How We Got Here and Where We're Going - History of Knowledge Work Productivity - DBR 074

Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

I want to talk about the history of knowledge work productivity. And it's going to involve a lot of different names. It's going to involve the triumvirate, well, the quadrumvirate (that’s the real word), the Mount Rushmore. Only through understanding what they were thinking about can we extend that thinking. Then we can work on knowledge work productivity. We'll go all the way back to the start of the 20th century. We have Frederick Taylor studying “Scientific Management”, which is a study of work, not ‘management’ per se. Then we've got Peter Drucker, and he's important because he was doing all the thinking around knowledge work and how that came about. Stephen Covey taught us that we have to get our mindset right in order to be effective people. David Allen taught us how to use tools and stop using our brains for task and attention management. I might bring in Cal Newport and Thomas Davenport and these different kinds of names, just because of the curiosity factor there. But anyway, Drucker, Covey, Taylor, David Allen, This episode is about:

• What problem do businesspeople and managers (in particular) have to deal with
• Why is it an important problem
• What ways have we tried to deal with this previously
• What tools are at our disposal to try to solve it now
• Who is currently presenting solutions and what are they

The issue is that our economy, particularly our economic productivity, is changing. We have yet to fully understand how to react to that change. Some history to give us perspective and hints on what to do.

• 20th century productivity growth
• Organizational structures - sociology (business structures were not theorized/engineered)
• Original organizational structures (government/church/military) were monarchy/hierarchy
• The notion of trade, business, and getting wealthy (via the “business” way)
• Apprentice -> employee -> growing organization -> modern business problems (management)
• Used to be everybody worked for the king, who distributed wealth and work

It needed to scale and be ‘optimized’, but was never engineered

• We don't know exactly how it works
• You got three blacksmiths. All of a sudden it's a managerial problem
• Most things cultural or sociological there isn't hard science - like business
• Atom bomb derived from theory and we ‘engineered’ a way to construct one. Same thing with NASA and the space program. Business really was not that way
• Railroad/telegraph as a management problem (distributed locations). If you need to tell somebody the train's coming, there's no faster way for that information to travel than the train itself.
• The history of information really correlates to the history of business and culture
• We can’t communicate quickly enough between different locations for ‘real-time’ management
• These business/communication structures grew organically, business is perhaps more Darwinian than Darwin Well, all of this was command and control.

So what about leadership/governance/control of the organization

• Now, we have to explain leadership, and this notion of who gets to tell who what to do
• The ‘great man’ theory
• Mid 20th century, there was a cult of personality
• Huge corporations, like General Motors, and they're selling stock, and nobody really understands how that works
• Government: we've got to understand how this business thing works and explain it to people and regulate it

How we began to understand and explain

• Frederick Taylor "scientific management" and notions of the efficiency of individual workers
• Peter Drucker In "The Concept of the Corporation" is trying to explain the notion of governance structures, some way to get people to work together
• We've got big organizations and factories. Got to produce a lot, and so we need to break this down, because nobody, no one person, can produce it all
• Drucker developed technique for management and the ideas of knowledge work
• Stephen Covey comes along. He's exploring this idea of technique for ‘effectiveness’.
• Covey talks effective people in terms of psychological, psychosocial properties of behavior and modes of thought. This is different from previous thought.

Now, Knowledge Work improvement (and management)

• Drucker’s hypothesis: improve the productivity of knowledge work. How do we manage versus how do we strategize? Now, we’ve moved to KW (and management)
• So, how do we manage ourselves and others
• The goal of such management is to improve the productivity of knowledge work.
• David Allen started to use Taylorist thinking in improving knowledge work.
• My offering on how to manage Knowledge Work is the Attention Compass - a successor to Allen's methodology.
• Focus: What are the components of knowledge work and how can we improve them? What is the system that needs to be put in place?

Our community is working on this and needs your insights and voice. Get in touch. [email protected] or find me on LinkedIn.