Anyone who fails to master complexity will be overcome by it

The purpose of all the methods and models used in management cybernetics is to enable complexity to be mastered, optimum results to be achieved and effective work to be done.

No human network can
operate faster or better
In three to four days, Team Syntegrity® will create the widest possible understanding and interconnection within a large heterogeneous group to enable a complex, difficult and/or conflict-ridden problem to be solved. The outcome of the procedure, which is performed on strict cybernetic principles, is a very wide consensus and a widely felt will, and this provides the ideal foundation for putting into practice decisions that are actually worked out and supported together. Optimum use is made of the potential that in fact already exists.

Whatever is in there, Team Syntegrity® brings it out
This cybernetic method of Stafford Beer's is based on his precisely defined mathematical design for the logic of inter-human communication and of brain-oriented learning processes. It operates as if a large group of people formed a single, healthily operating brain. During a Team Syntegration®, those involved spontaneously become able to operate like a neuronal network. Using another image, with Team Syntegrity® Stafford Beer causes a large number of different minds, which have been differently trained and think differently and which therefore understand differently and want different things, to "all pull together", and he does so by in no way asking them to be spontaneous.

It was Paul Watzlawick, if not someone before him, who pointed out that asking for spontaneity makes spontaneity impossible. Beer, the father of management cybernetics, does without every sort of technique for motivation, animation or intervention. In Team Syntegrity®, he simply developed a framework for self-organization, for creative spontaneity that will generate meaning and purpose and for the creation of order that makes good sense. The method ensures that there is nothing at all that the participants can do wrong, and that, in an entirely natural way, they do what is right.

The right acts rather than meaningless facts
This method realizes, in a natural way, the unattainable dream that people cherish about artificial intelligence, namely that the different knowledge that many people have should flow together to produce a higher, shared body of knowledge that everybody has. This is something that will never be achieved with computers because they cannot help but remain simplified models of the human brain. Nor is the problem simply one of the "storage capacity" or "processor speed" of brains. The problem that has to be solved is, in the larger shared whole, to make sense for the individual of the reality of which he can gain only his own, individual perception, and to make possible the sort of creativity that will give sense or meaning to what he is doing. Computers do not suffer from fear or uncertainty, they have no personal opinions and they do not have any varying needs. They will accept any non-sense for which they are programmed. The opposite is far more true of human beings.

Optimum for head, heart and hand
Team Syntegrity® creates conditions that are optimum for the human brain and for collective intellectual and psychological needs. Stafford Beer deals with what is at the heart of the problems of finding sense and meaning and of inhibited creativity: the need for autonomy and freedom from fear and anxiety. He creates both these things by laying down strict rules of procedure and by what is termed the "operational closing" of an open system. Understanding, in the form of the maximum understanding that is possible, is organized to operate on the model of a geometrical figure, the icosahedron.

Taking the structure of the icosahedron as a model, a large number of people are closed into a working structure in which they are suddenly able to solve a common task as it were spontaneously. The bars of the icosahedron represent the different people, the colors and nodes the subjects they wish to deal with, and the network as a whole the information loops and the learning process that develops in real time as a self-organizing process.

The amazingly fast rate at which things happen is due to Beer's not having simply built a network of triangles but to his having taken the icosahedron as a model and having brought these triangles (people and the subjects they deal with) as close together as they possibly can be. This shortens the paths followed by information and rules out errors or deficiencies in transmission. The green light has now been given for a growing knowledge of what one person actually has to do with all the others.

Intervention is no longer necessary
Whereas other communication techniques for work done in large groups can be seen as "large-group intervention", in Team Syntegrity® any need for intervention is ruled out right from the start. The participants themselves recognize what is needed for their own and shared effectiveness! The process is democratic down to its very roots and free of any hierarchy and those who commission its use and the participants in it merely have to follow exactly the few rules of procedure that there are. It operates as safely and reliably as a healthy brain.
You can find out more about this facility in the PDF file entitled
Wissensmanagement - Ein Problem, ein Weg oder eine Methode?