Cultivating a Future-Oriented Mindset the Peter Drucker Way

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The future often feels scary and amorphous. Many people have anxiety about artificial intelligence, Covid-19 and future healthcare surprises, and wars raging in many parts of the globe. The so-called culture wars in the U.S. and elsewhere, financial instability, and climate change create additional worries. And these reflect only issues of which we are currently aware; there are those still hidden and those that arise seemingly out of nowhere, events author Nassim Nicholas Taleb termed “black swans.”

Uncertainty about the future can deter us from taking it as seriously as we should, organizing our thoughts about the future, and being prepared for it. But it's possible to develop a forward-focused mindset, an approach that distinguished Peter Drucker and made him one of the great modern thinkers and doers about management in particular and work in general.

Drucker did not use the term mindset, but in researching his work on the future, described in my book Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way: Developing and Applying a Forward Focused Mindset, I found that an orientation to the future permeated his life and work. From interviews I conducted with Drucker as well as a deep dive into his work, 10 factors emerge that can help you think about what you can do now, in the present moment, to help secure a better tomorrow for you and those close to you.

Drucker, often called “the father of modern management,” died in 2005 at age 95 and never saw himself as a futurist. He believed that trying to predict the future was a futile exercise. Yet the concept of the future was ever-present in his work. I contend that his future-focused mindset was a key factor leading to such achievements as being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002, the nation’s highest honor for civilians.

Creating the Future in the Present Moment

Mindset: Keeping the future in mind as you go about your daily life and work; almost like an operating system running in the background of a computer.

Uncertainty: While the future is unpredictable, don’t assume tomorrow will be similar to today.

Creation: The future must be built/created, even in the face of uncertainty.

Inevitability: The concept of ‘the future that has already happened' is a long-running theme in his work.

Present moment: The future is based on the thoughts, decisions, and actions you are making right now. The future is also created based on the present moment thoughts, decisions, and actions of others.

Change: Accept it as normal and ongoing, and organize yourself for constant change.

Reflection: What are the future implications of potential futures for your life and work? How will you make time to concentrate on these reflections?

Remove/Improve: Based on Drucker’s idea of "systematic/planned abandonment," regularly removing activities that no longer serve a useful purpose, coupled with kaizen (steady, incremental improvement).

Innovation/Entrepreneurship: This formed the basis of his influential and ahead-of-its-time 1985 book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles.

Risk: Accepting and facing challenges from disruption, turbulence, and related factors.

Elements in Action

Think of these elements as a way of organizing your conceptualization of the future and making it concrete, tangible, and substantial. As you reflect and conduct your personal life or work, consider how your thoughts and actions match against the 1o factors, although not all of them apply every time. With a mindset shaped by these considerations, creation of the future is grounded in the present moment. Change is inherent in the future, and yet there is an undercurrent of uncertainty and risk.

Change and creation also form the basis of innovation and entrepreneurship, as you progress from your current state to a future (ideally better) state. If you remove activities that no longer serve a purpose and improve on the ones you keep, you are more likely to innovate based on that improvement.

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The Age of Discontinuity

An important source for Drucker’s conceptualization of the future is his 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society. The discontinuities he refers to may be subtle, gradual changes in how various parts of society are perceived. The changes sometimes pass by unnoticed or under the radar at the time.

Discontinuities require reflection and awareness of change itself. Drucker ends the preface to the original edition as follows: “This book does not project trends; it examines discontinuities. It does not forecast tomorrow; it looks at today. It does not ask, ‘What will tomorrow look like?’ It asks instead, ‘What do we have to tackle today to make tomorrow?’”

The concept of discontinuity provides another concrete way of perceiving how the future can unfold. In particular, it speaks to the notion of ‘the future that has already happened,’ such as events and trends that have already taken place but whose full effects are not yet known. For instance, financial innovations such as Bitcoin/blockchain/cryptocurrencies are in increasingly widespread use, but we don’t know exactly what their effects on society will ultimately be.

Two discontinuities discussed in the book are especially prescient, given that it was written 54 years ago: a world, global economy (Drucker refers to this as “one global shopping center,” in a nod to his friend, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, famous for his idea of the “global village”) and knowledge as the most crucial resource in society, which he identified as the most important of the changes. The latter in particular has resonance with our current obsession with artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, which is often portrayed as potentially destroying the jobs of knowledge workers.

Drucker stressed that what makes the future happen is what you do today and the accumulation of daily actions. It requires ongoing thought about what you want the future to look like, what kind of future world you want to live in, and how you are going to get there. His roll-up-your-sleeves approach is captured in his 1974 book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices: “The future requires decisions—now. It imposes risk—now. It requires action—now.”