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Figure 6.21.
The enneagram. Source: S. Beer,
beyond Dispute: the invention of team
syntegrity
(New York: Wiley, 1994), 202, fig. 12.4.
syntegrity, describes various experiments in syntegration and refinements
of the protocol, and elaborates many of Beer's ideas that are by now familiar,
up to and including his thoughts on how syntegration might play a part in
an emergent “world governance.” In chapters 11-14, 74 pages in all, the topic
takes on a different form. As if Beer had done his duty to the worldly aspects
of the project in the opening chapters, now he conjures up its spiritual aspects
and the esoteric knowledge that informs it. I cannot rehearse the entire con-
tent of these latter chapters, but we can examine some of its key aspects.
Chapter 12 is entitled “The Dynamics of Icosahedral Space” and focuses on
closed paths around the basic syntegration icosahedron, paths that lead from
one vertex to the next and eventually return to their starting points. Beer's in-
terest in such paths derived from the idea mentioned above, that in syntegra-
tion, discussions reverberate around the icosahedron, becoming the common
property of the infoset. In chapter 12, this discussion quickly condenses onto
the geometric figure known as an
enneagram
(fig. 6.21), which comprises a re-
entrant six-pointed form superimposed on a triangle. Beer offers an elaborate
spiritual pedigree for this figure. He remarks that he first heard about it in the
1960s in conversations with the English mystic John Bennett, who had in turn
