Syntegrity is a formal model presented by British theorist Anthony Stafford Beer in 1990. Now a trademark, it is “a form of non-hierarchical problem solving that can be used in a small team of 10 to 42 people. It is a business consultation product that is licensed as a basis model for solving problems in a team environment”. From synergistic tensegrity
Another good description is this one: “a future-oriented approach to the design of democratic management in the sense of the heterarchical-participative type of organization. It is a holographic model for organizing processes of communication, in particular for the (self-) management of social systems. Based on the structure of polyhedra it is especially suitable for realizing team-oriented structures as well as for supporting processes of planning, knowledge generation and innovation in turbulent environments”.
But the really amazing thing that I read recently is that Beer is the brainchild of Project Cybersyn, an attempt by Chile’s Socialist government under Salvador Allende to achieve a real-time, computer controlled planned economy of sorts. The year was 1971.
“A network of about 500 telex machines linking the country from north to south supported all this. A single computer center in Santiago controlled them, using principles of cybernetics. Its futurist design offered the hope of a more participative and less bureaucratic society. The project had the participation of a multidisciplinary group of national and international scientists. Their task was to build a system for distributed decision-making supported by relevant information. But their efforts were interrupted by the coup d’etat of 1973“
Photos from top to bottom: Stafford Beer from The Very Secret Plan; Salvador Allende from Axisglobe; CyberSyn operations room view (futuristic chair design for data reading and analytics)
Tags: Augusto Pinochet, Chile, non-hierarchical problem solving, project cybersyn, Salvador Allende, Stafford Beer, syntegrity
