– It is natural for interacting organisational actors and environmental agents to experience complexity asymmetries. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the balancing of these complexities at a level of performance that not only maintains the organisation’s viability but also the health of its ecosystem.
– Ashby (1964) proposed variety, or the number of possible states of a situation, as a measure of complexity and the Law of Requisite Variety as an ontology and heuristic for complexity management strategies. Following these propositions Beer’s variety engineering (Beer, 1979) is a construct to design these strategies.
– This paper offers epistemological and methodological considerations to discuss the viability and performance of organisational systems.
– Measuring organisational performance needs powerful methodological support. This paper offers to some extend this support but it needs further development.
– Performance is related to the concept of dynamic capabilities, which in recent times has had important practical implications.
– Though the concepts of this paper have a long history, their methodological articulation is original.
