From reducing complexity to adaptive organisations

Modelling or understanding markets is a very complex if not impossible task. Yet doing successful business a market is not a casino game. Creating value for a limited, well chosen, set of customers is a successful strategy. The deliberate limitation reduces the complexity of decision making to a manageable level. Structuring the organisation of business processes to match the needs of these customers reduces complexity even further. Using a state-space metaphor for decision making, heuristics for designing organisation structures are presented and evaluated against the entropic measure of complexity. However organisation structures have a best-before-date. Surviving in business means frequently adapting to new structures. Using the same state-space complexity model, well known change process can be evaluated too.