The Gyrator

In 1948, a Dutch engineer named Bernard Tellegen proposed a new circuit element: the gyrator. Unlike a transformer — which converts voltage to voltage — a gyrator converts voltage to current, and current to voltage. It transforms one kind of energy into another through its internal structure.

Forty years later, in 1989, a Ukrainian radio physicist named Oleksandr Malyuta published a monograph in Lviv called Hypercomplex Dynamic Systems. He used the gyrator concept from electronics and brought it into a universal systems theory. His insight: any stable, real-world system — whether it’s an atom, an organism, a team, or a company — survives because at its core, there’s a gyrator. A structure where the interactions between elements are balanced, cyclic, self-compensating.

He called it the hypercomplex gyrator. And he formulated the main law of his theory around it: every system strives to realize the function of an ideal gyrator.

This is an abstract statement. Let me make it concrete.

What a gyrator looks like in a team

Think about the best team you’ve ever worked in. Not the most productive one — the most alive one. The one where ideas moved freely, where problems got solved before they became crises, where people naturally compensated for each other’s weaknesses.

In that team, something specific was happening. Each person was both giving and receiving. A member who brought technical depth received clarity on user needs from someone else. The person who kept the team focused on deadlines got creative input that improved their planning. The communicator who bridged the technical team and stakeholders received the technical expertise that made their arguments credible.

Every element gives. Every element receives. The inflow and outflow for each member are balanced — not perfectly, not at every moment, but over time. This is the gyrator pattern: cyclic, self-compensating interaction. It’s what makes a team stable across time without burning out.

Malyuta proved something remarkable about this pattern: in any system, the gyrator component has zero probability of self-destruction. The balanced interactions mean no element is being depleted. The system can sustain itself indefinitely — as long as the structure holds.

Compare this to a team where interactions are one-directional. One person does all the heavy lifting. Two people consume the team’s energy without contributing back. Someone gives and gives until they burn out, while others coast. The unbalanced parts of the system will eventually collapse, taking the team with them.

The practical question becomes: how much of your team is gyrator, and how much isn’t?

The transformation reactor

Here’s where Malyuta’s theory connects to the problem I described in the first chapters.

A team doesn’t exist in isolation. It sits inside a company. It consumes company resources — people’s time, budget, attention, energy. And it produces value — delivered product, solved problems, enabled processes.

The gyrator structure is what makes this transformation efficient. A strong internal core — balanced, cyclic, self-compensating — means the team wastes less energy on internal friction and turns more of what it receives into output. The stronger the gyrator, the more value a team produces from the same resources.

This is what I mean when I say a team is a transformation reactor. The reactor’s power comes from its internal structure. Not from the number of people. Not from the tools. Not from the process. From the structure of interactions between people who bring different, complementary qualities.

An ideal gyrator — a perfect reactor — would transform every unit of resource into a unit of value. No waste. No friction. Like turning metal into gold. This is a theoretical limit, of course. Real teams have friction, imbalances, misalignments. But the closer you get to the gyrator pattern, the closer the team gets to turning everything it receives into value.

Why this isn’t just a metaphor

Malyuta didn’t offer a metaphor. He offered a formalism. The gyrator structure can be described mathematically through what he called the hypercomplex matrix — a formal representation of all elements, their qualities, and their interactions within a system. The matrix can be decomposed into two components: a symmetric part (where interactions are unbalanced and tend toward decay) and a skew-symmetric part (the gyrator — where interactions are balanced and self-sustaining).

In this publication we won’t dive into the deep theoretical foundations of the theory, but the key insight doesn’t require formulas: you can analyze any team by determining how much of its interaction structure is gyrator (balanced, self-sustaining) and how much isn’t. The ratio tells you how stable the team is and how efficiently it turns resources into value.