Introduction

Processes and directives form a central part in the company as they guide the operations and activities of people and machines. By means of intricate specifications of input, processing and output, the division of labour is enacted both within and between companies, along the lines of Fredrick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford. The modern corporation and present-day Western society would not exist were it not for a strict division of labour, with input, processing and output well specified. However, for each properly functioning, time- and resource-saving process there is often another process that is at best irrelevant, at worst counterproductive and inhibiting the personnel in their daily work. These are processes that may seem rational, but which often do not reflect the process in practice and which personnel ignore if possible or otherwise half-heartedly live up to. Other processes take on a life of their own, producing entire organizations dedicated not to production but to maintaining the internal process from which they arose in the first place.

In this chapter the authors argue that processes can be divided into two separate types: rational and intuitive processes. Furthermore, it is argued that these processes differ from each other on a fundamental level, with the former applying to stable processes that have been isolated from the outside world. The latter in turn applies to processes that are not closed to the outside world and where the question of information and its processing is almost by definition...