Figure 4. Sharing experience across teams

The experiences of multiple teams in similar situations can be successfully identified, understood, and learned upon with the help of BDA. For example, the effects of using multiple communication marketing campaigns in multiple markets can be compared.

There is though a limitation of using BDA to support learning between the teams. It works well in a highly repetitive processes, where data on similar situations are easily obtainable, as for instance sales, or mass production. If there are not enough similar cases, or if the data variety to explain a cases is too high, BDA cannot adequately provide insight.

3.6 BDA support the interhierarchical learning processes and reduce the number of the hierarchical recursion levels.

Figure 5. Understanding the drivers

The BDA is used by the higher levels in two ways: First, by elaborating the feedbacks of the lower structural recursion levels, it can fine-tune the activities, guiding to the desired results. Secondly, it can use BDA to better understand the needs, processes and relations at lower levels to propose solutions that provide value added for all the subjects, affected by the organizations. The higher capacity to manage variety also reduces the need for hierarchy and allows structural recursion. In some cases, the automated guiding systems can entirely eliminate the need for intermediaries between the consumer and provider on a global scale.

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Abstract.As a way of conceptualizing and of pursuing epistemological practices, such as learning, designing and researching, cybernetics should enjoy a front row position within academic settings today. However, being aligned orthogonally to – and occasionally challenging – the utilitarianism, revenue models, reward-orientation, and control structures of many academic and research organizations, cybernetics as an academic discipline is in serious crisis. In many parts of the world, it no longer enjoys the levels of funding support, student numbers, academic workforce and opportunities to offer study programs it enjoyed a few decades ago. While many cybernetic ideas and theories have been absorbed by other fields, where they are pursued in specialist engineering approaches, the study of cybernetics as a generalist philosophy has all but disappeared from formal curricula in many parts of the world. Furthermore, in many parts of the word the more generalist subject of cybernetics and its more specialist sister subject of computing have drifted apart, resulting in a disciplinary as well as philosophical fragmentation of the field.

Keywords: Cybernetics, reflexive pedagogy, second-order cybernetic concepts

In some ways, cybernetics is back where it was shortly after World War II, having to rely on its appeal to bright and enthusiastic minds to approach and pursue the subject, to build new communities, and to develop the future of cybernetics practically from scratch. Given the success of cybernetics in the middle of the last century, it is prudent to take a look back, and to examine how early cybernetic thinkers may have connected with control and communication early in their lives.