What is Synergy?

Fungi cling to the rock and absorb moisture, creating structure. Algae draw on air to create food by photosynthesis. Together, as lichen, they break down the compacted energies of bare rock to form duff and soil, and start the marvelously complex interrelationships of plants and insects and creatures and people who live together in interdependence in our world. All these phenomena are synergy in action - pulses of primordial energy interacting to self-create life processes at a physical level, as well as at the spiritual level from whence they spring.

In our search for the difference in meaning between synergy and symbiosis, we felt that where symbiosis was a "living together", synergy was essentially a process, a verb, involving a continually changing interaction of energies in process of self-creation.

In families it is of the very essence, since every member of a family has a different quality to contribute to family life, from the point of view of age, sex, capacity or character. The dynamism of these interacting energies is what makes it a family.

In communities the same thing applies. No real community has ever existed, or ever will, without it. And once again it is the synergetic interaction of individual energies which self-creates the wider system.

When flavours blend in cooking, the process is synergy.

When electric impulses from a light source impinge on an eye, and are transformed into images in the brain, we have once again the correlation of various forms of energy in eye and brain that self-create something new. This too is synergy.

In terms of the dictionary meaning, synergy is "the combined or correlated 'action' of a group of agents." In our first exploration, we identified as the key meaning of the synergetic process, a function in which each 'agent' separately influences a process in the same direction, such that an effect is produced greater than the sum of effects of each agent acting alone. Synergetic energies, acting together, have self-created a system.

An interesting query might be the role of catalysts in all this. Capra says (p.23) that "with the appearance of catalysts, molecular complexity increased rapidly, because catalysts create chemical networks by interlinking different reactions, so synergy could be thought of as the energy by which catalysts interlink systems. He suggests that once this happens, the entire nonlinear dynamics of networks comes into play. This includes in particular the spontaneous emergence of new forms of order.

We know that "chemical networks in closed spaces that are subject to continual flows of energy develop processes surprisingly like those of ecosystems."  (p.24 of Capra) and that in the increasingly widespread understanding of today's scientific disciplines, the whole of life has evolved as an integrated system, rather than as a clockwork machine. So synergy is at the very heart of living process. If human societies are to survive, they will have fully to embrace its principles in every aspect of their lives, including the corporate and financial systems of the business world, a realization that seems to be spreading fast in the best corporate leadership.

In a corporation, synergy is already understood as the power-house that engenders cooperative human interaction, frees the vision of the individual people involved, and engages their energies to capacity in effective work.

And finally, on the global and human scale of transcendent human evolution that we are working for, synergy is the activating force in the build-up to a critical threshold. The phase transition we've been talking about depends on synergetic relationships between people, and the intensity of their care for each other. Synergy is the primal cosmic mechanism of self-creative process, and springs from the heart of life, whether the system created thereby be a family, a corporation, a cell or a planet. It is the dynamo by which a species evolves.

Did the word "synergy" come into being as a contraction of "symbiosis" and "energy"? I have no knowledge of these things. But whatever the derivation, this is certainly the most useful way to think of it. The key lies in the nature of the energy used. Only symbiotic energy can build a viable system. Only symbiotic process can transform a community, a species or a planet. Only synergy can trigger the human transcendence we crave.

Perhaps most important of all, we remember Capra's words that "since the systems conception of life also identifies the self-organizing activity of living organisms with cognition, this means that, ultimately, evolution must be seen as a cognitive process." (p.146 of Capra)

This feels exactly right, doesn't it? What it means for us is that transcendental mutation of the human species can be seen as caring human will, and synergy another word for love.

(A word of warning here. I am told that the word "synergy" has become a badly over-used cliche in corporate circles, and tends to evoke ridicule rather than respect. If this is true, you will have encountered it too, and will know how to deal with it.)