Synergy


Synergy is the concept that a combined effect of two or more entities is greater than the sum of their individual effects. The term synergy comes from the Attic Greek word συνεργία synergia from synergos, wikt:συνεργός, meaning "working together". Synergy is similar in concept to emergence.
In essence, synergy describes a situation where the whole is greater than the simple sum of its parts. It is a fundamental principle observed in various fields, including physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. A common example is water, a compound whose properties are distinct and more complex than those of its constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen.
The concept has a long history, with its roots in physiology and theology before being applied to social psychology and organizational behavior. In Christian theology, for instance, synergism is the idea that salvation involves cooperation between divine grace and human freedom.
In the biological sciences, synergy is seen as a key driver of evolution. The Synergism Hypothesis, proposed by Peter Corning, suggests that the cooperative relationships at all levels of living systems, from genes to social groups, are favored by natural selection because they provide functional advantages for survival and reproduction. This principle also applies to toxicology and pharmacology, where the combined effect of multiple substances, such as drugs or toxins, can be significantly greater than their individual effects, a phenomenon known as drug synergy. This can be both beneficial, as in combination drug therapies, or harmful, as in the case of combined exposure to toxic chemicals.
In a business context, synergy suggests that a team can produce a superior result compared to what its members could achieve individually. This is often a goal in corporate mergers and acquisitions, where the combined entity is expected to be more valuable than the two separate companies. However, potential negative effects such as groupthink can arise in highly cohesive groups, leading to flawed decision-making. Furthermore, in the context of business, the word has been increasingly getting a pejorative connotation due to being used as corporate buzzword and the association with "management-speak".

History

The words synergy and synergetic have been used in the field of physiology since at least the middle of the 19th century:

SYN'ERGY, Synergi'a, Synenergi'a, Synergie; from συν, 'with', and εργον, 'work'. A correlation or concourse of action between different organs in health; and, according to some, in disease.

In 1896, Henri Mazel applied the term "synergy" to social psychology by writing La synergie sociale, in which he argued that Darwinian theory failed to account of "social synergy" or "social love", a collective evolutionary drive. The highest civilizations were the work not only of the elite but of the masses too; those masses must be led, however, because the crowd, a feminine and unconscious force, cannot distinguish between good and evil.
In 1909, Lester Frank Ward defined synergy as the universal constructive principle of nature:

I have characterized the social struggle as centrifugal and social solidarity as centripetal. Either alone is productive of evil consequences. Struggle is essentially destructive of the social order, while communism removes individual initiative. The one leads to disorder, the other to degeneracy. What is not seen—the truth that has no expounders—is that the wholesome, constructive movement consists in the properly ordered combination and interaction of both these principles. This is social synergy, which is a form of cosmic synergy, the universal constructive principle of nature.

In Christian theology, synergism is the idea that salvation involves some form of cooperation between divine grace and human freedom.
A modern view of synergy in natural sciences derives from the relationship between energy and information. Synergy is manifested when the system makes the transition between the different information embedded in both systems.
Abraham Maslow and John Honigmann drew attention to an important development in the cultural anthropology field which arose in lectures by Ruth Benedict from 1941, for which the original manuscripts have been lost but the ideas preserved in "Synergy: Some Notes of Ruth Benedict".

Descriptions and usages

In the natural world, synergistic phenomena are ubiquitous, ranging from physics to chemistry, to the cooperative interactions among the genes in genomes, the division of labor in bacterial colonies, the synergies of scale in multicellular organisms, as well as the many different kinds of synergies produced by socially-organized groups, from honeybee colonies to wolf packs and human societies: compare stigmergy, a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents or actions that results in the self-assembly of complex systems. Even the tools and technologies that are widespread in the natural world represent important sources of synergistic effects. The tools that enabled early hominins to become systematic big-game hunters is a primordial human example.
In the context of organizational behavior, following the view that a cohesive group is more than the sum of its parts, synergy is the ability of a group to outperform even its best individual member. These conclusions are derived from the studies conducted by Jay Hall on a number of laboratory-based group ranking and prediction tasks. He found that effective groups actively looked for the points in which they disagreed and in consequence encouraged conflicts amongst the participants in the early stages of the discussion. In contrast, the ineffective groups felt a need to establish a common view quickly, used simple decision making methods such as averaging, and focused on completing the task rather than on finding solutions they could agree on.
In a technical context, its meaning is a construct or collection of different elements working together to produce results not obtainable by any of the elements alone. The elements, or parts, can include people, hardware, software, facilities, policies, documents: all things required to produce system-level results. The value added by the system as a whole, beyond that contributed independently by the parts, is created primarily by the relationship among the parts, that is, how they are interconnected. In essence, a system constitutes a set of interrelated components working together with a common objective: fulfilling some designated need.
If used in a business application, synergy means that teamwork will produce an overall better result than if each person within the group were working toward the same goal individually. However, the concept of group cohesion needs to be considered. Group cohesion is that property that is inferred from the number and strength of mutual positive attitudes among members of the group. As the group becomes more cohesive, its functioning is affected in a number of ways. First, the interactions and communication between members increase. Common goals, interests and small size all contribute to this. In addition, group member satisfaction increases as the group provides friendship and support against outside threats.
There are negative aspects of group cohesion that have an effect on group decision-making and hence on group effectiveness. There are two issues arising. The risky shift phenomenon is the tendency of a group to make decisions that are riskier than those that the group would have recommended individually. Group Polarisation is when individuals in a group begin by taking a moderate stance on an issue regarding a common value and, after having discussed it, end up taking a more extreme stance.
A second, potential negative consequence of group cohesion is group think. Group think is a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in cohesive group, when the members' striving for unanimity overrides their motivation to appraise realistically the alternative courses of action. Studying the events of several American policy "disasters" such as the failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco, Irving Janis argued that they were due to the cohesive nature of the committees that made the relevant decisions.
That decisions made by committees lead to failure in a simple system is noted by Dr. Chris Elliot. His case study looked at IEEE-488, an international standard set by the leading US standards body; it led to a failure of small automation systems using the IEEE-488 standard. But the external devices used for communication were made by two different companies, and the incompatibility between the external devices led to a financial loss for the company. He argues that systems will be safe only if they are designed, not if they emerge by chance.

The idea of a systemic approach is endorsed by the United Kingdom Health and Safety Executive. The successful performance of the health and safety management depends upon the analyzing the causes of incidents and accidents and learning correct lessons from them. The idea is that all events represent failures in control, and present an opportunity for learning and improvement. UK Health and Safety Executive, Successful health and safety management : this book describes the principles and management practices, which provide the basis of effective health and safety management. It sets out the issues that need to be addressed, and can be used for developing improvement programs, self-audit, or self-assessment. Its message is that organizations must manage health and safety with the same degree of expertise and to the same standards as other core business activities, if they are to effectively control risks and prevent harm to people.
The term synergy was refined by R. Buckminster Fuller, who analyzed some of its implications more fully and coined the term synergetics.
  • A dynamic state in which combined action is favored over the difference of individual component actions.
  • Behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately, known as emergent behavior.
  • The cooperative action of two or more stimuli, resulting in a different or greater response than that of the individual stimuli.