Allenna Leonard

Allenna is an American/Canadian consultant in organizational cybernetics based in Toronto. Her academic background includes a BA from St. John’s College, a MA from George Washington University and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. She is a licensee of Team Syntegrity, a director of the Cwarel Isaf Institute and Chair of the Ecologos Environmental Institute. Beginning in the 1980’s and continuing until his death, she worked with Stafford Beer on a variety of consulting and educational projects in North America, South America and Europe, the most prominent being Projecto Urucib in Montevideo Uruguay for the UNDP. Her interests include improving accountability measures for soft information and applications of cybernetics to governance and ecology. She has taught university courses and published numerous papers and articles. Much of her work has been focused on the use of Beer’s Viable System Model and Team Syntegrity Process. She is a past president of the American Society for Cybernetics, and received its McCulloch Award and is also a past president of the International Society for Systems Science. She continues to support and extend Beer’s work in Conference presentations especially with with Metaphorum, the organization founded to continue his legacy.

Abstract: Cybernetic Roots and the Practice of the Team Syntegrity Process

The impetus for Stafford Beer’s development of the Team Syntegrity Process was his frustration with the limitations of hierarchy and the unfortunate trade-offs that seemed to accompany the emphasis between morale and efficiency. Conversations were needed that did not have some people on the inside and others on the periphery where they could discuss broader questions than those that came up in the course of ordinary business. The way forward was to design a system of conversations where each participant had a unique and equivalent series of roles in order that information in the group would be shared to the greatest extent possible with the fewest possible unintended consequences.

There were a number of cybernetic concepts that fed into its design. They included Ashby’ Law of Requisite Variety, homeostasis, synergy, channel capacity and feedback.

The emphasis on what is now referred to as 2nd order cybernetics put forward that each individual observer of a system brings a unique and particular perspective to any situation. That means that they select different aspects of it and assign different levels of saliency and priority from one another even if they have a lot in common culturally and professionally. Shared subjectivity has to be explored and developed to achieve common purpose in any complex set of circumstances.

The presentation will describe the background and the protocol of the Team Syntegrity Process and its most recent experiment of an on-line event.