---
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description: "On the third page of Beyond Dispute (BD 1994), after a list of paired roles (master and slave, squire and servant, boss and employee), Beer states the problem…"
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site: "Cybernetic Futures"
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# content

## 20.1 Starting point: hierarchy does not suffice
On the third page of *Beyond Dispute* (BD 1994), after a list of paired roles (master and slave, squire and servant, boss and employee), Beer states the problem that the rest of the book tries to solve: "the notion of hierarchy is endemic to the human experience of social system. And yet it seems never to suffice as an organizing principle" (BD 1994: 3). The list and the sentence open the book's first chapter, "A Long Gestation".
Beer does not claim that hierarchy can be abolished. His claim is narrower: hierarchy is everywhere, and it is everywhere supplemented, because on its own it does not do the work of organizing. He has little patience with the device through which hierarchy usually represents itself. The typical organization chart, the "family tree" in the words of the same page, is "a mere instrument for discovering who is to blame" (ibid.). The family tree records the chain of accountability. How the organization regulates itself does not appear on it.
People had already found practical ways round these limits, Beer acknowledges. There had been non-hierarchical solutions, "real, and effective, but perhaps fairly pragmatic in design. It might be advantageous to have a more rigorous theory" (ibid.). *Beyond Dispute* is framed as an attempt to supply that theory. Beer also names reasons why the question had become urgent by the early 1990s: "the international trend away from centralization; a growing repugnance towards the very concept of hierarchy detectable in public debate" (BD 1994: 3), together with the thinning of middle management that he describes on the following page.
The problem itself is older. The same chapter traces it back to Beer's operational research in the steel industry around 1950, where he used Alex Bavelas's network measures (Group Dispersion, Relative Centrality and Peripherality) to study how communication protocols shape a group (BD 1994: 4–5). What he reports from that work is a dilemma: "The central paradox resides in this: morale is improved by diminishing Peripheral isolation, but adjustments to Relative Centrality to achieve this lack efficiency and inhibit the emergence of leadership" (BD 1994: 5). Team Syntegrity would later address this paradox in a new form. Beer also notes that this line of work "was the origin of the theory of autonomy eventually advanced in *The Heart of Enterprise*" (BD 1994: 6). Syntegrity and the VSM thus share a starting point, well before the comparison Beer draws in chapter 9 of BD (see chapter 23).
Beer puts the VSM itself on the non-hierarchical side of the question. Reviewing his earlier models, he says that they "are all based on interlocking homeostatic subsystems, and are non-hierarchic in character for that reason—contrary to the critiques of some rather casual readers" (BD 1994: 7). The reasoning is brief. A model built from homeostats is a model of mutual regulation: each subsystem holds the others in balance and is held in balance by them, and command running in one direction is not what holds it together. Later in BD he repeats the point in the context of developmental planning: "the VSM is not a hierarchical but a circular model, exhibiting closure, because it includes its own environment in its organizational loops. Its five subsystems are profoundly interactive, so that notions such as 'top-down' and bottom-up' \[sic\] are as inappropriate as they are in the icosahedron" (BD 1994: 148). The sentence introduces Allenna Leonard's example chapter in the "Collaborators' Surplus" ("Her example emphasizes that..."). The words are Beer's, but he offers them as a summary of what her example shows.
A reader coming from Part II of this book may find these statements hard to square with the familiar VSM diagram, which puts System Five at the top and System One at the bottom and so looks rather like a family tree. Beer's answer, here and in chapter 23, is that the diagram shows logical levels of regulation, embedded in each other and linked in loops. It does not rank who may give orders to whom (see chapters 6 and 11).
## 20.2 The requirement: a perfect democracy
Garry Davis, founder of the World Service Authority, supplied the occasion with an invitation. Beer states the design task in two parallel clauses, one about structure and one about procedure: "The rest of us would need structure, but it had to be non-hierarchical; and we would need a procedural protocol, but it had to be non-hieratic. In short, we needed a perfect democracy" (BD 1994: 12).
Each clause keeps what it qualifies. Beer asks for structure of a particular kind, and for rules of procedure that give no one priestly standing. "Non-hieratic" (not priestly) anticipates the distinction between "sacerdotal" hierarchy and autonomous embedment that Beer draws at the end of the book (see chapter 23). "Perfect democracy" is meant as a specification: structure and protocol are to give no participant a privileged position, which is what a family tree gives to whoever sits at its root. Chapter 21 shows how Beer turns this specification into a geometric criterion.
His first attempt went through holography, "in which the whole picture is reformulated in any broken piece of glass, but could not get a hold via Denis Gabor's mathematics" (BD 1994: 12). He then returned to Buckminster Fuller's geodesics. The detour shows what he was after: a structure in which every part carries the whole, and in which that property can be stated rigorously.
