Above, I evoked the wonders of positive synergy.
But there is also negative synergy. Two angry men get into a fistfight. When we get together in groups and allow government to direct our thinking, those two angry men can launch a war that kills millions. And there are many other kinds of cultural and systemic oppression, prejudice, and hatred that last for decades, centuries, millennia.
And this also works on a smaller scale. A happy marriage is a wonderful thing. A miserable marriage can feel like an inescapable trap. A good business partnership flourishes. Many business efforts fall into a mess, dragging good people and good talent with them.
As the late Stephen Covey discusses in Habit 6 of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, positive synergy is what it is all about, but it is incredibly difficult to achieve and sustain. Negative synergy is what we are stuck with when we try for positive, and it doesn't work.
What's the trap? And how do we get unstuck?