Dr. Tilia Stingl de Vasconcelos Guedes is currently an autonomous Organizational Consultant and a former lecturer at Universities of Applied Sciences in Austria (academia nova GmbH, FH-Wiener Neustadt) in the area of Business Administration and Change Management. Tilia has bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science and Business Administration from the Vienna University of Technology, is post-graduated in Magazine Journalism and earned her doctorate in Communication Science from the University of Vienna, working in the field of Knowledge Management and Organizational Communication. She has also worked in the financial sector and later in management consulting. Today her research interests are in the field of organizational communication and systemic approaches.
Mag. Philipp Belcredi, MBA, is a biologist and economist (master's degree from University of Vienna, Austria). He played professional ice hockey during college and was an internationally successful regatta sailor. Philipp earned an MBA from the University of Economics and Business Administration HEC, Lausanne, Switzerland, with a focus on strategy and marketing. He did long-term training at SySt Institute Munich (Germany) and other systemic formations such as hypnotherapy with Gunther Schmidt at the Milton Erickson Institute of Heidelberg, Germany. Philipp has several years of experience as a project manager, manager, and CEO (OMV, Compass Group, Pewag). He works as a management consultant for companies and organizations in challenging strategic development- and change processes. Philipp has developed and introduced a number of practical applications and methods to organizations he has worked with, based on second-order cybernetics and system theories.
If you travel or interact with big companies, you have probably noticed some novel practices:
* The banking sector is in transition. The number of branches and employees is declining; business is increasingly taking place on the internet and smartphones.
* The next step in automation for travelers has transpired: For the past while, air passengers have been able to check in not only themselves but also their luggage.
* “Robot lawyers” that support or automate legal processes are the new trend in legal technology.
They are expected to offer efficient alternatives to legal services.
The above-mentioned examples illustrate a trend that seems to be unstoppable: Automated processes and even artificial intelligence are taking over the services sector, namely, the economic sector, where the human workforce was once an indispensable source of added value.
Such developments may lead to further questions about our future. From a social system-theoretical point of view, for instance, organizations are built through the communication of decisions. However, many of the current trends in business are based on creating machines or procedures that make decisions for people. If machines decide for humans, how can we validate humans as decision makers?
In this keynote address, we want to focus on this question using premises of social system theory and ideas of second-order cybernetics as guides for (a) a better understanding of dynamics, (b) self-reflection, and (c) adapted perspectives and solutions for upcoming challenges.
