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Figure 6.6.
The steel mill as cybernetic factory. Source: Beer 1994a, 200-201,
fig. 4.
functioning of “the T-Machine proper” (Beer 1962a, 203). These transfor-
mations, derived in practice from OR studies, first recombined the nineteen
sensations into twelve “functions”—six referring primarily to the company
and six to its environment. The functions all depended on ratios of expected
behavior to actual behavior of precisely the form of the indices developed
in Beer's earlier OR work, discussed above. “This last point,” Beer wrote
(204-5),
is important, since it incorporates in this exemplification the essential “black
box” treatment of unknowns and imponderables common to all cybernetic
machines. For a model of performance in any field may be inadequate: predic-
tions and judgements based upon it will be effectual only insofar as the model
is
adequate. But in exceedingly complex and probabilistic systems
no
analytic
model can possibly be adequate. The answer to this paradox, which I have used
successfully for 10 years, is to load the raw predictions of any analytic model
with a continuous feedback measuring its own efficiency as a predictor. In this
way, everything that went unrecognized in the analytic work, everything that
proved too subtle to handle, even the errors incurred in making calculations, is
“black boxed” into an unanalyseable weighting which is error-correcting.
