Drafting a document for a client earlier today, I was faced with a choice: synergy - embrace it or avoid it?
Generally, my first reaction to this consonant-heavy little noun is to look for an alternative: it feels cliched and a little obscure for mainstream human communication (how often do you say synergy out loud?) But today I thought I would look it up and see whether it had anything going for it.
It turns out that it comes to us, via Latin, from the Greek word sunergia meaning working together. In the mid-17th Century the word came into use as a way of describing cooperation. So far, so good. It then developed a theological following as synergism, the doctrine that the human will cooperates with divine grace in the work of regeneration (to my mind, any word with a meaning as elegant as that has some redeeming features).
For 150 years or more there have been medical and pharmacological uses for synergy, where substances or body parts work together in a way that generates a greater effect than the sum of the individual components. This is starting to sound familiar.
It's only in the last 40 years or so that the business use of synergy has come to the fore, most frequently in mergers and acquisitions: Company A makes a bid for Company B and claims synergies of £x. That's a technically accurate use of the term, no doubt.
The problem I have is that synergy is often used as a synonym for cost savings.
So don't claim a synergy when all you're doing is removing a bit of duplication in an admin team. Let's keep synergy for a higher goal: when cooperation leads to greater achievement.
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