In 1984, Ernst Götsch bought land on the edge of the Brazilian rainforest. It was barren—stripped of trees, depleted of life, written off as lost.
But Götsch had a different vision. Instead of treating nature as something to control, he chose to collaborate with it. He saw agriculture and forest management not as competing forces, but as partners in the same system. His method was simple but radical: regenerate soil, restore balance, and let nature do what it does best—create life. He chose Syntropy.
Over decades, Götsch transformed wasteland into a thriving rainforest. Today, that land not only sustains itself, but also feeds a large part of the surrounding community.
He called this principle syntropy—the opposite of entropy. Where entropy is decay and disorder, syntropy is regeneration, coherence, and growth. It is nature’s tendency toward order and vitality when given the right conditions.
Götsch’s story matters far beyond agriculture. It’s a blueprint for how we, too, can approach our work, our organizations, and our relationship with technology.
AI has promised efficiency, but it has also unleashed an avalanche of noise—more content, more dashboards, more decisions clouded by synthetic data. Left unchecked, this is entropy: clarity dissolving into confusion.
The challenge of our time is not to produce more. It is to create syntropy—to bring order out of chaos, coherence out of complexity, meaning out of noise.
That’s why I wrote Syntropy: How Humans Create Value in the Age of AI Entropy. Just as Götsch showed a new way to work with nature, we must learn to work with AI—not to outproduce it, but to guide it, curate it, and ensure that what remains is signal, not noise.
I invite you to watch the short film about Götsch’s work, Life in Syntropy. It’s a glimpse of what becomes possible when we align with the forces of regeneration.
And if the metaphor resonates, I hope you’ll explore my book. The future doesn’t need more volume. It needs clarity. It needs syntropy.
That idea is also at the heart of my new book, Syntropy. Just as Götsch applied syntropy to agriculture, we must now apply it to our work, our organizations, and our relationship with AI. In a world drowning in noise, our job is not to produce more—it’s to create clarity, coherence, and enduring value.