Adaptive systems management

New approaches start mostly with the formulation of global objectives for the development of products, i.e. the reduction of development time and costs while improving the quality simultaneously. More precisely, these objectives are coming from industry in order to fulfil "customer needs". Linked to the formulation of these common objectives is primarily the assumption that they can be attained in general. Secondly, there is the request to science to provide approaches and solutions to these objectives. This paper describes a new approach for planning and managing of the procedures in product development. Thereby, it is assumed that planning and managing can contribute to support and to optimise the product life cycle, e.g. by monitoring the search, identification, and realisation of solutions, and by dealing with conflicts of objectives. To introduce the problem, observations, usual models, methods, and supporting tools are briefly discussed. Beforehand, a differentiation is necessary. The solution approach described here builds on the criticism of the discussed phenomena, models, methods, procedure models, and supporting tools. It shows how to create a new approach for planning and managing product development processes by considering new results from complexity research, psychology, and system theory. With this, a metamodel has been developed on which effect structures and control loops between action system and object system as well as processes can be projected. Furthermore, it is described how the metamodel serves as a communication base and a knowledge base of the mediation process of product development, and how this can be included into a procedure model for planning and managing.