Great Problems

Our world is constantly changing and the rate of change has constantly increased.
Today, changes are in large part caused by the humans themselves, due to the growth of their global population and the ability to use technology to change matter, i. e., in agriculture, energy production, goods production, and transportation. Part of the ability to steer the forces of nature and humans in controlled ways can be attributed to the invention of management:

"The most important contribution of management in the 20th century was to increase manual worker productivity fifty-fold (Drucker 1999)."

The fast rate of change in the environment and in human societies causes great Great Problems wealth, but also great problems, e. g., social problems, economic problems and ecological problems (Vester 2000). As an example, very few people had foreseen or understood the financial crisis in 2008. Many bankers said in interviews, that nobody could understand the complex relationships of markets and financial products any longer. Humans must tackle the pressing ecological and economical problems.

Bush (1945, p. 108) summarised the motivation for this thesis nicely:

"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory.".

Drucker (1999) puts it more optimistic and foresees:

"The most important contribution of management in the 21st century will be to increase knowledge worker productivity -- hopefully by the same percentage. [...] The methods, however, are totally different from those that increased the productivity of manual workers."

What could be methods to increase the productivity of knowledge workers?