Bucky Domes, Doing More-With-Less & The Invention of Team Syntegrity

November 19, 2004

Last night I went to TradeStorm, an information technology/not-for-profit networking event organized and facilitated by Alex Sirota of NewPath Consulting (a great night — I would encourage both freelance IT consultants looking for meaningful work and not-for-profits looking for professional technology assistance to get involved in the next event). The evening was organized around a series of presentations, the most interesting of which (for me, at least) given by Allenna Leonard and Joe Truss on a facilitated group decision making and consensus building process called "Team Syntegrity." I'd read about Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes before, and understood the "doing more-with-less" efficiency principle, but was blown away to learn that Stafford Beer (founder of management cybernetics) had applied these principles (and specifically, the structural principles of the icosahedron) to the development of a collaborative, non-hierarchical, consensus-based decision making process that teams all over the world are using to optimize their effectiveness and efficiency while making group decisions and solving major problems.

The Team Syntegrity process is described in the book Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity — I haven't read it yet, but my understanding of the process is this: a team with an important question to answer (referred to as "the opening question") selects a group of 30 representatives to participate in a facilitated 2-3 day series of group discussions (referred to as a "Syntegration"). The group breaks down the opening question into 12 discussion topics, participants vote on which discussions they'd like to be involved in over the course of the 2-3 days, and people are assigned to discussions in teams of 5. The numbers 30, 12 and 5 are taken from the icosahedron, which has 30 edges and 12 vertices (with 5 faces meeting at each vertex).

As I understand it, the idea behind the process is that by mirroring the structure of the icosahedron in the communication design of the Syntegration, maximum efficiency is obtained (i.e. in the same way Bucky domes guarantee the efficient and unobstructed circulation of air and energy), and cross-linking and cross-pollination between people, teams and ideas is guaranteed. I'll post more once I've read the book — in the meantime, The Syntegrity Group website does a much better job of explaining the process than I have here :)