“Synergy means behavior of integral, aggregate, whole systems unpredicted by behaviors of any of their components or subassemblies of their components taken separately from the whole.”

—  Buckminster Fuller

102.00 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p0100.html
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

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American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inv… 1895–1983

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Buckminster Fuller photo

“Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Context: Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts. There is nothing in the chemistry of a toenail that predicts the existence of a human being.

Buckminster Fuller photo

“There are progressive degrees of synergy, called synergy-of-synergies, which are complexes of behavior aggregates holistically unpredicted by the separate behaviors of any of their subcomplex components. Any subcomplex aggregate is only a component aggregation of an even greater event aggregation whose comprehensive behaviors are never predicted by the component aggregates alone. There is a synergetic progression in Universe—a hierarchy of total complex behaviors entirely unpredicted by their successive subcomplexes' behaviors. It is manifest that Universe is the maximum synergy-of-synergies, being utterly unpredicted by any of its parts.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

150.01 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p5000.html
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Ervin László photo

“A system in one perspective is a subsystem in another. But the systems view always treats systems as integrated wholes of their subsidiary components and never as the mechanistic aggregate of parts in isolable causal relations.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 14.

Buckminster Fuller photo

“I find all of our world society is operating exclusively in parts. We know this because the word synergy is unknown popularly and it is the only word that means “behavior of wholes unpredicted by behavior of their parts.””

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

This proves that society does not even think that it has a need for such a word. This discloses that society does not think that there are behaviors of wholes unpredicted by the parts. It thinks statistics and probability are all that we need but if “probability” and “statistics” were of any power at all we could not have a stock market or gambling for we would know exactly how things are coming out and no one would bet against the probability.
1960s, Presentation to U.S. Congressional Sub-Committee on World Game (1969)

Buckminster Fuller photo

“The words synergy (syn-ergy) and energy (en-ergy) are companions. Energy studies are familiar. Energy relates to differentiating out subfunctions of nature, studying objects isolated out of the whole complex of Universe—for instance, studying soil minerals without consideration of hydraulics or of plant genetics. But synergy represents the integrated behaviors instead of all the differentiated behaviors of nature's galaxy systems and galaxy of galaxies.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

105.00 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p0100.html
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

“The behavior of the economy as a whole, at the aggregate, macro-level, is built up from the individual equations at the micro-level.”

Paul Ormerod book The Death of Economics

Part I, Chapter 4, Professional Reservations, p. 79
The Death of Economics (1994)

“Formulating a model of a system should start from the question “Where is the boundary, that encompasses the smallest number of components, within which the dynamic behavior under study is generated?””

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Principles of Systems (1968), p. 4-2; as cited in Richardson (2011)

“Systems theory, in its concern for the whole and its emergent properties, ignores the components.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Society: A Complex Adaptive System--Essays in Social Theory, (1998), p. 183 as cited in: Kenneth D. Bailey (2006).

Geoffrey West photo

“You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

2010s
Source: Ben Lillie. " The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations: Q&A with Geoffrey West http://blog.ted.com/qa-with-geoffrey-west/." at blog.ted.com. July 26, 2011.

Russell L. Ackoff photo

“When a mess, which is a system of problems, is taken apart, it loses its essential properties and so does each of its parts. The behavior of a mess depends more on how the treatment of its parts interact than how they act independently of each other. A partial solution to a whole system of problems is better than whole solutions of each of its parts taken separately.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Cited in: Can Alpaslan, Ian Mitroff (2011) Swans, Swine, and Swindlers: Coping with the Growing Threat of Mega-Crises and Mega-Messes. p. 16.
1970s, The future of operational research is past, 1979

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