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THE SYNERGY EFFECT

Happier workers, more responsible workers, higher productivity - those are the principal effects I've seen in the companies I visit from adopting a more involved style of motivation. But there's one other effect I want to mention, because it really explains why you get all the others. I call it the "Synergy Effect."

I believe that people want to be contented with their work, they want to be responsible for what they're doing, they want to pull their weight to achieve lower waste and higher productivity. And I believe that, in today's increasingly interconnected work environment, they can best accomplish those personal goals by being part of winning teams. In fact, being a member of a winning team becomes in itself a high priority achievement, because it makes the attainment of all those other goals so much easier.

The Synergy Effect explains why this happens. It explains why good teamwork and an institutionalized system of Involvement lead to better motivation and performance: it explains why groups achieve things that individuals alone cannot achieve.

Every team athlete has experienced synergy at one time or another. It's that strange and almost indefinable phenomenon that happens when you get three or four reasonably good players together and find out that, when they function together, they perform on a much higher level than even the best of them could do by himself. You know the old expression that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts - that sometimes one plus one plus one can equal four? That's the Synergy Effect. And it works even more obviously in business than on the playing field.

In our seminars on productivity, we do a "group survival" exercise that illustrates the Synergy Effect extremely well. First, we separate the seminar into groups of six or seven people each. Then, we ask them to imagine that they have just crash-landed above the Arctic Circle, and that there is no way of repairing their plane. They are uninjured and reasonably warmly dressed, but at least thirty miles from the nearest town and in totally
unfamiliar territory. In addition to a barely decipherable map, they were able to salvage from the plane only fifteen items. These include several wooden matches, a compass, an axe, a flashlight, some rope, three pairs of snowshoes, and a fifth of Bacardi rum. The exercise is to rank these items in order of importance to the group's survival, with the most important item being ranked 1, the next most important 2, and so on down
to 15.

We ask the seminar participants to perform this ranking exercise in two stages: first, individually, and then working in their groups, in a consensus fashion: that is, the group has to agree not by voting but by "talking it out" and compromise, what each item's ranking will be. We also tell them at the outset that, for the theoretical purposes of the exercise, there is a "best possible" ranking: it's a ranking that was provided to us by a
Canadian wilderness rescue team, experts in Arctic survival techniques. This expert evaluation is the standard against which we measure the accuracy of both the individual and group rankings. We perform the measurement by taking the expert's ranking as a "zero base," finding the difference between this base and the other rankings for each of the fifteen items, and finally adding up the differences to reach a composite score.

For example, if Joe Barnes feels that the flashlight ought to be ranked at 3, we compare that figure with the expert's ranking - in this case, 10 - and give Joe a score of 7 for that item. Likewise, if Roberta Malley ranks the flashlight at 12, she would get a score of 2 for that item. Once we've done that for each of the fifteen items, we add up the differences, and the person (or group) with the lowest total "wins."

Since our clients vary widely in their backgrounds and interests, we find a broad range of accuracy in their rankings. Some individuals and some groups get quite close to the expert's ranking, and some are light years away. That's not surprising. What is surprising is that, no matter how good an individual may be in ranking the importance of the items, I have never yet come across a case where an individual's score was better than that of his group.

I remember one guy from a banking firm who was an avid weekend backpacker, and whose individual score was incredibly low (that is, good). The average individual score in this exercise is something like 55, and his was 31 or 32. Nobody else in his group knew anything at all about the outdoors, so you might have expected that, when they came up with a consensus ranking, it would have been much worse than the wilderness wizard's own ranking.

Exactly the opposite happened. Somehow the interaction of the backpacking "genius" with the ignoramuses on his team made them come out with a game plan that was better than his alone. And this happens every time one of our client groups does the exercise.

We talked about the outcome later, and the backpacker showed some insight into why people who knew "less" than he did were able to give him lessons. "I was thinking about the problem," he said, "in the ways I had been trained to think. On most of the items that was OK. But on a few it was taking me in exactly the wrong direction. On some of those items the best ideas came from people who just didn't know what they were talking about."

In other words, they came from group members who were not burdened with "experience" or "tradition" or with the self-defeating knowledge that "you just can't do it this way." They came from people who were willing to throw in their two cents because they were too stupid to know that two cents won't buy anything. The result was the Synergy Effect - proof, once again, that even geniuses can be made smarter by an infusion of fresh ideas. That's a revelation that every manager troubled by low motivation would be wise to take to heart.

I'm going to talk about this survival exercise again later, on building and managing teamwork. Here I'll just make the basic point: not only are two (or ten) heads usually better than one, they are dramatically different in "partnership" than they could possibly be alone. Since the best solutions to business problems are seldom just accretions of former solutions, that differentness is an essential ingredient of really getting things done.

The way you get at that differentness is to make teamwork not just a word but an everyday, working reality. And the ultimate reason you want (or should want) to do that is very bottom-line and pragmatic: it gets better results than relying on the geniuses to show the way. Because sometimes the only way they can show you doesn't lead anywhere you want to go.

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