Yesterday the team behind making the Synergistic Accounting tool into an app submitted their first venture proposal.
It was a great experience as it forced us to think about our actions, what we are doing, and how to explain them succinctly.
The greatest rewards come from working on something that nobody has a name for. If you possibly can, work where there are no words for what you do. Kevin Kelly
The one-sentence statement describing what we are doing is as follows.
A platform that evolves our human experience by honouring value in all domains, restoring our relationship to what matters most.
The vision we hold is as follows:
Imagine a world where love, joy, care, generosity, and kindness are recorded and respected as currencies valued in the same realm as money. In this world, we would never again be limited to a singular economic currency and its inherent rules in a way that dominates and augments how we live, prosper, and care for ourselves and our planet.
In this system, we’d measure, honour, and reward value at a human level, overcome traditional monetary limitations, work to eliminate exploitation, colonisation, extraction, and corruption, and divine a more universally acceptable system where all can participate, contribute, and receive the benefits of the greater whole.
The Synergistic Accounting Platform combines Nature’s inherent sense of reciprocity, generosity, and exchange with a clear-minded approach to our current systems of value and is designed to evolve how we live, work, and think about what’s important to us as we operate together on this planet.
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I found some of the questions in the application process incredibly limiting and very traditional – not Syntropic.
For example, we had to name the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (UNSDG)our project sought to work on. There was no option but to do this, which meant I was forced to lie.
Syntropic World is dedicated to a whole systems approach. Our vision is to build new models that make the existing ones – that have created side effects like poverty – obsolete. While we need responses right now to those who hunger and those who are affected by war and famine, we also need, urgently, a whole system long-term focus on new models that make all of the UNSDG’s problems from our past.
Our work at Syntropic World is at the meta-systems level, not the parts level.
The Principle of Principles we teach in the Syntropic Masterclass is the Principle of Synergy, mentioned in last week’s edition of ​Sunday Syntropy.​
Synergy: The behaviour of the whole cannot be determined by examining the parts separately.
Our education and cultural systems have us focus on parts, parts, parts, like 17 UNSDGs. Yet we have these problems outlined in the 17 UNSDGs because of our complete failure to address the whole – the meta systems behind poverty, hunger, climate, and migration.
Buckminster Fuller said we have to start with Universe first.
We were also asked to comment on how many full-time employees we have and list a number. When I first read this, I stopped in my tracks, contemplating this question.
What is a full-time employee? What is full-time? What is an employee?
Do enterprises of the future have employees? Do these people need to work full-time? Every day, five days a week, repeated. Let’s consider the four-day workweek, and if we do, do we categorise this as full-time? Even better, when we use the Synergistic Accounting tool and the​ Trust Manifesto​ together, the idea of full-time on anything for a long time becomes an archaic expression.
In Syntropic World, we do not have full-time employees. We have people who have nominated what they have the capacity, willingness and desire to bring, and in naming, take responsibility for their promises and commitment. Times and contributions can move daily, weekly and year to year. A Syntropic Enterprise is a living system modelling Nature’s Coordinate system. We are committed to the enterprise being isomorphic with Nature.
As to employees, I prefer partners or contributors or even a title we have yet to devise. A position that honours people’s contribution and input in multiple domains, giving them access and rights to decision-making based on their Synergistic Audit and within an ecology of trust.
I want people to bring their wholehearted selves to the work they have agreed to, take responsibility for what they have committed to, and have a life. The Synergistic Audit allows this to happen.
Want to work a four-day week? Or a two-day week? Or have three months of travel a year? All-in? Part-in? All-in some months and not others? The Synergistic Accounting tool plus the ​Trust Manifesto​ allows for that to happen.
Another question that bothered me deeply was we were asked when we incorporated.
I hope more and more people consider our legal codes with greater thoughtfulness going forward. Reaching for the standard legal codes to wrap around (smother) our business is primarily an unquestioned habit. I certainly did not question this in my earlier life.
My discipline as a Bucky Fuller student has to be to go back to Source. What is the Source of a Limited Liability Corporation? Why was it created? When was it created? What is its Purpose?
The answer lies in the words. To limit liability. Created by Queen Elizabeth I at the beginning of the East India Company’s extractive forays to India. Designed to ensure the shareholders cannot be held to account if the ships were lost at sea—to shareholders, not employees, contributors, or workers. Workers end up paying for the shareholders to get away with whatever they like. This meant the families of the lost sailors could not hold the shareholders to account and seek compensation.
Imagine what kind of world would we live in without limited liability? If we had to take responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. Every time?
Might we think a little more about our choices? Might we factor in the externalities up front? Might we stop suing people – the taste of money for lack of responsibility a seemingly easy take?
As Katharina Pistor writes in ​The Code of Capital​, our legal codes enable terrible things to happen to people, communities, nations, and the environment – with no accountability.
A Bcorp is an advance on this but is still an in-between model, a better favour of limited liability where the Purpose of the business is core. However, Bcorps can claim their B status while they extract to extinction, exploit and ignore externalities. For some companies, the BCorp designation is a form of legal code greenwashing.
We need new legal codes.
Ones like ​Purpose-Economy​ in Germany have been working on. Steward Ownership models, where the voting rights and dividend rights are separate. Where we consider capped returns so that greed is shut off from the beginning. Where we incentivise for the Purpose rather than for the cash. Where we create a Golden Share that ensures the Purpose of the business can never be violated. Where those who contribute the most – considered in 6 domains – have the opportunity to get a return on their contribution.
The conversation around legal codes and how to create Integrity Councils, and the steps to prevent corruption of an enterprise’s Pattern Integrity is critical. One that is ideally had early in the business’s life. It is the core reason templates like the ​Trust Manifesto​ are so important.
Syntropic World is not incorporated. We never will be.
In a world focused on diversity and inclusion, something I love, there is almost no diversity of thinking about the underpinning structures of how we create business.
We are not questioning employment, limited liability, legal codes, or our problem-solving approach. We march behind the Pied Piper, oblivious of the impending cliff.
We want to build better businesses, to do good things, but not be too disruptive, to rock the boat. To challenge the status quo.
Yet the status quo must be challenged. We are not bright-eyed teenagers rushing onto the African continent, intent to save the people: good intentions and seriously flawed actions. It is not the people who need saving.
It is time we examined our operating system. The systems and structures that have poverty, inequality, hunger, climate catastrophe, and AI decimation built in by design.
It is time we awaken to the meta structures of power, incentive, and win-lose. We cannot behave as children, hiding behind “I didn’t know.” “It can’t be true.”
Get educated. Go to the Source. Invite diversity of thinking about the meta-systems like money, currency, and legal codes.
It is time we become omni-considerate of everything before we do anything to fix something for the long term.
Waking up to the recognition that what we have not questioned till now is contributing to destroying our beautiful home planet and all her creatures is hard and dark work. We must confront it first. Only then can we start taking action for transformative change.
I know this journey well. I spent most of my life not questioning anything about our meta systems. I wholeheartedly spent my days polishing the guard rails on the Titanic, believing I was doing great work.
Understanding and responsibility are a heavy load. Once seen, we cannot unsee.
And then we get to do the real work.
Beautiful. Bold. Making the existing obsolete. Together, because the only workable maps we have are the ones that have always been there. Mother Nature’s maps and designs. We must re-learn how to use these time-tested maps and tools in everything we do.
If we want a world with a future.
