Origins of the Synthesis Institute

For those of you who are interested in how the Synthesis Institute came to be founded (originally back in 1992, though it didn't receive 501(c)(3) status until 1993), I thought a relatively brief history was in order. I'll fill in more detail in later postings - promise!

The true origins of the Synthesis Institute were in the late '70s, when I ran across a small mention in a book, Managing for Responsive Research and Development (Stewart P. Blake), about an informal role at SRI International called a "bridge". Effectively, this role applied to a person who, on a multi-disciplinary project, tended to cross disciplinary boundaries (i.e., from the person's own discipline) and ask questions of others on the project who belong to other disciplines assigned to the project. Blake's description of the personal characteristics of a "bridge" were a close fit to my own self-assessment, which I found intruiging.

After contacting Blake, he referred me to the expert on this topic still at SRI, a PhD industrial engineer named Joseph MacPherson. Upon meeting Joe, he described the origins of this "bridge" concept to me. In (very) short, upon his looking into success factors on multi-disciplinary projects (then a mainstay of SRI's business), he discovered that success for a project was closely tied to existence of a person on the project who - against management and peer pressure in many cases - would unilaterally decide that other specialties' work on the project was more interesting than his or her own assigned work and would ask the other project members often-basic questions about what they were doing and how their field of expertise worked. In short, if such a person (now called a "bridge" at SRI) was on a project, the project invariably or almost invariably succeeded; if now, the project usually failed.

MacPherson's analysis of what was happening in these projects was a blurring of disciplinary boundaries by action of the "bridge"; another word he and Blake's book used for this process (which was apparently completely inadvertent on the part of both the "bridge" and the person answering his or her questions) was "coupling".

After several discussions with Joe MacPherson, I came to the conclusion that there must be a career path, however tenuous, for someone with the personality profile of a "bridge" (i.e., me), and made it a high off-hours priority to see if I could help myself and others of like personality find a way to do this type of work for fun and profit.

In future postings, I'll list Blake's "bridge" personality characteristics; perhaps the reader will recognize himself or herself in this list.

Welcome to Synthesis Institute!

Let me introduce myself first of all. My name is Bruce L. Tow, and I'm president and CEO of the Synthesis Institute, a California 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation originally founded in 1993. (Please note that the web-site http://www.synthesisinstitute.org/ belongs to another Synthesis Institute, which focuses its attention on the synthesis of chemicals, not ideas. We're working on a web-site for our Synthesis Institute; when it's available I'll post how to find it!)

Synthesis Institute's mission is to promote the art and science of multi-disciplinary problem-solving, which I and others believe is a growing need in today's increasingly complex and increasingly specialized world.

In future posts, I'll be describing the history and philosophical background of Synthesis Institute and its founders and supporters.

For now, membership in the Synthesis Institute is free; you can become a member simply by sending contact information and e-mail address to btow@synovationsolutions.com.

Thank for for your attention, and I look forward to future comments, feedback and the free exchange of ideas on techniques for solving multi-disciplinary challenges.