Finding the Solution

The most common moment when a gyrator group slips back into being an ordinary team is when it has to make a decision.

People gather, think, discuss. Someone throws out an idea. Someone else, a counter-idea. A third, a modification. They talk, find a compromise, decide, and go do the work.

It looks like a normal process. But look closely and it’s not a process at all. It’s a random sequence of reactions in which the one who speaks most convincingly wins, or the one who stayed silent the longest. The outcome depends on the order of people, on voice, on who has the patience to sit longer. Not on the structure of the challenge.

Malyuta would call this directly: unsystematic activity. Not as an insult but as a technical term — activity that doesn’t match the definition of a system. It can’t be predicted, it isn’t reproducible, it has no orthogonal components, no baseline, no condition of realizability. It produces a result, but it has no way of telling a good result from a lucky one.

Decisions are the most important repeated act of the group. If this act is unsystematic, all the rest of the systemness is worth nothing. This chapter is about how to make it a gyrator act.

Composing the baseline — every time

In chapter 8 I wrote about composing the baseline at the group’s start: bringing together people from different positions, letting each describe what they see from their own place, and from that assembling a multidimensional picture of the challenge.

This isn’t something you do once. It’s something you do before every non-trivial decision.

Why? Because the challenge evolves. What was clear at the start becomes murky two weeks later when new circumstances appear. The baseline you composed at the beginning has stopped matching reality. If you make a decision leaning on the old baseline, you’ll answer the wrong question very precisely.

In practice this isn’t long. Fifteen minutes before you move to options:

What has changed since the last decomposition? — New facts, new constraints, new opportunities.

What does the challenge look like now, from each position? — A quick round: the person who feels the pain daily; the person who sees the systemic cause; the person who controls resources; the person who understands the constraints.

What’s visible from one baseline that isn’t visible from others? — This is the most valuable part. If everyone sees the same thing, you haven’t composed a baseline — you’ve assembled a group of like-minded people. And you need to consciously look for someone with a different position.

Only after this do you move to discussing options. And then the options will respond to the real structure of the challenge, not someone’s idea of it.

Set yourself aside

Everything written above is a method. But the method won’t work if the people in the room are defending not the solution but their position in it.

This is the most delicate moment in the search. A person who comes to a discussion brings with them not only their baseline and their spectrum. They bring their fear of looking incompetent. Their wish that their idea wins. Their habit of holding on to what they said five minutes ago, even when they already see its weakness. These things are ordinary and human, but in a search for a solution they’re a direct obstacle.

Orthogonal interaction requires that each person, for the duration of the search, set themselves aside. Not give up their position — the position matters, we just composed it into the baseline. Set aside the intention that specifically your version of the solution be the one chosen. Trade “I’m right” for “we’re looking for what works.”

It sounds obvious. In practice it’s hard, daily internal work. Because every voice in the room naturally pulls the decision closer to its own position — even the voice of someone who sincerely wants to help. This isn’t ill intent, it’s a structural property of how human attention works.

The only thing you can do about it is name it directly and keep coming back to it. At the start of the meeting, remind each other: we’re not here to win, we’re here to find a solution. During the discussion, when you notice yourself pulling toward your side, it’s worth stopping and saying so out loud. Letting others name it in you without taking offense.

A gyrator isn’t possible while its elements defend themselves instead of circulating. In Malyuta’s theory this shows up in the formal decomposition of the interaction matrix: the symmetric (egoistic) component drives the system toward decay, the skew-symmetric (balanced, circulatory) component toward stability. Inside a group it’s simpler: are people willing, this time, to yield their version for the sake of something larger than any of them.

This is a necessary condition. Not desirable — necessary. Without it all the other methods in this chapter become theater.

Decision as orthogonal interaction

The usual process for finding a solution looks for a compromise. The middle between positions. “Some want A, others want B, let’s do something in between.” Everyone is a little unhappy, but at least we’re moving.

This is a systemically weak decision. A compromise is a vector that isn’t perpendicular to any baseline. It’s tilted toward each, but orthogonal to none. Consequence: no side sees their position fully represented in the decision, and over time everyone starts pulling the decision their way.

