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Team Syntegrity
HOW SHALL WE EvER CONCEIvE
HOWEvER EXPRESS
A NEW IDEA
IF WE ARE BOUND BY THE CATEGORIZATION
THAT DELIvERED OUR PROBLEM TO US
IN THE FIRST PLACE
?
STaFFORd BeeR,
beyOnD DispUte
(1994B, 8)
From the time of Project Cybersyn onward, the VSM was the centerpiece of
Beer's management consultancy. In parallel to the VSM, however, he also
developed a rather different approach to organizations that he called “team
syntegrity.” This grew from the 1950s onward, “flared into considerable activ-
ity 20 years ago, and occupied me throughout 1990 in a series of five major ex-
periments” (Beer 1994b, 4). In the 1990s also, the conduct of “syntegrations”
became partly a commercial business for Beer and his friends, associates,
and followers.
43
Beer only published one topic on syntegrity,
Beyond Dispute
(1994b), as distinct from three on the VSM, but he and his collaborators de-
veloped and reflected upon syntegration in considerable detail.
44
I am not go-
ing to attempt to do justice to that here. My aim is to sketch out the basic form
of the approach, to connect it to the cybernetic ontology, and, continuing the
above discussion, to examine it as a form of micro-sub-politics.
45
Put very crudely, the substance of team syntegrity was (and is) an evolving
format or protocol for holding a meeting, a rather elaborate meeting called a
“syntegration,” and we can explore this format in stages. First, there are the
connected questions of what the meeting is about and who should come to it.
On the latter, Beer offered no prescriptions. The idea was that syntegration
was a process focused on some topic of interest to its participants. His model
for thinking about this was a group of friends who met regularly in a bar and
found themselves returning to some topic, perhaps current politics, but an
early example in the development of the technique involved members of the
British Operational Research Society seeking to redesign the society's consti-
tution in 1970, and the first experiment in 1990 involved a group of friends
and friends of friends thinking about world governance (Beer 1994b, 9, 35).
The participants were, then, characterized by their common concern and in-
terest in whatever the syntegration was about. Beer called such a group an
