What team synergy means
Synergy is the difference between what a group achieves together and what its members would have achieved separately. A team with synergy produces a better answer than the average of its members, and at its best a better answer than its best member. Social psychologists call that last case the assembly bonus effect (Collins and Guetzkow, 1964).
The opposite is common and much less discussed. Ivan Steiner (1972) put it as a simple equation: a group's actual productivity is its potential productivity minus the losses caused by faulty process. The potential is the knowledge and skill in the room. The losses are everything that stops that knowledge reaching the decision.
Why teams lose what their members know
The process losses are familiar once they are named, and every facilitator has watched them happen.
- Status beats accuracy. The most senior or most confident person's view wins, whether or not it is the best one.
- The quiet expert is not heard. The person who knows most is often not the person who speaks most.
- Averaging instead of deciding. Groups split the difference to avoid conflict, which produces an answer nobody actually believes.
- Early agreement. The first plausible idea is adopted before alternatives are heard, and everyone moves on relieved.
- Effort drops as the group grows. Individuals try less hard when their contribution is not identifiable, the pattern researchers call social loafing (Latané, Williams and Harkins, 1979).
How to measure synergy in a workshop
Synergy can be measured with a simple design that has been used in training rooms since the 1970s: everyone solves the same problem alone first, then the team solves it together, and both answers are scored against an expert answer. Jay Hall and W. H. Watson (1970) used it with a survival ranking task, and found that groups given short guidelines for reaching consensus did better than groups left to their own devices.
The design works because it produces three numbers the group cannot argue with: each member's individual score, the team's score, and the gap between the team and its members. A positive gap means the conversation added something. A negative gap means the team talked itself out of what its members already knew. Either way, the group has something concrete to explain.
Running the exercise
Ranking runs this design on each participant's phone and does the arithmetic live.
- Stage 1, alone and in silence. Each person reads the survival scenario and ranks the salvaged items by importance. Hold the silence with your voice: the individual answers must be honest for the comparison to mean anything.
- Stage 2, as a team. The team argues its way to one ranking, and the captain submits it.
- The leaderboard. Individual scores first, then the team rankings with the synergy points. Read the team table out loud and let the room react before you say anything.
- Optional: a second scenario. Run another item set after the debrief and compare the synergy scores. The difference is the effect of what the group just learned about itself.
The debrief that follows
Start with the teams whose score beat their members, then the ones that did not. Ask each to explain the result from what happened in the room.
- Who had the best individual ranking in your team? Did the team know, and did it listen?
- Which item did you argue about most? Who moved, and why?
- How did you reach the final ranking: argument, volume, status, or trade-offs?
- When did you stop discussing and start agreeing? Was that too early?
- Where at work does the loudest view win over the best one?
What raises a team's synergy
The habits that raise synergy are the reverse of the process losses, and a group that has just measured its own gap is unusually willing to try them.
- Ask everyone for their view before anyone argues for one. Silent individual thinking first, then discussion.
- Treat disagreement as information. A dissenting view is a reason to look again, not a problem to resolve by vote.
- Ask what the quiet people know. Directly, and early.
- Decide how you will decide before you start. Consensus, the expert's call, or a vote are all legitimate; not knowing which one you are using is not.
- Check the decision against the facts, not against the mood of the room.
