Jens Ove Riis

Managing Uncertainty and Complexity in Company Development: a Participatory Approach Taking Manufacturing As Point of Departure Jens Ove Riis

Unforeseeable changes and complexity represent two major challenges to companies. This calls for an effort to augment the repertoire of managerial and organizational actions to improve the management of unforeseeable changes and complexity. Addressing this issue, based on action research this book presents models and methods aimed at understanding the mutual interplay of current operation, applying a participatory approach to manufacturing vision development, and implementing company development initiatives. Implications include new directions for company development: (1) Adopting an experimental approach to probing into the future, e.g.through timeout, dialectic planning and gaming; (2) Including strategic readiness, for example by collectively exploring future directions to prepare the organization for concrete moves, (3) Making use of organizational learning, e.g. by developing commonly shared pictures, using games for collective reflection and experimentation, and developing tacit collective knowledge through social simulation. The target group includes students and researchers of operations management as well as industrial managers.