Synergy and Its Enemies

What does it take for a team to have synergy? A whole lot.

In order for synergy to emerge, form and sustain, it needs mutual trust, unrelenting criticism and a delicate balance between the intuitive conformity and the diversity of thought.

Synergy inevitably has many enemies:

• Distrust or one-directional trust due to power imbalance
• Lack of, or way too much of, a culture of unrelenting criticism
• Too much conformity due to long-standing cultural norms
• Too much thought diversity that disrupts the creative flow during intense interactions
• Unstable team structure or composition
• Unsustainable strategic direction for a team
• Frequent change of management
• (This list can go on forever)

In a world where reorganization happens more often than not, and institutional corruption circumvents genuine efforts of both diversity and inclusion, how do we nurture synergy for a team, not to mention an organization?

The answer is simple yet difficult–

Implement democratic oversight on a locally feasible scale within your team or organization.

Physical, virtual and mental workspaces for fermenting synergy will emerge through that democratic oversight, which holds people with power accountable, facilitates mutual trust, closes the gaps of bureaucratic power imbalance, opens transparent and fearless feedback loop, unifies employees to form stable teams that carry organizational memories, and sustains diversity and inclusion activism. 

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