Extract from Winfried Weber, Die Purpose-Wirtschaft, 2024, eBook (Amazon Kindle)
"I never predict. I just look out the window and see what's visible—but not yet seen."
Peter Drucker, 1997
Anyone who manages organizations or makes decisions in social systems today is dealing with an unknown future. In a purpose-driven economy, future viability is created through openness. A central key is management innovation, i.e. constantly rethinking the process of organizing and entering a terrain in which you no longer have the usual overview. Those who embrace this take on responsibility, redefine their own leadership role, reprioritize their own tasks in a purpose-driven economy and open themselves up to the tension between profit orientation as the cost of survival and orientation towards the common good with questions of social legitimacy. The contradictions between the goal-based business model and the social task that arises for the organization for sustainable, social or democracy-promoting reasons, and which it can increasingly rarely avoid fulfilling, cannot be resolved in the next society.
In the purpose-driven economy, managers need a higher degree of judgment in order to be able to deal with the unexpected in the next society. Past economic success no longer guarantees future success. In the age of complexity, complacency is dangerous. However, when managers strengthen open debates and networking, including with critical voices, both internally and externally, they help to expand diversity in the organization in terms of observation, perception, pattern recognition and understanding of social change. This creates the capacity for discourse, and communication leads to follow-up communication. The purpose debate is not a fad, it is not a short-term phenomenon of the zeitgeist. Profit and social legitimacy have become two sides of the same coin in the economic system.
Modern leadership is well advised to no longer focus on "power over", but on "power with" (Mary Parker Follett). "Power with" means recognizing potential conflicts with all stakeholder groups and civil society at an early stage and en-gaging with interdependencies. Using power to enforce one's own proven and profit-maximizing business model has become riskier.
Ashby's Law by mathematician and cyberneticist Ross W. Ashby can serve as a guiding principle: "only variety can destroy variety" (Ashby 1956). The variety in management debates should be at least as great as the variety of disruptions occurring in the market and society, because only then can the process of organizing be carried out with appropriate variety.
Niklas Luhmann can be seen as a second leading figure or leading thinker, with his postulate of engaging with variety and relying on simple complexity in management innovations. "You can change everything, even if not everything at once", according to the introduction in the text "Soziologische Aufklärung” (Engl.: Sociological Enlighten-ment, Luhmann 1970). Luhmann, the sociological enlightener uses a consistent stylistic device throughout: abstraction. Managers still rely on their intelligence bank, which they construct in clouds of events. But with Chester Barnard, it has also been true since 1938 that they open themselves more and more to clouds of abstractions (Barnard 1938). And with both perspectives, one understands all the better what could be more relevant for the respective decision, communication opportunity or legitimacy.
Maren Lehmann summarizes it after Luhmann's death. "Abstraction [...] lifts every constriction. What, if not that, is contemporary?" (Lehmann 2023). For Rudolph Stichweh, Luhmann's approach is embodied in the concept of learning ability. "Luhmann was deeply convinced of the ability to learn. It was a human characteristic that could not be improved. It was a condition of coping with double contingency. It was the only way to master the complexity 'that comes into the world with the existence of a free alter ego'." (Stichweh 2023)
The third guiding principle for variety can already be observed in Denmark, where the Ministry of Education has been a key initiator since 2010. Innovation, knowledge work and education are closely linked. In the age of complexity, entrepreneurship and a willingness to change are particularly important for a sustainable economy. In Den-mark's national strategy for education and training, entrepreneurship is a central com-ponent of education policy and practice in both formal and non-formal learning. Not all Danes have to become entrepreneurs, but if sluggish and increasingly complacent societies fail to motivate some of their young people to pursue entrepreneurial life and work plans, a country's future viability will diminish. Denmark has set the benchmark. In the top group of its educational institutions, over half of its students are already being trained with entrepreneurship content.
"Education is to increase the innovation capacity: A change of culture in the educational system focusing more on innovation" (Danish Government 2012). An entrepreneurial society is emerging in which technical, sustainable and social problems are seen as entrepreneurial opportunities. The educated individual of the 21st century sees it as his or her own duty to apply knowledge and does not wait for an organization to give him or her the freedom to do so. The 21st century individual develops a balance between self-reliance and the need to share knowledge with others in order to make it fruitful. For the organizations of the 21st century, this means constantly adapting their structures, allowing entrepreneurial freedom within the organization, promoting it in its environ-ment, operating more in networks and focusing on diversity.
In the next society, a sustainable company and sustainable managers will be oriented towards the challenge of being able to deal with contradictions. Many can solve complicated phenomena. However, those who seek solutions for complex and chaotic phenomena and problems are working on an "advantage through variety". A sound business model needs this advantage.
Comments