On Synergy I

 "Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth", 1963)

"Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking", 1975)

"There is a multilayering of global networks in the key strategic activities that structure and destructure the planet. When these multilayered networks overlap in some node, when there is a node that belongs to different networks, two major consequences follow. First, economies of synergy between these different networks take place in that node: between financial markets and media businesses; or between academic research and technology development and innovation; between politics and media." (Manuel Castells, "The Rise of the Network Society", 1996)

"With the growing interest in complex adaptive systems, artificial life, swarms and simulated societies, the concept of “collective intelligence” is coming more and more to the fore. The basic idea is that a group of individuals (e. g. people, insects, robots, or software agents) can be smart in a way that none of its members is. Complex, apparently intelligent behavior may emerge from the synergy created by simple interactions between individuals that follow simple rules." (Francis Heylighen, "Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web", 1999)

"Systems thinking means the ability to see the synergy of the whole rather than just the separate elements of a system and to learn to reinforce or change whole system patterns. Many people have been trained to solve problems by breaking a complex system, such as an organization, into discrete parts and working to make each part perform as well as possible. However, the success of each piece does not add up to the success of the whole. to the success of the whole. In fact, sometimes changing one part to make it better actually makes the whole system function less effectively." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience", 2002)

"Self-organization can be seen as a spontaneous coordination of the interactions between the components of the system, so as to maximize their synergy. This requires the propagation and processing of information, as different components perceive different aspects of the situation, while their shared goal requires this information to be integrated. The resulting process is characterized by distributed cognition: different components participate in different ways to the overall gathering and processing of information, thus collectively solving the problems posed by any perceived deviation between the present situation and the desired situation." (Carlos Gershenson & Francis Heylighen, "How can we think the complex?", 2004)

"Synergy is the combined action that occurs when people work together to create new alternatives and solutions. In addition, the greatest opportunity for synergy occurs when people have different viewpoints, because the differences present new opportunities. The essence of synergy is to value and respect differences and take advantage of them to build on strengths and compensate for weaknesses." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience" 4th Ed., 2008)

"Synergy occurs when organizational parts interact to produce a joint effect that is greater than the sum of the parts acting alone. As a result the organization may attain a special advantage with respect to cost, market power, technology, or employee." (Richard L Daft, "The Leadership Experience" 4th Ed., 2008)

"In short, synergy is the consequence of the energy expended in creating order. It is locked up in the viable system created, be it an organism or a social system. It is at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system's components. Whenever the system is dismembered to examine its components, this binding energy dissipates." (J-C Spender, "Organizational Knowledge, Collective Practice and Penrose Rents", 2009)

"Synergy is defined as the surplus gained by working together. A task which couldn’t be fulfilled by one individual, can be completed by the work of different individuals together. To maximize synergy, first, the initial task is divided into different sub-tasks. Different agents perform different tasks, which is called division of labor. An end product of one work is used for another work, which is called workflow. Finally, everything needs to be put together. We call this aggregation. This isn’t as linear as it looks. At every step in the process it can happen that a task is divided into sub tasks or aggregated with other tasks." (Evo Busseniers, "Self-organization versus hierarchical organization", [thesis] 2018)