In Malyuta’s theory, the optimal interaction is orthogonal. Not an interaction that’s “in the middle” between elements, but one that transmits maximum with minimum loss. In the context of a decision this means: look not for a middle between positions, but for a solution that is perpendicular to all baselines at once. One that’s equally honest to each, pulls toward none, and each position sees itself represented fully in it.

This sounds abstract. In practice it’s a question the group asks above its options:

“If we implemented this option — does the fullness of each baseline we composed still hold? Is some position being ignored here and only acknowledged for form’s sake?”

If some position is being ignored — this isn’t an orthogonal decision. It’s a compromise in disguise. You can still go with it if there’s nothing better, but you need to know what exactly you chose and what its consequences are.

An orthogonal decision often doesn’t look like the most obvious one. It requires more thought before committing, but less repair afterward. Because there’s no unhappy side silently sabotaging.

Plurality of realizations

Sometimes the group can’t reduce the options to one. All of them are good, all make sense, but they pull in different directions. The traditional reaction is to force a choice. “We need a decision, not a conversation. Let’s vote.”

Malyuta described a separate mechanism for this — zone D, the zone of pluralistic development. Its essence: under certain conditions, several options can exist in parallel without conflicting. The condition is simple — all options have the same sign of the derivative, meaning they move the system in the same general direction, even if by different paths.

In practice: if two options lead in the same direction, and the resource allows — run them in parallel. Don’t force a choice where choice isn’t necessary. The crisis comes not from having several options, but from demanding that the group reduce them to one prematurely.

This isn’t always possible, of course. Resources are limited, attention is limited, sometimes options are mutually exclusive. But the key question to ask before voting: are the options really incompatible, or are we just not used to holding two?

Condition of realizability

Before committing to a decision — one last check, the one most often skipped.

In “The System of Activity” Malyuta formulates the condition of realizability: the systemic assessment of the product of activity cannot exceed the level of organization of the system that creates it. In plain language: if the decision is more complex than the group that produces it — it won’t be realized. No matter how much time you spend, how much effort you pour in.

This isn’t an idea exclusive to Malyuta. In 1956 the British cybernetician W. Ross Ashby formulated the law of requisite variety: a controlling system must have at least as much variety of states as the system it controls. If a process has a hundred possible paths of development and the controller can only distinguish ten of them — the controller isn’t controlling the process, it’s only creating the illusion of control. Malyuta generalized this from the informational level to any systemic activity. A group that makes a decision is, in Ashby’s terms, the “controller” of the problem it’s solving. If the group’s variety (spectrum, baselines, interactions) is smaller than the variety of the problem, the decision will be an illusion.

Signs that a decision exceeds the group’s level:

Realization requires qualities that aren’t in the group’s spectrum. — And you can’t bring them in quickly. That means the decision is right for a different group, not yours.

The number of interactions required to realize it exceeds what the group can hold at once. — Small groups can’t carry decisions that require coordinating twenty dependencies. You need to either simplify the decision or escalate it to a level with more throughput.

The decision requires trust or authority the group doesn’t have. — And can’t get within the needed timeframe. This is a structural block, not an operational one.

In all three cases the answer is the same: either reduce the scope of the decision to what the group can actually do, or escalate the challenge upward — to where there’s the resource, spectrum, and authority the decision needs.

Heroism doesn’t save you. A group that takes on a decision above its level fails it — and along with it often fails what was within its level.

Not procedure, but sight

This is not a decision-making framework in the sense of RACI or RAPID. There’s no distribution of authority here, no “who approves, who consults.” Those tools have their use, but they solve a different problem — they formalize accountability.

What this chapter is about is how the group collectively sees the challenge before it starts solving it. Without that sight, any distribution of authority acts in a vacuum: someone formally approves a decision made on an incomplete baseline and a compromise that ignores half the positions.

The goal is to make the decision a consequence of shared work on the challenge, not of the voice of whoever stayed silent the longest.