The Synergysophy

[Tom Merilahti]

THE SYNERGYSOPHY

Where chaos begins, classical science stops. There has always been ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the turbulent sea, in the fluctuations of wildlife populations, the oscillations of the heart and brain......

Classical (western) science is the science of logic, of linearity, of definitions... We believe that where 'classical science stops', the real fun begins. We want to explore the chaos of ideas that try to depict this adventurous century and form the roots of the century ahead. Because we believe that within the chaos patterns can be found. And these patterns will enable the formation of strategic thinking.

Names and boxes

The classical method for the investigation of systems and processes is a flow chart - a network of discrete ' boxes ', each named, and connected together, in a hierarchy of ' decision '. Useful though this method may be, boxes often exclude the very information that might be needed. And in a world where barriers are falling, frontiers collapsing, disciplines intermixing and culture going into the melting pot, these precise delineated boxes no longer reveal truths, they conceal them.

We prefer to think of a name, or a box, as a stone dropped into a lake of ideas. Each 'stone' produces concentric ripples which spread out and intersect with other ripples, creating complex patterns of interference - which might be called chaos.

It is the the resonation of ideas with each other that interests us most of all. It is in the spaces between the boxes that excitement lies!

One basic law of organic evolution is 'increasing complexity'. Things never get easier. On the other hand, the simple smoothness of a pebble on the beach is the result of millions of frictional contacts with other pebbles in the surge and ebb of the tides. Ideas become beautiful in the same way. Our ideas may one day be beautiful - but for the moment we are interested in the waves, not the beach. Not in the concrete, but in the ephemeral motion which is the result of conflicting energies.

SICU as a Operational Research Group

Operational Research (OR) was a system devised during WW2 to solve unique problems of technology, logistics and strategy. Radar was one of the hundreds of answers to vaguely positioned but urgent problems that OR produced.

The principle of OR was that new circumstances required innovative methodologies. An OR group was always a mixture of different professional disciplines. A botanist, a mathematician, a chemist, a psychologist, an astronomer - each OR member brought to the group a discrete worldview or logical system, and also detailed knowledge and understanding of the structure of that system. But none of them could solve the problem alone. ONLY THE INTERSECTION of these systems produced innovative thinking.

The clash of these systems, the impossibility of mapping one system onto another, is what often sparked the INSIGHT - the FLASH OF INSPIRATION that firstly defined the gestalt of the problem, and eventually led to it's solution.

We believe that the principles of OR can usefully be applied both within and outside commercial and institutional organisations which seek fresh input into their systems of management, operation and, especially, communication.

Success for the whole symphony orchestra

Traditional notes can be described as a linear process chart, where the notes are “fixed” on a stave. The score of contemporary music is a time-dependent graphic representation. It is a composition played with several instruments, but there is not necessarily even one traditional note or a stave. It can for instance be a circle filled with indigenous symbols, which represents a totally unidentified chaos for most people, but in the eyes of the composer a well ordered goal which generates success for whole of the orchestra.

SICU (Synergy Integrated - Connects the Unconnected)

SICU is founded in that spirit of exploration - to bring together different creative disciplines and to discover the resonances and dissonances between them. SICU represents many things: ombudsgroup, think-tank, concept exploration, simulation, OR, an open, and a multifunctional marketing agency, and a multidimesional virtual organization. It will remain many-faceted because the very nature of the chaos facing us is that the old boxes and linear flowcharts cannot serve us any longer.