Knowledge work productivity

Peter F. Drucker identified better knowledge work productivity as our most important economic need ^[4][5][6][7]. He went so far as to warn that our long term prosperity and even our economic survival depends upon it ^[8]. Better productivity generates the economic surpluses that pay wages, produce profits, and generate the tax revenues that support our social structures. For example, if wages stay the same and productivity goes down, even flat wages will not be affordable for long. At the same time, if productivity were to go up 100%, wages could go up dramatically and continue to be very affordable. To be sustainable, Enterprises need to generate surpluses for workers as well as for the firms themselves ^[9]. This requires a systematic approach ^[10], and from a design perspective ^[11][12] needs to factor in that bad systems encourage bad behaviors, good systems create good behaviors ^[9][13][14], and similar systems produce the same behaviors.

Drucker’s core idea on the subject of knowledge work was that the world used to run on manual work, and that this work was made much more productive due to the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 1900’s – related to Scientific Management. Now, knowledge workers make up the majority of the workers in developed economies. The problem to be solved is that knowledge work needs to be made more productive for our workers, companies and societies to maintain and improve their prosperity. Unfortunately, Scientific Management methods have not been as effective in managing knowledge work, making a new system and new principles needed to improve the special nature of this type of work.

Business thinkers have acknowledged for decades that Enterprises had not made enough progress with their knowledge work productivity ^{[4][5][6][15]}. Drucker's work reveals that knowledge work productivity has been constrained by the scientific methods that made manual work more productive for much of the 20th Century – requiring our need to improve knowledge work productivity systematically and sustainably ^{[10][13][14][16]}. It is argued that the best way to improve the prosperity of our Enterprises is to change the structure that drives its performance – from a Scientific to a Cybernetic management approach ^{[3][4][5][6][7][17][18][19]}.

Throughout Drucker’s life he emphasized that the next level of economic growth ^[7] needs to be driven by knowledge work productivity—requiring that managers simultaneously make their present Enterprise more effective, identify and realize its potential, and create a different Enterprise for a different future ^[20]. In so doing he suggested that business leaders needed to continually shift resources from less productive to more productive areas ^[21] through better knowledge work productivity and innovation.

Manual work is visible, specialized, and stable, whereas knowledge work is invisible, holistic, and ever changing. Unlike manual workers, knowledge workers use their situational knowledge to get things done in a dynamic environment. They are almost always formally educated and are called upon to run and change their functions and organizations simultaneously.

Knowledge workers acquire knowledge—through a combination of education, experience, and personal interaction—and then use that knowledge to holistically achieve organizational goals in changing environments. This work is generally much more project oriented than manual work, and Enterprise productivity improves faster when one area of knowledge can be rapidly transferred to another.

One reason that knowledge work has been difficult to manage is because of its nature to expand to fill the available time ^[22]. It is also commonly stymied by organizational disconnects within and across hierarchies ^[23][24]. To manage the invisible and elastic nature of knowledge work better, Drucker suggested that we think about it more systematically. He advised that Enterprises strive to remove unproductive work, and restructure work as part of an overall system to create a satisfied customer. In this light he suggested that knowledge be organized through teams – with clarity around who is in charge at what time, for what reason, and for how long ^[5][6].

To create a working system to manage knowledge work more productively it’s useful to compare and contrast Taylor’s thinking on manual work with Drucker’s on knowledge work:

Source: Reinvent Your Enterprise, by Jack Bergstrand

While manual work and knowledge work productivity both try to generate surpluses. Manual work and knowledge work productivity need to be managed differently due to the nature of the work ^[3]. The knowledge work productivity system suggested in his work is based on the social sciences and cybernetics ^[18][19][25] – integrating the sociological paradigm work of Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan, the action theory work of Talcott Parsons, and cybernetic insights from mathematician Norbert Wiener.

Source: Reinvent Your Enterprise, by Jack Bergstrand

Drucker described workers who were both knowledge workers and manual workers as technologists ^[6] and correctly predicted that these workers would be the fastest growing part of the workforce. The knowledge work productivity management system therefore also needs to accommodate and capitalize on this – at the individual, functional, and organizational levels. This knowledge work productivity instrument has been turned into a survey-based instrument with Strategic Profiling.

Source: Strategic Profiling

The knowledge work productivity system—linked to Burrell, Morgan, Parsons, and Wiener—introduces both a shared framework and an explicit process ^[18][19][25]. First, a shared framework (i.e. a shared mental model linked to Burrell and Morgan’s sociological paradigm work and Parson’s action theory) is needed to get everyone on the same page. Then, in conjunction with this shared framework, a standard process (linked to Weiner’s cybernetics and Parson’s cybernetic hierarchy) to help people manage their knowledge work more productively and in a more sustainable way.