Abstract
We, as individuals, are dealing with complex situations, that is, with situations challenging us with a large number of states changing rapidly and unpredictably over time. In all these situations to perform effectively we have to manage the complexity of the situation. This chapter is dedicated to explore principles for managing complexity. We take the view that in general managing complexity refers to our ability to achieve an adequate performance in particular situations of concern. Their boundaries are defined by the purposes we ascribe, implicitly or explicitly, to them. So, in this chapter we explore how we ascribe purposes to situations and why this is important for managing their complexity. The concepts and detailed methods we explain in this chapter are known as variety engineering, which is the key concept that guides our operational design of organizations.
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Notes
- 1.
At that time in Colombia the prosecution and trailing of criminal cases was in the hands of the courts.
- 2.
Cognitive in this context relates to a person’s capabilities for making distinctions and also acting upon them; cognition is not only a mind activity, it is a total body activity.
- 3.
These are similar to the three venues explained for the case of individual management of complexity.
- 4.
These are processes that allow the company to create, produce and regulate its own tasks. We will develop in more detail this concept later on in Chapter 6.
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Espejo, R., Reyes, A. (2011). On Managing Complexity: Variety Engineering. In: Organizational Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19109-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19109-1_4
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