Supervision

Abstract

Organizations are charged with tasks that exceed the capacity of a single individual. To handle large tasks, one must divide and further subdivide them in such a way that the final units obtained by this sequence of subdivision can be worked on independently of each other. At each stage the subtasks of the next lower stage must be put together. This could be a physical process of assembly from sub-assemblies. More often it is a decision making process, where each stage works out the details of the next higher stage and delegates further details to the next lower stage. A prerequisite is that such “factoring” of a task into parts is technically feasible repeatedly.