Managing complexity: achieving the impossible?

Modern decision-making is highly complex. Every initiator of a decision-making process is dependent upon a wide variety of other actors (and their resources) to achieve meaningful results. In this paper we track the resources of complexity in three dimensions: - The uncertainty about content (and resulting negotiations about problem definitions and knowledge) - The strategic uncertainty (as result of the involvement of many actors with different strategies, but also as consequence of the many places were decisions are being taken) - Institutional variety (the different set of rules which are used by the wide variety of actors from different networks) We also show that in this chaotic pattern of decision-making a few stabilising factors exist. These include the interdependencies, interaction patterns, rules and trust relationships in a network. We use a case analysis to illustrate these complexities and their stabilising factors. We end with some successful management strategies to cope with complexity in decisionmaking.