In the acknowledgements Beer credits Davis with "the initial stimulus and subsequent contract that metabolized theory into action" (BD 1994: xi). The World Service Authority also paid secretarial and commissarial expenses for the Toronto experiments, "because of their interest in the validation of the Team Syntegrity technique" (BD 1994: 87). The technique therefore grew out of a concrete political commission as well as out of management consulting: a world-citizenship organization was looking for a way to let people deliberate without a ruling centre. Its use in enterprises (chapter 23) came later.
## 20.3 Infoset and Problem Jostle: the provenance
Two of the central ideas of Team Syntegrity, Beer stresses, are much older than the 1990 experiments.
**Infoset.** The first concerns what holds a group together. "Data themselves do not supply this cohesion: it is the *interpretation* of data that procures purpose, and it is the *shared* interpretation between individuals that procures group cohesion. Thus groups of this kind were nominated as infosets" (BD 1994: 10). Beer's answer is informational, then, though data as such do not suffice. An infoset (information set) is defined by what its members share in interpretation; formal membership of an organizational unit, the kind of membership a family tree records, is not the criterion. Beer dates the term to an unpublished text, *Status Quo*, "which I wrote in Chile, June–August 1973, while working for President Salvador Allende" (ibid.). The concept thus belongs to the same period as the Chilean project described in chapter 16. In BD's chapter on developmental planning Beer extends it. Command in the brain "is not prefigured, but is potential in any concatenation that shares the needful information. Well, this defines none other than an information set, an infoset" (BD 1994: 158). In organizations, "Potential command will be seized and made actual by fluid infosets of people who have the shared purpose and the shared information appropriate to the decisions involved" (ibid.). The syntegrity protocol did not invent the infoset. Beer's claim is that infosets already exist in every organization, formally recognized or not.
**Problem Jostle.** The second idea concerns meetings without a fixed agenda. "Meetings with no agenda must generate their own; and they must generate their own categories too" (BD 1994: 9). The second clause carries the weight: a group which only fills pre-set categories has not set its own agenda. Beer traces the technique to "Marlow Seventy", the 1970 council meeting of the Operational Research Society, and reports its use at the Silver Jubilee Meeting of the Society for General Systems Research in 1979 (BD 1994: 9). He adds that during these experiments "it became obvious that the size of the group was critical" (ibid.). That observation points ahead to the fixed number of 30 participants that the icosahedron imposes (chapter 21).
## 20.4 Reverberation, tensegrity, syntegrity
A small group of friends who often discuss politics among themselves gives Beer the last element of his account, the dynamic idea that links the infoset to a geometric model. The views they hear "consolidate, gain or lose adherents, subtly change ... these views are REVERBERATING around the closed system" (BD 1994: 13). He then puts it more sharply: "some node within the system propagates an idea, which then bounces round other nodes—and returns (somewhat modified) to hit its progenitors on the back of the neck" (ibid.).
Two conditions are built into this description. The group must be closed, so that ideas come back instead of leaking away, and ideas must pass through several nodes, so that they return changed. Beer connects both to Buckminster Fuller's principle of structural integrity. In a tensegrity structure, "the wholeness, the INTEGRITY, of the structure is guaranteed not by the local compressive stresses where structural members are joined together, but by the overall tensile stresses of the entire system. Hence came the portmanteau term for Tensile Integrity: TENSEGRITY" (BD 1994: 13). He applies this to groups. An infoset tries to compress its shared idea into a cohesive statement, but it knows that "the popular term 'consensus' is likely to represent merely a lowest common denominator that robs the group of its whole *raison d'être*. It is also aware of *tension*: what else but tension generates discussion, never mind argument?" (ibid.). Closure here does not mean isolation: "Of course the Infoset is not closed to information: new outside developments are pumped in as the lifeblood of the group's body-politic" (ibid.). The closure Beer means is organizational. What circulates stays in circulation.
One sentence brings the two ideas together: "This concept of Reverberation came to mean to me the instrumentality of tensegrity within the Infoset: it generates *synergy*" (BD 1994: 14). Reverberation is the means by which tension produces an integrated result. The name of the technique followed. Because Fuller's term had been taken up commercially by architects, Boris Freesman "coined the word syntegrity, which draws together synergistic tensegrity, and Team Syntegrity has been the name for this technique ever since" (ibid.). Beer adds at once: "Of course, it depends on structural closure" (ibid.). How to close an infoset structurally, with no position privileged, is the question that leads to the polyhedra of chapter 21.
*Textual note:* Later in the book Beer explains a related word differently: "Syntegration is a portmanteau word for *synergistic* integrity, after all" (BD 1994: 197). "Syntegrity" (synergistic tensegrity, p. 14) and "syntegration" (synergistic integrity, p. 197) are thus derived differently. The two explanations do not contradict each other, since tensegrity is itself "tensile integrity". But the second omits the tensile element that the first put at the centre. Beer's text does not say whether the change is deliberate.

## References

- **BOTF** — Beer, Stafford (1981). *Brain of the Firm*. 2nd ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. (1st ed. London: Allen Lane, 1972.)
- **BD** — Beer, Stafford (1994). *Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity*. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.