PRINCIPLES OF CREATIVE COOPERATION
What is synergy?
Simply defined, it means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Synergistic communication
When you communicate synergistically, you are simply opening your mind and heart and expressions to new possibilities, new alternatives, new options. Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential. They experience synergy only in small, peripheral ways in their lives.
Synergy in the Classroom
There are times when neither the teacher nor the student knows for sure what’s going to happen. In the beginning, there’s a safe environment that enables people to be really open and to learn and listen to each other’s ideas. Then comes brainstorming, where the spirit of evaluation is subordinated to the spirit of creativity, imagining, and intellectual networking. Synergy is almost as if a group collectively agrees to subordinate old scripts and to write a new one.
Synergy in Business
Once people have experienced real synergy, they are never quite the same again. They know the possibility of having other such mind-expanding adventures in the future. Often attempts are made to recreate a particular synergistic experience, but this seldom can be done. However, the essential purpose behind creative work can be recaptured. Like the Far Eastern philosophy,” we seek not to imitate the masters, rather we seek what they sought,” we seek not to imitate past creative synergistic experience, rather we seek new ones around new and different and sometimes higher purpose.
Synergy and Communication
Synergy is exciting. Creativity is exciting. It’s phenomenal what openness and communication can produce. The possibility of truly significant gain, of significant improvement are so real that it’s worth the risk such openness entails. The lowest level of communication comes out of low-trust situation, which would be characterized by defensiveness. The middle position is respectful communication. The highest level comes from synergy.
Fishing for the Third Alternative
We need to synergize and communicate back and forth until we come up with a solution we feel good about. It’s better than compromise. It’s a synergistic solution that builds P and PC. Buddhism calls this “the middle way”. Middle in this sense does not mean compromise; it means higher, like the apex of the triangle.
Negative Synergy
How much negative energy is typically expanded when people try to solve problem or make decision in an independent reality? And instead of getting a foot off the brake, most people give it to more gas. They try to apply more pressure, more eloquence, more logical information to strengthen their position.
Valuing the Difference
Valuing the difference is the essence of synergy – the mental, the emotional, the psychological difference between people. And the key to valuing those difference is to realize that all people see the world, not as it is, but as they are. The person truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perception limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings. That person values the difference because those difference add to his knowledge, to his understanding of reality.
Focus Field Analysis
Sociologist Kurt Lewin developed a “Force Field Analysis” model in which he described any current level of performance or being as a state of equilibrium between the driving forces that encourage upward movement and the restraining forces that discourage it.