Synergy-second-order-Glossary | New School Futures

Second Order Synergy

The Oxford English Dictionary defines synergy as “the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.”
Yet even this use of the term seems absent or, at best, peripheral to the main foci of the curriculum.
Perhaps this blind spot derives from cognitive processes that evolved though certain lifestyle habits.

Homo sapiens has been digging up, shaping and discarding things for around 3 million years.
This created a summative mindset in which we see the world as a finite set of things that get scarcer over time.
One of Buckminster Fuller's solutions was to ephemeralize our technology to make it leaner.
Today's more popular vision is the so-called circular economy.
Ultimately, this would probably depend on more science when we design products (i.e. things) .
- (e.g. some experts are working with green chemistry to give products successive lives).

Instead of extracting more virgin materials we could learn to re-combine things we already have.
The art of combining or re-combining things in such a way that they work together to produce and outcome (e.g. a beneficial surplus or emergence) that might benefit a third party.
This derives from our research into metadesign that adopts a creative and active design approach.

We suspect that creating abundance through synergy offers more favourable opportunities.
However, reimagining the world in combinatorial terms is probably more radical & challenging.
It would mean thinking beyond existing lifestyles and assumptions to find new paradigms.
Peter Corning believes that synergy is an important evolutionary principle (Corning, .
If he is right, the universe is rewarding synergies for both animate and inanimate things.
If we fail to notice them, we will miss their potential for "doing more with less".

Bicycles are a clever combination of synergies.
For example, bicycle spokes use the extra 'tension-strength' of stainless steel, which is far stronger than its strength 'in compression'.
The combined synergies mean that bicycle wheels can carry up to 700 times their own weight.
Each synergy may have more than one property (most stainless steels last far longer than ordinary steels because they do not rust).

Some abundance is too complex for description.
Indeed, synergies are usually made from many things that may, in themselves, be synergistic.
This means that managing their complexity is a real challenge.
It probably means that the familiar language of description is not adequate for the task.
Creating synergies-of-synergies may, therefore require a process of 'creative re-languaging' (i.e. languaging).
Since a ‘net synergy of synergies cannot be achieved without understanding the vital importance of interpersonal synergies’, then metadesigning necessarily includes ‘cultivating and building reciprocal empathies’.
One reason for embracing Koestler’s approach is that there are always more relations than things.
As collaboration is useful, every relationship represents a potential synergy, in addition to those between the collaborators themselves.
This offers more opportunities than the winner-loser paradigm that is normalised in genres of choice or debate. It also offers a more convivial way to manage invention and innovation.
One reason is because the modern (Western) grammar tends to divide the world into separate nouns, rather than dynamic conjunctions.
Of course, it is easier to count on things, as they promise predictability.
It is unfortunate, therefore, that arithmetic was designed to deny the existence of synergy.
This is not the case in biology, where symbiotic and synergistic relations are understood.

Why do we fail to notice the abundance of synergy in the world?
Five thousand years ago we invented accountancy to help us manage large projects at a distance.
This made it seem normal to summarise, or to totalise everything.
Making everything add up probably made us more able to see similarities than differences.
- e.g. addition (e.g. 1+1=2) only makes sense if we can see each part as so similar they can be classed as a ‘1’.
This mindset became a fundamental principle behind the global economic system.

Compared with the directly outcome-focused agenda of design, it is hard to predict when a synergy-seeking approach will offer the outcomes we want.

Buckminster Fuller's definition of synergy reflects this:
"The behaviour of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviours of their parts taken separately" (Bucky Fuller).