Habit 6 is the major achievement of independent relationships: the ability to create synergy with another person. Synergy creates an outcome that’s greater than the sum of its parts, as in 1+1 = 3 or more. In other words, two people working together can create greater results than would have been possible separately.
For example, two pieces of wood joined together can hold more weight than they could have separately. In addition, when an egg and sperm come together they create an entirely new human life.
Synergy is the culmination of all the previous habits — you need a deep conviction of your principles and values, a Win/Win paradigm, and the skills to develop and nurture effective interdependent relationships. Part of the reason that 1 + 1 can equal 3 is that the relationship itself adds value and creates the ability to synergize; the joint between the two pieces of wood adds strength beyond what each piece can carry. Similarly, the teamwork, high Emotional Bank Account, and mutual understanding between two people add to their collaborative creative power.
Communicating synergistically means opening your mind and heart to different realities and possibilities. This requires vulnerability and comfort with (or at least tolerance of) uncertainty and some level of chaos; in its essence, synergy is a creative process — you’re working with others to create new possibilities — and that means you don’t know what the outcome will be when you start the process. You’re not entering the situation to push your proposition or blindly accept the other person’s, but rather to come up with a third alternative.
Sometimes situations devolve into chaos instead of evolving into synergy, and those negative experiences can make the people involved skittish about opening up in the future to the possibility of synergy. For example, this can happen when a company creates policies that give employees the freedom to allocate some of their time to develop new ideas — as long as they still get their work done in a timely manner — but a handful of people abuse it and scare executives into reforming or revoking the policy.
Additionally, many people have paradigms that cause them to mistrust other people and interact in protective or defensive ways. Often these people only have brief glimpses of synergy, such as when people come together in an exceptionally cooperative and collaborative way in response to an emergency. These events can seem like rare, extraordinary occurrences, but with the right approach you can experience synergy regularly.
Synergy can build upon momentum in a relationship or group dynamic. One person begins by being courageous enough to be authentic and open-minded, which empowers others and makes them feel safe to be open and authentic as well. This can build back and forth as everyone gains new insights, and those insights open new ideas, and the creative energy swells.
Think of brainstorming sessions you’ve been in: The first ideas might’ve been more obvious and conventional, but all it takes is one out-of-the-box suggestion to lead to more innovative and unexpected ideas, and that winding road can take you to places you never expected. Plus, the people involved in that process tend to come out of it more excited about and committed to the plan than if it had been a run-of-the-mill idea produced from a stale collaborative session.
Because synergy requires vulnerability and openness, it’s critical that the people involved trust each other. There’s a positive correlation between trust and communication; higher trust allows for higher levels of communication that improve interdependent relationships and make synergy possible.
Low-trust situations foster the lowest levels of communication, in which people are protective and defensive. You see this in situations like divorce settlements, where people feel the need to close all loopholes and cover all their bases for lack of trust and fear of being taken advantage of. Ironically, this kind of communication further erodes trust and spooks people into being even more protective and defensive. This form of communication leads to Win/Lose or Lose/Win frameworks.
A moderate level of trust creates respectful communication, when people are polite, honest, and genuine, but avoid opening up enough to risk confrontations. People who communicate at this level understand each other’s positions intellectually, but don’t assess their own paradigms or open their minds to new possibilities. Without the necessary components to come up with creative new ideas, this kind of communication tends to lead to compromise, a low form of Win/Win.
High trust leads to high levels of communication that produce creative, synergistic results. The trust allows everyone involved to feel safe and comfortable openly sharing their ideas and paradigms, with the knowledge that others will try to understand their perspective and build on it. This level of communication nurtures the P/PC balance that fosters even greater trust and positive results.
A productive relationship with a high Emotional Bank Account lays the groundwork for synergy, and each time the people involved achieve synergy it further builds their relationship.
For example, your annual family vacation is coming up and, per tradition, you’ve booked a beautiful cabin and week full of fishing and relaxation, but your mother-in-law is sick and your spouse sees that week as the only opportunity to spend time with her before her health continues to decline.
Instead of getting frustrated and exasperated about how much you’ve been looking forward to this vacation and how you’ve already made reservations — which would likely make your wife defensive and insistent about the importance of seeing her mother — you can acknowledge how much this means to your wife. This response gives her the psychological air to also recognize how much you’ve been looking forward to this vacation, creating an atmosphere where both sides feel understood and can synergize to think of third alternatives so everyone can be happy.
