On Managing Complexity: Variety Engineering

Raul Espejo () and Alfonso Reyes ()
Additional contact information
Raul Espejo: Syncho Ltd.
Alfonso Reyes: Universidad de Ibague

Chapter Chapter 4 in Organizational Systems, 2011, pp 49-73 from Springer

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Performance Criterion; Situational Variety; Critical Success Factor; Variety Engineering; Response Capacity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-642-19109-1_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783642191091

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-19109-1_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().