What is a Syntropic Life?
Syntropic World aspires to leave everything better.
We are not seeking perfection, which would be almost impossible in today’s current world.
Avoiding the use of plastics, not buying products and services that travel halfway around the world and back before we use them, creating enterprises in countries where labour and commercial laws require a violation of Syntropic Enterprise design, and never travelling anywhere would be a very steep ask.
Yet we must hold the aspiration and purpose as our compass if we ever hope to arrive there.
We must ask better questions about how we can achieve increased well-being for Earth and all her creatures without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.
Syntropic World considers its approach integral. Our focus is tetrahedral — four-dimensional.
The Syntropic Enterprise Masterclass teaches the model I learned from Buckminster Fuller. The tetrahedron is the minimum system in Universe. Any system requires 4 elements and 6 relationships for existence.
What does this mean specifically?
Element #1. Our interiors
We must evolve — deliberately and actively — our interiors. We must grow up and become better people, able to respond to high orders of complexity. This includes cleaning up our past trauma, fractured relationships, and any violations of integrity, challenging our beliefs, surrounding ourselves with people who care enough to point out our limiting behaviour, and cultivating a developmental practice that becomes the stabiliser of our life.
As Steward Leaders, we must evolve our capacity to hold the space for synergy, work with the whole as a discipline, speak with authority when needed, and care more about the work and people than we care about what people think of us.
As a Syntropic Enterprise — to be our word and live our values, up, down and through. To be open to feedback, criticism from those we serve, and ideas from others. For people we serve to know who we are through how we do everything. Transparent. Integrous. Generous. Thinking for the long-term, for Earth and all her creatures. Respectful. Avoiding any form of exploitation and colonisation. Humble. Wholehearted. Embracing diversity and polarity.
To be in integrity we must have polarity. Holding space in diversity and conflict, in leadership and love.
Element #2 Our actions in the world
Make commitments you intend to keep.
I repeat.
Make commitments you intend to keep. And keep them in almost all cases, with rare exceptions.
Another way to say this is to be your word, written, spoken, sung, texted, or painted.
Take care of your environment, the garden of your life. Pick up, clean, be thoughtful of your being and having been, on others and those yet to arrive.
Take care of your physical being. Eat alive food, sourced locally if possible. Move. Move some more. Laugh. Play. Dance. Be with lovers — those who love life and show up with love for life. Learn new things. Challenge your mind, your body, your spirit. Get outdoors as often as you can. Experience other cultures.
As a Syntropic Enterprise, consider the life cycle of your products and services. The direct costs AND the all-in-costs include the cost of Mother Earth and her creatures to make the raw ingredients, the cost to use those raw ingredients, and the post-use cost of recycling and pollution.
Ideas, too, have a lineage and cost prior to their implementation. Honour lineage. Name it. Understand the precessional effects of your ideas. The consequences well past your life or the life of your idea.
Element #3 The Culture we create. The relationships we hold as sacred
Culture is an act of creation and emergence. A healthy culture relies on all of us. The relationships between us are the metaphysical gravity, the glue.
Those of us who care less about a vital, healthy culture, or place the quality of our relationships as secondary to our work, goals or desires, will be introduced to bone-deep loneliness. We will not know the feeling of belonging.
All of us are citizens of culture, the culture makers. Every act, every word, every unspoken word, is our opportunity to create culture.
A Syntropic Enterprise knows that a vibrant culture is a result of deliberate, thoughtful design. There are key elements that shape a culture of equality, dignity, choice, responsibility, love, care and respect. You can find some of these elements inSyntropic World Trust Manifesto.
The relational dynamic is critical. Do we give it attention or ignore it in our haste to build the thing, reach the goals, and make the money?
Element #4 The Operating Systems that underpin everything
This fourth element is the one almost every regenerative business, social enterprise and business-for-change movement neglects to attend to.
And I can clearly understand why.
First, our operating system is the water to the fish. Invisible to us. So thoroughly entrenched. We cannot see it until we do. And to see it, we have to be looking. Easier to focus on Elements #1, #2, and #3. They are workable and solvable.
Secondly, when we see the enormity of the task of changing the existing Operating System that plays in every dimension of our lives, like the background movement of air, it is overwhelming, crippling even, to consider where to start the change and how.
Element #4 is central to the work of Syntropic World. How to create new Operating Systems that make the current ones obsolete.
While we have many answers, we also have more questions on how to do this.
Yet we are unafraid to begin. If we do not transform our existing Operating Systems, then all of our work in the other four elements will probably only cause incremental change.
For this reason, we have tools such as the Trust Manifesto for Syntropic World, and the Synergistic Audit. Transformative tools, yet practical to the core.
It is also why we are building Syntropic World to endure for decades because the transformation and change we seek is a long game. It requires patience, endurance, commitment, thoughtfulness, comprehensive consideration, elegance, and a steady slow forward movement. In addition, we fly below the radar. Until we have established significant mass, including models that clearly demonstrate the new Operating System we are testing, we will keep a low profile.
So what is a Syntropic Life?
We act on all of the four elements.
We apply Nature’s Coordinate System to everything we do.
Applying Nature’s Laws and Nature’s coordinate system to everything we do
We respect Kairos time — the non-linear flow time of seasons local and Universal.
Kairos time — the clock of the heavens
We trust that the next step will be provisioned. Not the second or third step, because the second step will not be revealed until we have taken the next step. This is living and working with emergence.
Any enterprise, be that a family, business or community is a living system
We understand the Principle of Stewardship. An idea or business is not ours. We are its Stewards.
We aim to invite and do so in a dignified and respectful way. We avoid exploitation or colonisation that is harmful to another.
Integrity is the essence of everything we do.
Laughter, joy, love, care, play, respect, responsibility and creativity, are Syntropic. Once seeded, they are abundant.
We know the Principle of Synergy. When we create ecologies of Synergy we create the potential to unleash the greatest exponential technology of all. Humans working together synergistically.
A tool to create enterprises of Trust where synergy is normal
Relationship — between people — between people and Nature — between people and Earth — between people and Universe is metaphysical gravity. In the field of relationships are found our wealth and well-being.
Is a Syntropic Life Hard?
How do we define hard?
Is hard a commitment to our best self? Is it the quest to stand in our integrity? Is it to stand against all that is not love and integrity? Is it the deep inner work required to restore our wholeness? Is it to walk new terrains and create new Operating Systems without a map? To be the outlier and pioneer? Is it to be laughed at and ridiculed, even attacked, for being naive or visionary? Is it to be threatened by those most threatened by change?
What I know from living a Syntropic Life is that it is the greatest expression of life I could imagine. I, as life, as Syntropy, become integrity and love.
Even better, I get to spend my days with others who also choose a Syntropic Life.
We laugh, cry, hold each other up, and live all-of-it together as an expression of life emerging. Beautiful. Imperfect. Creative.
Do join us.
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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.
Find us here https://syntropic.world
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