🔬 The Science Behind Successful Collaboration: Harnessing the 12 Degrees of Freedom 🔄💪
Space has shape, said my mentor of 35 years, Buckminster Fuller.
But what did he mean, and why is this important to you, me and the future?
More recently, one of my student practitioners in the Year of Syntropy Program asked me how we hold space, an essential skill of steward leadership.
Everything we teach in Syntropic World is grounded in mathematics and science. It includes the weightless invisible, because after all, the majority of the world is weightless invisible space.
Metaphysical is not some mystical woo woo. Meta means after, beyond or more comprehensive. Beyond physical is the weightless invisible world. It includes emotions, ideas, values, beliefs, culture and relationships.
A structure is a pattern comprised entirely of energy and information.
Geometry literally means the study of relationships.
There is a geometry to healthy human relationships that is almost always ignored.
We bring a diverse group of people together to bring an idea to life, and in our neglect to understand human relational geometry, our relationships with each other more often disintegrate into a mess.
Almost everyone I know has some experience of this.
Collaboration is hard — some people say.
I say collaboration is easy if you apply the design and coordinate principles of Universe to human relational design.
Below I will make an effort to describe some of these principles. My intention is to give you tools that will support how you stabilise ideas, create a structure for synergy, hold the space and shape as a steward leader, and transmit intention.
I consider all of these elements essential ingredients in a Syntropic Enterprise. The foundation stones of a stable, design-science-created enterprise. The kind that might ensure a world with a future for Earth and all her creatures.
I invite you to remember that I am writing the manual below, which is useless unless we apply these principles.
Let us begin with an idea.
An idea is metaphysical, weightless and invisible.
It can be a simple idea to make a peanut butter sandwich. To take the idea and bring it to form requires coordinated action in the physical world by people and things.
If we do not take action and move atoms, the idea remains metaphysical.
How might we stabilise an idea?
Ah, good question. I am glad you asked.
Meet the 12 Degrees of Freedom — the six positive and six negative forces required to stabilise a system’s motion.
How many restraining forces are required to completely inhibit a system’s motion, or, said another way, what is the minimum number of forces required to anchor a body in space?
Think of a hub and spoke bicycle wheel. Unless we have 12 spokes, the hub will not be stabilised. Until the last spoke is in place, the hub will wobble. We do not want a wobbly bike. Similarly, we would prefer to be working towards stable monetary and currency systems, stable health, education, food and housing systems. Stable does not mean fixed. We certainly want stable governance. The hub and spoke of a bike wheel are not fixed. While innovation has allowed carbon fibre wheel replacements, the principle and Pattern Integrity is still the same. A stable system is a living system.
Imagine a tennis ball held in space by strings.
Two strings pull it in opposite directions, and the ball can still move around and up and down (90 degrees to the direction of the string pull).
If we add two more strings, we get increased stability, yet still the ball can twist.
Only when we add twelve strings, six positive and six negatives, positioned in a triangulated manner, does the ball become stable in space.
We do not need thirteen strings. Twelve is the magic number to stabilise a system. The most efficient, effective use of material possible. Eleven will not work.
Humans want ten or eleven to work, cutting corners or ignoring structural geometry. But Nature is consummately efficient.
This is true in all cases. If you want to stabilise any system, you need the six positive and six negative inputs.
The motions we are stabilising are as follows.
Axial rotation — turning on an axis
A spinning top
The Earth spinning on its axis
Orbital Rotation
The Earth orbits the sun.
The electron orbits the nucleus of the atom.
Humans orbit each other. Or, as Bucky said, we orbit in love. If we fall in love, we collapse into each other. If we fall out of love, we spin-off.
Expand Contract
Inhale — exhale.
Syntropy — Entropy
Grow — rest
Warm — cold
Torque/Twist
We know torque/twist if we have ever used a wrench to tighten a nut onto a bolt.
Or have squeezed the water out of a cloth.
Wound up a toy or top with a string to release it so that it moves.
Inside out
Put a glove on one hand, take it off inside out, and it will go on the other hand.
Inside Out is a demonstration of the complementarity of all things.
It is Yin to Yang.
Up to down.
Concave to convex
It includes another Principle of Universe — Unity is Plural, at minimum two. There are always two sides to the whole.
Polarity is required for existence.
​Precession​
At 90 degrees, the effect of any body in motion on another body in motion.
Drop a stone into a pond, and we get ripples at 90 degrees.
A honey bee gathers pollen on its legs and wings, 90 degrees to its travel trajectory to gather honey creating the precessional effect of life on Earth.
Why should we care about 12 Degrees of Freedom and Stabilising any system?
We have significant issues and problems that require our focused care and attention.
AND
We need to be able to coordinate people to work together in a way that allows synergy and emergence rather than chaos and disintegration and more of the same — war, violence, an emotional tug-of-war, and all of the other relational breakdowns that are commonplace.
How do I get started?
Start with stabilising your idea.
- (a) Why do you want to breathe life into this idea? What is its purpose? (b)Why do others want or need it?
- (a) What is it? What will it do? (b) How will you know when it does what it wants to do?
- (a) Who is working on the idea? Who is on your team? (b) Who does your idea serve?
- (a) When will you start? What is your relationship to when — the timing? When does it need to be transmuted from idea to form? (b) When does the world/people need this idea to be transmuted into form? When it is finished, what will be the consequences — short and long-term?
