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“infoset,” and, for reasons that will become clear, the basic form of an infoset
would comprise thirty people.
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But just how should the topic of such a meeting be defined? This was a
matter of pressing concern for Beer, a concern that ran along much the same
lines as his critique of opinion polls mentioned earlier. The usual way of struc-
turing such a meeting would be to distribute in advance an agenda listing
specific topics for discussion and action. Beer's point was that such an agenda
prefigures its outcome within lines that can already be foreseen, and “any-
thing truly novel has two minutes as Any Other Business” (Beer 1994b, 9).
His idea, therefore, was that the first element of a syntegration should itself
be the construction by the infoset in real time of a set of relatively specific
topics for discussion. In the mature form of syntegration this entailed a fairly
complicated protocol extending over some hours, but, in essence, the proce-
dure was this: Knowing the general topic of the meeting—world governance,
say—each participant was asked to write down at least one brief statement of
importance (SI) relevant to the topic, aiming to encourage original discussion
of some aspect of the overall focus of concern. These statements would then
be publically displayed to all of the participants, who would wander around,
discussing whichever SIs interested them with others, elaborating them, criti-
cizing them, or whatever (all this, and what follows, with the aid of experi-
enced “facilitators”). Finally, after a prescribed length of time, the participants
would vote for the developed SIs they considered of most importance, and the
top twelve SIs would be chosen as the focus for the remainder of the meeting
(27). In this way, something like a specific agenda would be constructed,
not
as given in advance but as emergent itself in the process of the meeting.
Given a set of thirty participants and twelve SIs, what happens next? In
a short but complicated process, participants are each assigned to a pair of
SIs, respecting, as much as possible, their preferences. Then the process of
syntegration proper begins, and things get complicated to explain. How do
you organize the discussion of twelve topics by thirty people? A completely
unstructured agora-like situation is imaginable, but experience dictates that
it would get nowhere. One might try to structure the meeting by, say, rank-
ing individuals or topics in terms of priority, but this would return to Beer's
critique of agendas, one step down the line. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller's
geodesic domes (Beer 1994b, 12-14), the solution that Beer arrived at was
to structure discussions in the form of a geometric figure, the icosahedron
(fig. 6.17).
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An icosahedron has thirty edges and twelve vertices, and hence the ap-
pearance of these numbers above. Each of the twelve topics is assigned to
