Abstract

This chapter explores current practice in organizations at an operational level, and particularly teams who use visual tools in their decision-making. We focus on the field of operations management, and the management of everyday processes. The dominating paradigm within operations management has been lean operations and this has a large visual component known as ‘visual management’. This chapter will draw mainly from these fields and provide examples of visual tools. We outline how design principles in the field of visual management were developed and give an example of how this has been applied in a company – Assa Abloy. We present four further examples of visual management and then conclude by setting out an agenda for how this approach to decision-making can be applied and the challenges that lie ahead.