- (a) Where will the idea be brought to life? Where are the resources needed to create this? (b) Where will this be offered? Where are the people it serves? Where are we going?
- (a) How will you start? How will it work? (b) How will you know that it is working? How will the future look because of this?
Now we have stabilised and given it structure. Does it have what is needed?
We now need to consider the overarching purpose behind the idea and, indeed, behind our life. We call this the Evolutionary Purpose because this type of purpose is one that keeps our eyes and hearts focused on some future possibility we may not see in our lifetime. A purpose that is far bigger than us asks us to do impossible, often scary things, to grow up as we bring the idea to life, and to give those working to bring the idea to life a super clear sense of direction. It also ensures that the idea will not be dropped when the going gets hard or we get bored. The Idea has endurance.
The tension between where we are today, now with our idea, and the Evolutionary Purpose we hold provides the power to stay on course. Power — energy — passion — endurance.
If we draw a vector between where we are now with our idea and where we intend to go, this provides the movement and direction, even if our idea gets lost in complexity or we get lost/separated from the idea.
This Vector is our Intention. It is unambiguous. A transmission. Greta Thunberg has an intention that is a transmission. There is no doubt about where she is going in everything she does. She sees a future that is not being expressed in the present and she holds the intention for that future to manifest.
The Structure that lives behind the 12 Degrees of Freedom is the Vector Equilibrium, also known as cube octahedron or jitterbug. See the video below for a demonstration.
https://vimeo.com/547783204?share=copy
It is a living system, a living structure, not fixed and rigid.
If our purpose is to go to the moon and back safely, our intention is to the moon. Our Source Idea is to create a vehicle, a spaceship, to get us safely there and back. The Source Idea has a Pattern Integrity, which includes a structure that can withhold extreme temperature variations and speed, keeping the occupants inside from boiling or freezing.
The structure of human coordination to enable the spaceship to be designed and built is created using the 12 Degrees of Freedom.
In Syntropic World we apply the 12 Degrees of Freedom to create the Trust Manifesto. It stabilises the human relational design. A Trust Manifesto might consider these similar but different questions.
- Why do you want to be involved? Why does this project need to be brought to life? Why does it matter?
- What does the idea need to enable ecologies of synergy? What is our Evolutionary Purpose? What are our values, rules, agreements, principles, and operating codes? What is the legal structure? What do the people need to ensure collaboration? What is enough? What is our time frame? What is the endpoint? What happens to the money? What is power? What is our risk tolerance, specifically?
- Who will be involved in active participation? Who will be involved in peripheral support? Who are the leaders? Who has the power? Who makes decisions? Who owns the IP and other assets? Who is the Steward of the Source Idea? Who is on the Integrity Council? Who do we serve?
- When do we need to take the first step? When is the first major milestone? When is it time to stop? When will we know now is the time?
- Where are we based? Where do we meet? Where is the power? Where is the value?
- How do we coordinate? How do we handle disagreements? How do we make decisions? How transparent are we? How do we honour and respect value and contribution? How do we respond to risk? Finally, how we honour and respect value and contribution is shaped by the 12 Degrees of Freedom.
In Syntropic World we call this process of honouring and respecting value Synergistic Accounting.
Six positive and six negative inputs and outputs of value, where no one value is given dominion over another. Imagine if one bicycle wheel spoke was longer or stronger than another. We would have a wobbly wheel. Yet our global system of value recognition and exchange is a one spoked wheel. The Synergistic Accounting tool, because it is designed using the 12 Degrees of Freedom, is visually and concretely represented by the vector equilibrium/jitterbug. It is a living, breathing system that enables participants to both bring their agency to community and live a whole life.
What does Leadership of a Syntropic Enterprise look like?
In Syntropic World the leader stewards the Source Idea towards the Evolutionary Purpose. The Steward Leader of the Source Idea that we are bringing to life lives in the membrane/architecture of the structure. In Syntropic World, we speak of the cell membrane as an analogy for enterprise architecture. Polarity is built in by design, for unless we have polarity, the membrane will either explode or collapse.
The Steward Leader, as an occupant of the membrane, rather than being in a position at the top of an ivory tower, holds the shape of the living, breathing architecture, adjusting elements depending on the context within the cell/enterprise and outside of the cell/enterprise.
Their role is to enable the Source Idea to be brought to life in its fullest possible expression through the collaborative, synergistic coordination of the people within the enterprise.
The Steward Leader holds the shape and integrity of the enterprise while intending the Evolutionary Purpose to be achieved through the manifestation of the Source Idea.
If you as a Steward Leader are interested in designing a Trust Manifesto for your enterprise with a small group of people over a three-week immersive experience, then consider the Trust Manifesto Creation Workshop.
If you would love to go deeper into all of the above material and create a Syntropic Enterprise, then sign up for the waitlist for the next Syntropic Masterclass — our foundation’s program or join the On-demand Syntropic Masterclass to start right away.
Syntropic Enterprise Masterclass ​https://syntropic.world/masterclass/​
If value, currency, equitable exchange, and intimately connected team dynamics are important, then register on the waitlist for the Synergistic Accounting Workshop.
Synergistic Accounting Workshop ​https://syntropic.world/synergistic-accounting-workshop/​
Trust Manifesto for Syntropic World https://syntropic.world/trustmanifesto
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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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