What is a Syntropic Enterprise?

Christine McDougall
2 min readJun 24, 2019

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Language matters.

From Etymology a Social Enterprise is;

An undertaking devoted to or relating to home life, others, living together with others.

Is this the right name for enterprises committed to a world with a future?

I see many enterprises calling themselves social enterprises when really what they are doing is incremental or translational change.

You might have heard of the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, which is the gradual running down of the energy of Universe.

Entropic enterprise is business-as-usual. Extraction to extinction, exploitation, colonisation. Eventually the ouroboros eats its tail. No amount of money can buy life on a disintegrated planet. When Walmart doesn’t pay its workers enough money to buy its goods, then they have hit an end zone. When Jeff Bezos pays zero tax from $11Billion profit and his factory workers pay more tax in their monthly salary than the entire Amazon company pays, then we have entropy by business design.

What we need from enterprise is transformational change into something better than. And we need this as the complimentary pair to our current business-as-usual entropic model.

I propose instead to elevate a word that I first encountered via Buckminster Fuller.

Entropy has a complimentary phase, which Bucky designated as syntropy.

Syntropy means going to states of higher order.

Syntropic enterprise = an undertaking that enables a higher order. By nature it evokes gravity (attraction) and coherence towards an eternally regenerative Universe.

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Christine McDougall
Christine McDougall

Written by Christine McDougall

Committed to supporting those in business who strive to leave the world better. syntropic.world

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