Team Syntegrity

Thirty people as icosahedron edges, twelve topics as vertices, held as an infoset by “shared interpretation” (BD 1994: 10, 14). Freesman coined syntegrity as “synergistic tensegrity” after Fuller (BD 1994: 14). Goal: “a perfect democracy” — structure non-hierarchical, protocol non-hieratic (BD 1994: 12).

What Beer says

• Hierarchy “never” suffices; the org chart is “a mere instrument for discovering who is to blame” (BD 1994: 3). The viable-system-model is “not a hierarchical but a circular model” (BD 1994: 148).
• Regular polyhedra only: “no top, no bottom, no sides” (BD 1994: 14); equal edge status; Bavelas peripherality zero (BD 1994: 181, 17).
• Protocol three parts: Problem Jostle, Topic Auction, Outcome Resolve (BD 1994: 21). Later: eight episodes of a “SYNTEGRATION” (BD 1994: 111).
• Mechanism: symmetric closure plus reverberation (BD 1994: 45). Facilitation against the infoset makes it “spurious thereafter” (BD 1994: 146).

Where it sits in the model

system-three and system-four “must massively interact”; system-five sees that this happens “all the time” (BD 1994: 149–150). Planning “cannot be isolated in System Four” (BD 1994: 151). recursion is “rigorously determined by the law-of-cohesion” (BD 1994: 229).

Open points

• syntegrity / syntegration: synergistic tensegrity (BD 1994: 14) vs synergistic integrity (BD 1994: 197).
• Three parts (BD 1994: 21) vs eight episodes (BD 1994: 111, 144).
• Hureston loop “has not been tried” (BD 1994: 77). “Infosettic consciousness” reported, not evaluated (BD 1994: 208). Draft 0.8 is not canon.

Related

beyond-dispute · pure-vsm-part-iv-team-syntegrity · stafford-beer · viable-system-model · pure-vsm-appendix