Create an enterprise where people do the best work of their lives for a world with a future
Create an enterprise where people do the best work of their lives. End Quiet Quitting and Great Resignations.
You might ask, what has this got to do with a Syntropic World? Don’t all businesses seek to have their people do the best work of their lives?
Hmm…if we look at the numbers around burnout and engagement, they tell their own story. Add to the 2022 lexicon words such as Quiet Quitting and the Great Resignation, and it is apparent there is something very wrong.
The very seeds of Syntropic World — its Pattern Integrity — include the question: How do we bring good, wholehearted people together around a purpose they care about and not have it fall into a Messy Human Heap?
Messy Human Heap — an unedited excerpt from Syntropic World Dictionary to be published in 2023.
We are all familiar with messy human heaps. This is how they occur.
Someone or a few people have a brilliant idea to do something — create a project, build an enterprise, produce an event — and invite others to join. This team or group might live within an existing enterprise or business or within a family or community group. It could be the seeds of a startup or new business.
The team or group comes together and gets on with the project, bringing the idea to life. Often the idea is held as this glittering possibility, and each person within the team or group overlays the idea with their expectations, desires, values, needs and wants.
Values clash as the days tick by and ideas merge or blow apart. Intentions start to go in many directions. When stress is added to this system — the need to raise funds, a hard timeline, divergent opportunities and differences of opinion of pathways — there is an acceleration towards a messy human heap.
In a messy human heap respect goes out the window, words are spoken with anger, misunderstanding rules the day, and competing egos fight for domination and control.
We wonder how such people — good, wholehearted people — managed to get into such a mess.
Quite often the fallout is a complete deterioration of the relationship to the point that it might not be sustained.
At Syntropic World, after a lifetime of knowing the experience of Messy Human Heaps and having learned from this, we employ architecture and design to ensure they do not happen.
Designing ecologies for people to be and do the best work of their lives is as significant an investment in time, care, love and understanding of human relational geometry as it is to design the most complex systems.
For this reason, I shudder when I see the rush to build and use DAOs — Decentralised Autonomous Organisations. As if technology can be overlaid on human complexity, expecting order and dignity to be the outcome.
I am not against DAOs. Yet until we have the human relational design as an analogue architecture working symphonically, throwing a DAO over people will not coherence make.
Syntropic World teaches that there is a geometry to human relationships — a geometry that is isomorphic with Nature’s Coordinate System.
Let me explain this a bit more. Space has shape. The space between humans, between humans and creatures and between humans and matter is not a void to be filled any which way unless you do not care about people doing their best work.
Geometry means the study of relationships.
I propose that there is a precise geometry to how we coordinate humans to create cultures of synergy, where the individual human and the collective team do the best work of their lives.
How to do this is a significant part of what we teach in the Syntropic Enterprise Masterclass. (Consider joining us, the final class for 2022 starts this week. Here.)
There are a few key ingredients to get started.
- The purpose of your team, project, enterprise or community group must be clear and aligned for everyone. No shades of grey, no hidden agenda, and no posturing as doing one thing while truly doing something else.
- Integrity all the way up, down and through. Do what you say. Say what you do. Be transparent. Acknowledge mistakes. Be humble. Invite disagreement and feedback. Listen as if your life depends upon it.
- Communicate the Pattern Integrity of the idea you are stewarding to life clearly and unambiguously. The Pattern Integrity is the unique qualities, characteristics, values and particularities that are integral to the Source Idea. Read more about it here. https://syntropic.world/pattern-integrity-and-source-idea-as-sacred/
- Create a real threshold-crossing experience etched in an agreement and rules that define the culture of the enterprise. People must know in advance what is expected of them and what they can expect from others. In Syntropic World we call this the Trust Manifesto. You can download and read Syntropic World’s Trust Manifesto here. https://syntropic.world/trustmanifesto
- Offer ongoing support, training and coaching in communication. Human relationships are not easy. We are all learning to do them better than yesterday.
- 6. Design appropriate polarity into the architecture deliberately. No polarity, no shape, no thing = messy human heap. Too much polarity, too much drama, too much noise = explosive event.
Other essential ingredients
There is a geometric requirement for the team: its size, communication flows, and the degree of polarity. Tensegrity Teaming is a thoughtfully designed combination of tension, compression and integrity. A Steward Leader will look at a team and know whether the tension is about right or if it needs to be adapted for a set of conditions. The experience of high-calibre communication flows will remove the side effects of assumptions, misunderstanding, failed event horizons, and time spent cleaning up dysfunctional relational dynamics.
The Syntropic World Synergistic Audit enables people to bring their whole value, the fullness of what they have to offer, to the team, project or enterprise. When we create a space for people to be seen and experienced for their full value, their brilliance is given space to come alive.
When we take the time to get the human relational shape and architecture resonant and vibrant, when we see people doing the best work of their lives individually and collectively, and when people hold each other and the team to account, we might then consider how to scale this using a DAO, asking, beforehand — is a DAO needed? What will the DAO do that the analogue collective cannot do? Will the DAO amplify the collective experience or obfuscate it in a technology wrapper?
Of course, the Steward Leader needs to be at a personal development level to hold the shape for other people’s brilliance. Unfortunately, not everyone can do this. A great Syntropic Steward leader plays in the background, with no interest in the spotlight unless it is to support the purpose of the business. Instead, they would give their people the spotlight, both in the community the enterprise serves and the interior community of the enterprise itself.
A high functioning Steward Leader needs to be a ‘high-frequency tunable set.’ This is a term coined by Buckminster Fuller which means they have the space and time to tune into the flows and signals of the immediate environment in which their team or enterprise exists, as well as the global geopolitical and economic currents, while also managing the interior ecology of the enterprise itself, held by the architecture created to enable people to do their best work.
Syntropic Enterprise Architecture has the development of all active participants built in by design. We get to grow up as we build the thing we care about.
In Summary
Human relationships. Not easy. Creating an enterprise where people do the best work of their lives has thoughtful, deliberately designed elements. Unfortunately, very few startups or small businesses take the time to consider this. Most larger companies leave this consideration until after the drama has hit.
Yet the overwhelming data shows that when people are offered the space that enables them to do the best work of their lives, every single measure an enterprise is seeking — except perhaps the absolute hardcore profit gained by stripping out every single cost possible (which we consider an Entropic Enterprise) — goes up.
One of my mantras or key messages is that the human mind working together synergistically can solve almost any problem we have. The power unleashed by many doing the best work of their lives together cannot be estimated.
At the end of our days, we all value our relationships. If our workplaces and spaces can build strong coherent relationships that enable all participants to do the best work of their lives, we will end the Quiet Quitting and Great Resignation. More importantly, we will get so much more.
I was inspired to write this today by this image.
One of the things Putin cannot understand is the power of a collective under threat to be resilient. Through the flames of perturbation, people in Ukraine are rising to the best work of their lives. Not how they would have wanted. And at a significant cost. But the synergy of their actions will stop Russia or Putin from winning. It is the Pattern Integrity behind the classic David and Goliath story.
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Syntropic World is a global education and community of practice applying the organising principles of nature to enterprise design and human coordination. Creating ecologies of trust, ensuring integrity in everything, enabling collective sense making, and organising around a central purpose — how to create a world that works for 100% of humanity without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.
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