Ever wonder why certain businesses thrive? Or how certain people achieve unthinkable success? What about how businesses built with the best of intentions bust? Or why people who try really really hard still fail?
I have one word that explains the answers to these questions:
Synergy
Synergy can either work in your life to create compounding success, or it can work in your life to create compounding failure. Synergy is not something you can escape or avoid. It happens organically and often is difficult or impossible to predict. However, it can be anticipated (because it WILL occur, good or bad) and recognized, then addressed to it's fullest potential. Understanding the concept of synergy means you can maximize the compounding success and minimize the compounding failure, which will unlock a world of opportunity for you.
What Exactly is Synergy?
After a bit of research on different definitions of the word synergy, I especially liked the one I found on the handy Dictionary.com (Yep, I use that and Wikepedia all. the. time. Haters hate not):
Synergy (n) - the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements, contributions, etc.
Interesting. This means that when seemingly unrelated or different elements in your life combine, they create an effect that's greater than the single element alone. This phenomenon applies in biology, physics, genetics, chemistry, business - you name it.
Another definition I liked by R. Buckminster Fuller describes "synergism" as:
Behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.*
If this is such a powerful concept, then how exactly is one to tap into and recognize this potential??
Bad Synergy
Let's start by describing how bad synergy can come into play in your life. This will bring about a much greater appreciation for the flip side of creating good synergy. There are 3 areas I think that are vitally important to synergy in your life.
Processes
Inefficient and ineffective processes in your life, career, or business create negative synergy. In fact, there are 10 telltale signs of a broken process. Let's take an example of a business process to create and send invoices to customers. The invoice process is unnecessarily complex and confusing. This results in:
Sending incorrect bills to customers, which irritates them when they have to spend extra time calling the company to sort it out. Sorting out the issues takes way longer than normal because the system is so complex and confusing, wasting employee and customer time. This frustration leads customers to write negative reviews for the company as well as tell their friends about their poor experiences. This in turn leads to less business, which leads to less profits and falling stock price, which eventually leads to laying off employees. The employees were already unhappy in the workplace from constantly firefighting this process every day - after all things broke daily-
as well as from receiving all of these angry customer calls. The company lays off all but the best employees in an effort to stay afloat, but these employees are barely hanging on with all of the negativity they face daily along with the now-increased workload from having less people. These top-notch employees eventually begin quitting due to burnout and dissatisfaction, forcing the company to spend time and money it doesn't have on recruiting and training people to back-fill these positions. This high turnover rate results in employees being less attracted to apply to work there, leading to lower quality applicants. Can you see the synergy at play here??
Learning
Learning doesn't stop when you graduate from college!! An old (or young) dog who can't learn new tricks is setting himself back more than he thinks. The way the world works, you will be left behind if you refuse to continually feed yourself with more knowledge. You become outdated very quickly.
Let's take an example in medicine I experienced this very week:
I recently went on a search to find a new general doctor. I found one that takes my insurance that is within 0.2 miles from home that I can bike to (plus for me!). I looked online and found that they had no website and that I had to call to schedule an appointment. I called 2 times during working hours and got sent to voicemail. The third time I called they finally answered, but told me the first available appointment they had was 2 weeks away, because I'd be a new patient. I told them I'd think about it and get back to them. The next day, I called back during working hours and got through on the first call. However, they put me on hold immediately. After sitting on hold for 10
minutes, I decided that this wasn't worth my time and hung up. If the office was this poorly run just for getting an appointment, I would doubt that the medical service was superb, and I couldn't deal with all of this time wasted every time I needed an appointment. The Process Maven does not waste this kind of time after all, as time is a precious commodity that must be prioritized relentlessly. So, I set out to find a doctor who had a website with online appointments. I found one that is highly rated, within 5 miles from home (a bit farther than I'd like), and takes my insurance. I set up an appointment online within 5 minutes. At my office visit, I found that this doctor also has implemented video calls for non-emergency issues like sore throat, flu, mild infections, etc. Cool eh?? This would save me considerable time in the future when I needed routine care! Thus, I've decided that this will be the doctor I give my business to, and the doctor I will also recommend to friends and family in the area. I was a small piece of the larger synergy working against the outdated doctor and for the technically savvy doctor.
Mindset
Your mindset creates your reality. If you have a negative and complaining approach, this will eventually seep into all areas of your life and become a self-prophesying habit. Let's assume you're unhappy at work. This leads you to come home in a bad mood. Eventually this creates discord in your marriage because your spouse becomes impatient with the constant complaints - your negativity impacts them after all. Since negativity is already a habit, this makes it easy for you to become negative about your home life now too, which ensures you react sub-optimally to normal situations or triggers. You fight more, you sleep less, and your anxiety rises. This in turn seeps into poor work performance and further inability to handle work demands, which you continue to bring home. Both situations become a self-feeding cycle of destruction. See the synergy??
Good Synergy
Obviously, the things I described above are not things you want to experience or live with. No! You deserve so much more! So now, let's take those 3 areas and look at how you can use them to create good and life-giving synergy.
1. Build Lean & Efficient Systems
Whenever you drive waste from systems, be it at home or at work, the results are often surprising. The efficiency ends up impacting other parts you'd never have thought of, creating a synergistic energy with tendrils and branches that reach out in all directions. Let's take the same invoice system we described above. If this invoice system is lean, it will:
Save employee time, enabling employees to focus on removing waste in other systems. These employees gain a deeper knowledge and appreciation for lean systems, resulting in time and cost savings all throughout the company.
Improve customer satisfaction, leading to increased repeat customers who then pass the word along to all their friends creating new business that increases profitability.
Cultivate satisfied employees who feel respected and empowered. They in turn feel motivated to do excellent work and interact with customers in positive ways. This further adds to company profitability and customer satisfaction.
Reflect in the market as the consumer view of the company improves and the stock price goes up, resulting in more money to invest in company growth.
2. Be a lifelong student
I'm currently reading "How to Win Friends & Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. I added it to my Life Hacks page to share the love. So far, I've been astounded at how many applications this book has - in my marriage, my career, my relationships. When I apply these concepts at work, it cultivates better teamwork and enables me to more easily influence others. This in turn makes my work life happier and more fulfilling. Eventually this creates increased success in my career. When I apply these concepts with my personal relationships, it cultivates intimacy, trust, and peace, positively impacting my happiness and the happiness of those around me. One day if I have kids, I'll teach them these concepts, enabling them to use these habits to create positive synergy early on in their lives, enhancing their success and fulfillment in life. All this from reading a little book on the side for fun! That's the beauty of synergy at play.
(This could be you celebrating life learning with enriching books. I've got plenty listed on my Life Hacks page - Check it out!)
3. Understand the power of positivity
As I said above, your mindset creates your reality. Set your goal on being relentlessly positive. It may be hard at first, but soon you'll find it becoming a habit. Your positivity creates energy in yourself and around you to others. This boosts your self-confidence and motivation while drawing others to want to be around you. You inspire positivity in others, planting seeds of success in their lives as well. This leads you to deliver excellently at work perhaps moving into leadership while cultivating enriching relationships inside and outside of work, further leading to astounding synergy in all areas of your life.
Have you experienced good or bad synergy in your life? What did you do? Share it with me in the comments below! Think this stuff is actually pretty good?? Share it with your friends. Let the good synergy flow!
*Fuller, R. B., (1975), “Synergetics: Explorations In The Geometry Of Thinking”