Team Syntegrity

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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.

Beyond Dispute · Part IV — Team Syntegrity · Stafford Beer · Viable System Model · Pure VSM — Appendix