embracing the emergent reality, and the experience to integrate the demands from the people involved and the situation at hand.
For our society, Peter Drucker points out the danger that communication turns into propaganda that in the end will make communication impossible at all: „The danger of total propaganda is not that the propaganda will be believed. The danger is that nothing will be believed and that every communication becomes suspect. In the end, no communication is being received any more. Everything anyone says is considered a demand and resisted, resented, and in effect not heard at all. The end results of total propaganda are not fanatics, but cynics — but this, of course, may be even greater and more dangerous corruption.“ [4]
We are seeing exactly this pattern today with filter bubbles and fake news. It again shows the nature of successful communication: understanding and acknowleding each other perspectives, searching for common ground (information) and avoiding false compromises.
Daemons
„With Christianity, freedom and equality became the two basic concepts of Europe; they are themselves Europe. […] European history is the history of the projection of these concepts into the reality of social existence.“ [5]„Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in the free and equal society. […] All social energies have to be concentrated upon the promotion of economic ends, because economic progress carries the promise of the social millennium. […] But the failure to establish equality by economic freedom destroyed […] the belief in capitalism as a social system in spite of material blessings.“ [6] „Society ceases to be a community of individuals bound together by a common purpose, and becomes a chaotic hubbub of purposeless isolated nomads. […]The European masses realized […] that existence in this society is governed not by rational and sensible, but by blind, irrational, and demonic forces. […] The concept of society in which man is an equal and free member and in which his fate depends mainly upon his own merits and his own efforts, proved an illusion.“ [7] „The masses, then, become prepared to abandon freedom if this promises to re-establish the rationality of the world. If freedom is incompatible with equality, they will give up freedom. If it is incompatible with security, they will decide for security.“ [8]
Peter Drucker wrote these sentences in 1938 about Europe at that time. I cannot help but feel that the same applies to us (again) today. In 1938, there were the great depression, an upcoming war, politicians perceived as weak, and a conspirancy theory against Jews in whole Europe. Today we have globalization, a misused fear of Islamic terror, an EU incapable of acting, and refugees as a projection surface for all problems. In both cases we have people who feel powerless and without a clear purpose; they are Angst-driven with a desire for easy, magical answers.
Peter Drucker attributed the situation to „the absence of leadership, the absense of affirmation, the absense of men of values and principles.“ [9] For him, the salvation laid in Christian faith, but he concluded that society was not ready for it: „Religion could indeed offer an answer to the despair of the induvidual and to his existential agony. But it could not offer an answer to the despair of the masses. I am afraid that this conclusion still holds today. Western Man — indeed today Man altogether — is not ready to renounce this world.“ [10]
Knowledge worker
In the last years, there has been a lot of talk about new work and agility. Peter Drucker talked about the knowledge worker as early as 1991: „The most valuable asset of a twenty-first-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.“ [11].
Other authors only followed. Take for example the book ‚Drive‘ from Daniel Pink. It is very popular among the new generation of digital knowledge workers. It popularized the concept of purpose, mastery, and autonomy as a base for knowledge-workers‘ performance. These three drivers correlate very clearly to the six major factors Peter Drucker laid out in „The productivity of the knowledge worker“ [12]
Knowledge-workers
- Understand the task (purpose)
- Want to work for organization, i.e. are treated as asset, not cost (purpose)
- Innovate continuously (mastery)
- Learn continuously (mastery)
- Manage themselves (autonomy)
- Focus on quality (mastery)
These guidelines are also the recipe for innovation and the bedrock of agile product development. Peter Drucker said it all before.
From cause to configuration
Even though he didn’t use the term as such, Peter Drucker was a system thinker. I find it impressive that he developed and described his view as early as 1957 in „The landmarks of tomorrow“.
Let’s look at his text and put it in context with new findings and the terminology of today.
He starts with the observation that the world-view of the modern West has been based on the Cartesian world-view: the whole is the results of the parts; I know what I can measure; and science is defined as the certain and evident knowledge of things by their causes. But then he wrote: „Though most of us still have the conditioned reflex of familiarity toward these assertions, there are few scientist today who would still accept the definition […] at least not for what they call ‚science‘ in their own field. Every one of our disciplines, science and arts today bases itself on concepts which are incompatible with the Cartesian axiom and with the world-view of the modern West developed from there. […]
Every discipline has as its center today a concept of a whole that is not the result of its parts, not equal to the sum of its parts, and not identifiable, knowable, measurable, predictable, effective or meaningful through identifying, knowing, measuring, predicting, moving or understanding the parts. The central concepts […] are patterns and configurations. […] Even the physical sciences […] talk about systems.“ [13]
Peter Drucker attributes this change to a new concept of science: „It is not causality, though, but purpose.“ [14] Peter Drucker always looked for legitimation. I think this is the reason why he introduced the concept of purpose in this discussion. With this claim, however, he went too far. He didn’t justify how purpose could come into play. In fact, purpose is a concept that needs an observer. There is no purpose without somebody seeing it. Nature shows the principles of evolution and emergence — on biological, psychological, and social level. On each level there are autopoietic systems (the living cell, thoughts, communication), but no purpose. Purpose and meaning is a concept a conscious observer uses in order to make sense of things he sees. Science doesn’t give any reason to legitimate anything human outside of ourselves.
Even though Peter Drucker rejected Absolute Truth and Absolute Readon, he was in search of final legitimation and meaning. He found it for himself in Christian faith. That, however, doesn’t work anymore in a global world of the 21st century.
[1] p. 181 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[2] p. 188 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[3] p. 189 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[4] p. 185 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[5] p. 41 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[6] p. 40 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[7] p. 43 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[8] p. 45 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[9] p. 36 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[10] p. 32 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[11] p. 169 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[12] p. 169 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[13] p. 151 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
[14] p. 153 in Drucker, Peter: A functioning society: Transaction Publishers, 2011
Originally published at timmrichter.de on March 26, 2017.
