This is the seventh on my series of articles which draw upon the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. You can read my previous articles about Habit 1, Habit 2, Habit 3, Habit 4 and Habit 5.
Buzzword
According to Business New Daily, Synergy is one of the 10 Overused Corporate Buzzwords to avoid. Up there with “the new normal” and “low hanging fruit”.
Growing up in the 90’s, my first exposure to Synergy was on the Simpsons. I had no idea what it was, but I knew it was corny business talk. The type of thing that peddled by drink-the-cool-aid consultant types.
Its fair to say that I approached the chapter on Habit 6: Synergy with a decent degree of cynicism. What the hell is synergy anyway?
Teamwork Makes the Dreams Work
Author Stephen Covey does not take pains to define synergy. But from my reading, it seems to be best described as Collaborative Creativity.
As it is a collaborative habit, it builds heavily upon the earlier two habits. Synergy relies on a) understanding your own needs and the needs of the other(s), and b) committing oneself to a win/win outcome. The result of confluence of these habits is Synergy, and to Covey, it’s almost magical.
Covey breathlessly relates his synergistic successes stories. The time his class wrote a book together. The time he saved a bank and a land developer who were heading for a mutually destructive legal battle. It’s clear that Covey is a team-worker par excellence.
Is synergy achievable for us mere mortals?
Gestalt Gets Results
About 100 years ago, a group of German speaking visual perception researchers claimed that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. This school of psychology was called the Gestalt group, and they changed the way we think about the relationship between the individual and the group.
1 + 1 = 2
Nothing could be more evident than the statement above. But for Stephen Covey, Synergy disrupts this equation by detonating collaborative energies.
1 + 1 could = 5, or 500.
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
In his uber-best-seller book, Sapiens, Yuval Harari notes that humans dominance is founded on collaboration at a titanic scale. Humans are the only mammal to organise in groups greater in size that a few 100’s. These mass collaborations result in monumental advances in science, wealth and power.
In principle, this collaborative power could be harnessed by everyone.
Worshiping Individual Success: A Stairway to Hell
Hell is other people – Jean-Paul Satre from the play No Exit
Society and culture have become increasingly individualistic. This was true 30+ years ago when Covey wrote 7-Habits, and it’s even truer now. Our culture teaches us success is the individual genius or entrepreneur, breaking out from the herd with a singular vision.
When we judge our success by how much we stand out against those standing near us, we become competitive and suspicious. We hold are cards close to our chest – we make sure our motives can’t be easily understood. We think win/lose – try to cut the tall poppy and avoid being the poppy getting cut.
Synergy, on the other hand, means finding success with other people, via other people.
Our culture teaches us that our own individual efforts, achievements, outcomes are what really counts, not the achievements of our group. A lesson that, I must be honest, I bought hook, line and sinker most of my life.
I’ve been cynical about synergy as a word. But even before I knew what it was, I was cynical about cooperation and collaboration as concepts. I’d drunk too much of the individualist cool-aid.
Hell is not other people, unless we make it so. For Covey, other people are a stairway to a worldly heaven, through the highest of the habits: Synergy.