Syntropic World Founder and Chief Steward
Christine McDougall
A Thirty + year applied student of
R.Buckminster Fuller
I was inadvertently introduced to Bucky in my mid-twenties, and spent seven days in the early ’90s studying his work intensely enough to recognise him as my main mentor ever since. For over thirty years I’ve applied his models to teams, human coordination, and enterprise design.
“You continue to astound me with your deep insights. You truly are one of Bucky’s most brilliant heirs. Your mind is amazing. Thank you so much for continuing to express yourself so clearly. You are a light in the dark that surrounds us in space and time. “
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Guiding Principles
Integrity
All of my work starts with integrity. Easy word to say, hard to live by – harder still to build a life and an enterprise with it as the foundation. Sleeping well each night means knowing you’ve lived the highest expression of your integrity that day. That’s the whole practice.
I build models and maps. I help others build them. Most of all, I like to co-build them – “Argue with the model,” Bucky used to say. I’m most passionate about building the models that make the old ones obsolete. Over thirty years that’s produced organisational designs where people co-create world-changing projects together without human upset, entirely self-managed. The Trust Manifesto of Syntropic Enterprises is one example. It works.
Book Christine to Speak
Dynamic and Provocative
Speaker
I am alive on stage teaching, speaking, challenging. I speak of all things Syntropic. Integrity. Steward Leadership. Synergy. Clean Communication. Evolutionary Purpose.
‘To hear Christine McDougall speak is to witness a unique mix of passion and integrity. Christine brings decades of life experience combined with an amazing skill set that has come from a beautifully diverse ecosystem of experiential and diverse study and interest. The work of Buckminster Fuller is the holding space for what has emerged through Christine in the form of Syntropic World. We are all indeed being called forth, in our own unique way, to midwife a world with a future into being. Christine helps to give you an architecture for that emergence’.
Nikki Thompson Soil2Soul.
The Conscious Company Article (Link no longer available)
“Perhaps instead of saying It’s time to burn it all down, but how do we do that, and how do we rebuild it, we should start asking how we can benefit the most people, value the most contributions, and work towards our 100-year goal of a truly Syntropic world? Yes, 100-year goal – not Q3 goal. Syntropic looks well into the future and thinks about the cost of everything (the cost to the earth, humans, government, and more).”
Christine speaks to the Cambridge Greens, UK
Limited Edition Podcast Series
Episode 01: Syntropic Voyage – Charting Course Towards Life And Hope
What if we held life as sacred in everything we build — work, play, enterprise? A conversation on reverence as a business practice, and the more beautiful world our hearts already know is possible.
Episode 02: Human Symphonies – Partnerships For A Syntropic Planet
Every life has value. No one wants to be exploited, extracted, or colonised. Sarah’s work reframes a Syntropic Enterprise as a living system — cells, membranes, a nervous system, its own consciousness — and what it actually takes to redesign in partnership with life.
Episode 03: Systems In Syntropy – A Global Ecology Of Integrity And Trust
A confronting look at what happens when we actually animate the elements of a Syntropic Enterprise — held against a Molochian world built for win-lose, accumulation, and extraction. Human history is bloody. So is the present. This episode asks what comes next.
Episode 04: The Future Is Syntropic – Success Is A Thriving Planet
A call to action: move from impossible to possible, one trim-tab change at a time — individual and enterprise. What it takes to build the scaffolding for a Syntropic life, in work and in technology.
Explore my daily blog: Beauty of Beginnings
Care of each other is on us
Care of each other is on us. Humanity is on us. Kindness is on us. So is paying tax. On us. I wonder, thinking about children born so innocent,
Dolly has left us
Dolly has left us. She was one of the few people who managed to be universally loved. I think about this. For some, to be universally loved is
From Leadership to Stewardship: Designing Enterprises That Are Harder to Corrupt
From Leadership to Stewardship: Designing Enterprises That Are Harder to Corrupt. They are design principles for enterprises that refuse to
Christine speaks about Syntropic World
Graduates from 33 Countries
We have to start with the whole
Why?
RE- Design Business + Remember Who We Are
In 2019, I was fed up. Fed up with morally bankrupt leaders and broken systems – so I started a movement that would leave everything it touched better. That idea, that intention, became Syntropic World.
It’s a completely new take on business. No more rearranging the deck chairs. I’m building a whole new boat – one designed for the success of 100% of humanity, Earth, and all her creatures, without ecological offence or disadvantage to anyone.
Syntropic World is business for a world with a future: where integrity, multiple domains of value, human connection, and well-being are honoured on the balance sheet, not just profit.
The greatest exponential technology available is the human mind working together synergistically. The question is how we build ecologies of synergy – where we’re genuinely better together – and how we make that normal operating practice instead of the exception.
That starts with reconnecting to our own Pattern Integrity: the unique thing that has to stay true about each of us, no matter what. When we bring that gorgeous uniqueness into deliberately designed ecologies for synergy, around a purpose we actually care about, we do impossible things regularly.
Zero exploitation. Zero extraction to extinction. Zero colonisation.
Towards a Syntropic World.
If you want a better story about the same broken system, I’m not who you’re looking for. If you’re ready to build the whole new boat, that’s the work I do.
My path to here
Under a Big Blue Sky
Buckminster Fuller has been my main mentor since my mid-twenties. As an ongoing student of his work, I speak systems, design, and the geometry of relationships and integrity with fluency.
I was one of the global founders of the coaching profession in the ’90s. I was the first non-USA board member of the Global Board of the International Coach Federation (ICF), holding that role for five years – the final year as Vice President. I was the founding President of the Australasian ICF, setting up the Chapter system in Australia and around the world.
I’ve worked in corporate, leadership, startup, and future-of-business spaces with 100% focus since 1998 – first as a coach, then evolving to create and lead businesses, partner with teams worldwide, and mentor leaders building a whole new kind of world.
In 2013, I pitched Sir Richard Branson an idea around his book, Screw Business as Usual. That pitch led to Big Blue Sky in 2015 and 2016 – a world-class event in my local city that convened multi-sectoral community members, plus a few provocateurs from around the world, to co-create solutions for the future of our city.
‘The greatest exponential technology is thoughtfully designed human relationships’ Christine McDougall
Books & Publications
Communications skills
Speak the Truth
The seven-step process I use to say the true thing instead of the easy one – without it costing the relationship.
Business design
How to Start a Syntropic Enterprise
The first moves: how to name your Evolutionary Purpose, find your Source Idea, and build the Pattern Integrity that has to stay true no matter what comes next.
Trust Manifesto for Syntropic Enterprises
Coordinating people around a purpose they care about is never easy. This is the agreement that lets diverse teams co-create with elegance instead of chaos – no matter your enterprise’s size, some form of it is critical if you want to be better together, not just louder together.
The Beauty of Beginnings
116 contemplations, written one sunrise at a time, to rouse your heart, fire up your mind, and change our world.
Photos from my life. My partner Tony. My daughter Natalie. Writing Beauty of Beginnings from the back of our van. Our dog Milly.
