The situations we must manage span the range from deterministic to stochastic. On the deterministic end we have wonderful methods from the highly repetitive world of manufacturing. On the extreme stochastic end, completely unpredictable situations with an infinite number of possible conditions, each of unknown likelihood, planning is useless. Product development lies between these extremes – we deal with limited rather than complete uncertainty. Such conditions also appear in other domains. In this session Don Reinertsen will discuss the strategies of decentralized control that are used in the military. Such approaches are interesting because they work at large scale and they have avoided the natural tendency of self-organization to turn into local optimization.
