Synergy
Two or more acting together to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.
It is the arithmetic claim beneath cooperation. If working together produced only the sum of working apart, there would be no reason to bear the cost of coordination — and coordination is always costly. The whole architecture of federation is a bet that the surplus is real and large enough to pay for the structure that produces it.
The Way makes the bet explicit in its production half. You cannot optimize the pieces and expect the Whole to work; you must optimize the Whole. Collaborate, really collaborate. Increase right relationship among all participants. A Body organized to sub-optimize its parts will reliably underperform the same people organized to serve the whole, and the difference is not marginal.
The distinction worth keeping is between synergy and mere aggregation. Ten people doing the same thing beside one another produce ten people's work. Ten people whose different gifts compose produce something none of them could have. Which is why Genius being distributed rather than uniform is an asset rather than a coordination problem, and why coherence is diversity in resonance rather than sameness (Coherence).
Its dark twin is the word's use as a promise. Synergy is among the most reliably hollow words in the old world's vocabulary — invoked to justify combinations that produced no surplus for anyone except those combining. A Body using the word should be able to say where the surplus went, in what order, and to whom (The waterfall), which is the test that distinguishes the thing from the claim.
The canon holds it as a single borrowed definition with no articulation of its own.
Also called: — Stands on: Emergence · Higher Order Functional Unity · Integrated Delivery · Reciprocity Opens onto: Coherence · Design To The Goal · Genius · The waterfall · Federation · Cross-Functional Integration · Theory Of Constraints In play: beyond Sources: Synergy (root page, stub — a single quoted definition, credited to Open Civics) · THE DNA OF HEAVEN Part VII · lionsberg.wiki: Synergy Open: The canon carries a borrowed definition and no LIØNSBERG articulation; nothing states how a claimed synergy is verified.