In some cases, synergy isn’t possible and the No Deal option isn’t viable, leaving compromise as the only option. When this is the case, a genuine effort to share openly and understand each other will make great deposits in your Emotional Bank Account and generally lead to a more positive compromise.
To foster synergy, you must view a person’s differences as assets — rather than roadblocks — to creating something new and innovative; someone who has the same view and opinion as you adds nothing to your knowledge and perspective, but someone with a different view gives you the opportunity to expand your perspective and come up with solutions that would never have occurred to your otherwise.
As we discussed earlier, everyone sees the world through their own paradigms; that means no one’s view is objective, including yours. If you think you see the world objectively, then you’ll think that anyone who sees things differently is wrong. But if you understand that your — and everyone else’s — lens of the world is determined by individual paradigms, then you can value and appreciate that other people’s views can broaden your (admittedly limited) understanding of the world.
In fact, if you truly understand that your view of the world is limited by your lens, then it’s easy to see why you need to consider and integrate other people’s perspectives so that you can approach life with more complete data. If you were trying to map the stars and were confined to the view from where you live, would you reject images of the night sky that someone sent you from another part of the world because they looked different than the photos you took? Or would you use them to expand your map?
In order to make lasting change in your life, you need to make changes that foster that growth while also eliminating the factors that are limiting growth. Synergy is especially effective at minimizing the negative forces that push back against positive growth.
The sociologist Kurt Lewin uses the Force Field Analysis as an analogy to explain: The performance level in any given situation is at an equilibrium between the driving forces and restraining forces. Driving forces encourage progress and are typically positive, logical, conscious, reasonable, and economic. Restraining forces restrict growth and change, and are generally negative, illogical, unconscious, emotional, and social or psychological.
Imagine you want to create a more positive climate in your family’s home; you feel your children are too competitive among one another, the level of trust between parents and children is lower than you’d like, and everyone has developed some bad habits in their daily interactions. Your positive, logical, conscious desire to improve your family’s culture is a driving force, but that will only get you so far — and most likely the effects will be largely temporary — unless you also work to eliminate some of the negative, emotional, and psychological restraining forces at play.
The more change you try to create by focusing solely on driving forces, the harder it will become to make progress — like if you were pushing a metal spring back, and the tension kept building until finally the pent-up force of the coils bounce back against you. When you use synergy to tackle a problem, you see differences and challenges as opportunities to create new insights and possibilities, which actually transforms restraining forces into driving forces.
For example, a land developer is working on a project that has faced major delays, and the developer has fallen so far behind on his payments that the bank wants to foreclose. In turn, the developer sues the bank to avoid foreclosure. The developer and the bank are caught in a conundrum: The developer needs more money to finish the project so he can get a return and repay the bank, but the bank refuses to lend him any more money until he catches up on his current payments — and all the while, the project is falling further behind.
Tension is high by the time the developer meets with the bank officials, but he approaches the meeting with Habits 4 (Win/Win), 5 (understand the other side before trying to be understood), and 6 (synergy) in mind. The developer writes down all the bank’s concerns, and, seeing his effort, the officials open up and clarify to help him fully understand their perspective. After this process, the officials have been given enough psychological air to be open to listening to the developer’s concerns. The mutual understanding both sides gain through Habits 4 and 5 motivate them to turn their shared stress and financial concerns (restraining forces) into a logical, conscious effort (driving force) to find a synergistic solution that benefits everyone.
Just as you must achieve Private Victories — a proactive paradigm, a principled center, personal leadership, and true independence — before the Public Victory of effective interdependence, you need internal synergy before you can have synergy with other people. How do you have synergy with yourself? What is there to synergize?
Some people let their left brain lead them through life, taking logical approaches to all situations; but sometimes the problems you encounter in life are emotional or creative problems that call for right-brained solutions. Other people lead with their intuitive, creative right brains, but encounter the inverse issue when dealing with analytical and logical problems. Life is a balance of both the logical and the emotional, and you need synergy between both sides of your brain to effectively adapt.
Have you ever had a relationship in which one person is emotionally driven and the other is intellectually driven? What happens when you have an interpersonal conflict? One person tries to express her concerns in feelings, while the other person is asking for concrete examples and evidence of the problem. If both sides of your brain are engaged, you can better understand and respond to the other person, and integrate both emotional and logical aspects in your solution.
In order to create synergy, you need a solid foundation of the previous habits and a determination to keep an open mind to the other person’s perspectives and desires. Follow these steps to start practicing synergy in your own life.