Cybernetic principle: Synergy

← Leadership and cybernetic skills for leading change

Central idea:

Synergy is the interaction between the goals of the individual and the goals of the group. High synergy groups have strong alignment between these goals and the overarching system purpose. These groups achieve more.

← Leadership and cybernetic skills for leading change Ruth Benedict (American Anthropologist, 1887-1948) took the word ‘synergy’ from biological sciences and applied it to human societies.25 She inspired a number of others, including early cyberneticians like Margaret Mead, who in turn inspired Warren Bennis. He writes: “The more I learned, the more I realized that the usual way of looking at groups and leadership, as separate phenomena, was no longer adequate. The most exciting groups – the ones […] that shook the world – resulted from a mutually respectful marriage between an able leader and an assemblage of extraordinary people.26” Through synergy, the people in the group providing the skills for leading change will likely shift as the focus on different goals and actions adjust dynamically over time. Synergy also allows a collective memory to be constructed and accessed over time to allow for creative synthesis at opportune moments in the dynamic shifts of the complex adaptive systems the group is working with. This also relates to new work in generative versus exploitative leadership. As Ariella Helfgott describes, we need to move systems towards generative rather than exploitative processes throughout their configurations27 , which raises new questions for ethics and what organisational changes and can be enacted to achieve these.