Complexity and industrial management

The growth and evolution of complexity in the present 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 the present 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. Darwinian precepts for survival of the ‘fittest’ have alreay 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. The purpose of this article is to focus on the process of such transformation, the effects of complexity, its impact and how it alters the basic precepts of traditional industrial management.