The word synergy has become so clichéd that it’s mostly a punchline. There are probably two reasons for that:
Lousy managers use the word to justify reorgs and layoffs.
People like to laugh at words (and anything else) they don’t understand.
There’s plenty of jargon we can mock. The phrases “best practices” and “think outside the box” come to mind. But it would be a shame to lose the word synergy, which represents such an important concept.
The idea of synergy is that when you get the right people together, they can collectively accomplish more than they could separately. We’re not talking about the happenstance benefits of serendipitous confluence; we’re talking about deliberate, orchestrated commingling of skills and perspectives, like mashing up two melodies to create surprising and wonderful harmonies.
syn·er·gy (sĭn’ər-jē)
n. pl. syn·er·gies
The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.
Cooperative interaction among groups, especially among the acquired subsidiaries or merged parts of a corporation, that creates an enhanced combined effect.
Examples abound in both nature and industry. The most delicious cup of coffee comprises chemicals that taste disgusting on their own (or if not properly balanced). We’ve all met couples that seem like either would be miserable, but both are a delight. Synergy can make the worthless worthwhile, the good great, and the great transcendant.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
—Someone mistaken. Paul Mallon, maybe.
The most obvious examples are economies of scale. If you’re building a web service that needs a server, and I’m building an unrelated web service that also needs a server, maybe we can get together and not have to pay for two separate servers. If there are significant per-server costs, and using a single multi-tenant server won’t compromise security or performance, we might be able to save a lot of money and hassle by sharing. That’s synergy in its most mundane form.
If you’ll bear with me through a real example that’s a good metaphor for how surprising synergy can be, I’d like to tell you about a cool technology used in the manufacture of high-end electronic devices. Microprocessors are manufactured in a fascinating way. They’re designed as a set of horizontal layers; that is, 2D slices of the physical 3D object that will eventually be sold to you as the single most expensive part of your phone or desktop computer. Each layer is made of a different material. Professional mask designers decide where, within each layer, the material should go, and where it should not.
At the fab (where processors are “fabricated”), silicon wafers are laid out flat, and covered with the mask for the lowest layer. Particles of the material for that layer (sometimes obtained by heating a chunk of the material until it evaporates) are released into the air above the wafers, slowly settling onto them. The mask is then removed, leaving the material on the wafer only in places where the mask had holes. The process is called deposition. It’s repeated for each layer. Modern processors have dozens of layers.
The feature size of a semiconductor fabrication process is the smallest distance we can realistically control. It’s some fraction of the width of a single transistor. The feature size of current generation processors is about 5 nm; that is, 0.0000005% of a meter. That’s so small that the holes in the masks have to be cut with laser beams. In fact, it’s even smaller than we can cut with a laser beam, because a laser with a wavelength that short (and thus a high frequency) would be too powerful for practical use. So, how do we cut such tiny mask holes? We use two lasers whose waves are almost diametrically out of phase with each other, such that they mostly cancel each other out, much as noise cancelling headphones cancel ambient sound. But they don’t completely cancel each other out; and the little bit of difference is so small that we can use it to cut 5nm holes in masks for microprocessors, making modern digital electronics possible.
Thunder only happens when it’s raining.
—Fleetwood Mac, Dreams
Synergy isn’t merely putting two things together, and getting the sum of their parts; nor even getting more than the sum of their parts, in any naïve sense. Combining two lasers doesn’t necessarily give you one doubly powerful laser. Often, it’s precisely the tension between the composed parts (or people) in a system that makes it special.
Part of great project management is recognizing opportunities for synergy, and turning the workaday into something unique. If you’re able to achieve synergy, and get it moving in the right direction, then you have captured lightning in a bottle. Just maybe keep your voice down when you speak the word “synergy” aloud, because not everyone takes kindly to it.