Complexity and Industrial Management

The growth and evolution of complexity in our industrial environment has changed the motives, the structure and the process of industrial management At the beginning of the century, production was an art and quality the measure of this art. Throughout this century, emphasis has been given to the professionalisation of industrial management, emphasising the organisation, control and rationalisation of work, augmenting controls on the one hand and negating what cannot be controlled on the other. In this process, alienation, de-motivation and an over simplified view of the agents of production has led to a state where our man-made complexity has been overwhelmed by the cumulative effects of noise factors which are now pounding the traditional approach to industrial management.The stakes are no longer local optimisation which has an inherent myopic bias but survival - an objective which is inherently, non-myopic (Berger et al. 1989). Darwinian precepts for survival of the “fittest” have already created an awareness that we are at the end of an era whose dawn in the industrial revolution, has taught us to master the quantification of production. Today, a new industrial management is moving in, with competing concepts and ideas we are only beginning to guess.