I’ve long maintained that our organizational practices are too often misaligned with how our brains really work. I’ve attributed that to a legacy from previous eras. Yet, I realize that there may be another legacy, a cognitive one. Here I’ll suggest we need to move beyond Industrial Age thinking.
The premise comes from business. We transitioned from a largely agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy, of goods and services. Factories got economic advantage from scale. We also essentially treated people as parts of the machine. Taylorism, aka scientific management, looked at how much a person could produce if they were working as efficiently as possible, without damage. So few were educated, and we didn’t have sufficiently sophisticated mechanisms. Times change, and we’re now in an information age. Yet, a number of our approaches are still based upon industrial approaches. We’re living on a legacy.
Tags: Design • meta-learning • Strategy