How to combine or integrate dynamic complex systems like human organisations or groups in a consistent way.

Management and leadership include designing rules, parameters, visions and culture, modifying management models and adapting them to new contexts, relationships or environments. However, a company can only achieve the necessary flexibility and at the same time the required resilience if its management instruments can be applied to the smallest active elements of the system. That means: if it is managed based on activities the company needs for living and growing.

Advantages of activity- based modelling

An approach that is rigorously focused on human activities as the key basis for consistent management in an enterprise is, in itself, nothing new. However, as the term “activity” has been expanded beyond human actions to encompass objects, it has become increasingly cumbersome in practice. Implementing and maintaining multi-level system of processes on pure object orientation has proved expensive and extremely complicated. Cost accounting focused on human activities is simpler and clearer.

Here, an activity is defined as “an action determined by a human decision, either an act or omission”.

These very small active elements of economic subjects can be used to consistently link changes in business portfolios (products, services, projects, resources and stocks) and movements that make up business processes (flows of value, finance and information). As in activity-based accounting and controlling (ABC) and the subsequent developments activity-based budgeting (ABB) and activity-based management (ABM), human activities are related to one another or combined into overlapping processes.

An organisation consists of a large number of subjects with „will“, or, as Albert Schweizer put it: “I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live.”
With all the current discussions surrounding the issue of digitalisation, there is a growing danger of exaggerating the use of „object“ orientation in modelling and neglecting people and their free will. Decisions are linked to responsibility for the effects they provoke. And it is ultimately people who have that responsibility.
It has only been when discussing questions relating to responsibility for autonomous driving or artificial intelligence that many people have become cognisant of the fact that without human “free will” any discussion of fault is simply obsolete.
However, the debate has largely been focused on the technical level. But as organisations become increasingly complex, it is vital to combine the various developments in the fields of “management” and “leadership” into a consistent “management method”.
Managing risks in a sense of opportunities and threats, for example, should enable people to make responsible decisions and take responsible actions.
This could mean, that we should come back to concentrate on “real human activities” in management and leadership, instead of simply using objects for all flows or stocks or instruments etc. just named „activities“.
Perhaps as a key to overcoming this challenge and to find unique „parameters of human will“.