Another Drucker memory

December 14, 2014

My other vivid memory of Peter Drucker (and it still hurts) was when I naively criticised Taylorism and ended up on the receiving end of an I knew Frederick Taylor response during which I was reduced to a puddle of humiliation.   The great man decided I might be redeemable, something for which I am eternally grateful and the leadership seminar I mentioned yesterday was one response.   That meant I got a chance to teach complexity theory with Drucker (and I suspect that is a unique) and to talk about the relationship to other theories.

The conclusion we came to was that scientific management and complexity had much in common.  While the former provided physical augmentation to human capability, automating many tasks it still at its heart respected the value of human judgement.  Complexity, or at least my cognitive complexity variation also shows the same respect, arguing for cognitive augmentation.  In SenseMaker® we talk about humans at the front, humans at the end which makes the same point.

Both contrast with systems thinking (in its popular forms) where the intent of many of the practices and their theory appears to be cognitive replacement.   I’m increasingly convinced that there is more work to do here and I’ve been going back to Taylor and Deming to review that intuition.  The more I read, the more I am convinced this is important.  Interesting computational complexity and systems dynamics share a love of models which just adds to my argument.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

About the Cynefin Company

The Cynefin Company (formerly known as Cognitive Edge) was founded in 2005 by Dave Snowden. We believe in praxis and focus on building methods, tools and capability that apply the wisdom from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. We are the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world.
ABOUT USSUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER

Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.

© COPYRIGHT 2024

< Prev

Between the ideal and real?

An interesting extended weekend in an Agile Alliance think tank I joined last year.  Then ...

More posts

Next >

Creating an architecture for change

Yesterday’s post was partly inspired by my reading David Chandler’s 2014 book Resilience: The Governance ...

More posts

linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram