As ‘An’ Historian I am keenly aware that the average 'modern' practitioner of historiography considers it shocking or 'paternalistic' to think of lessons or morals emerging from history. Yet scholarship teaches, in so far as the study of the past surfaces truths. These may be inconvenient truths; these may be truths that are not fashionable — even deemed bigoted by the prevailing zeitgeist — but simply because a truth does not buttress our worldview, it in no way makes it false.
To take an example from the discipline of history to demonstrate how method can shape results, German scholars in the 1920s and 1930s asserted the centrality of foreign policy in shaping a nation's understanding of history. This approach was pursued to bolster a broader political push to furnish arguments against the excoriated Treaty of Versailles and in favour of recovering territories lost following the First World War. Scholars who didn't embrace this zeitgeist were ostracised in academic circles — a process that paved the way for willing scholarly engagement with the Machtergreifung and subsequent Nazification of German education and institutions.
While a particularly extreme example, a similar process can and does happen in organisations. In that there is a prevailing view or culture in which employees, particularly managers, who do not embrace the corporate zeitgeist find themselves 'on the wrong side of history'. More specifically, on the wrong side of those with positional authority.
Setting aside that history does not have a 'right' side — that is a discussion for another day — I do not need to provide examples for you to think of situations at work in which you have observed the manipulative use of evidence, wilful misreading of 'the data', and construction of a falsified consensus.
Given there are lessons from history, what follows in this and subsequent articles is a look at the ways in which the philosophy of history can provide thinking tools or maps of meaning to help a manager pull apart the falsified consensus to achieve a more accurate interpretation of the landscape. A process that is essential to achieving good governance.
But before we get into the implications for governance, leadership, and management, a survey of the landscape is necessary to discern the tigers from the trees.
