Buckminster Fuller came up with a mathematical equation that goes like this.
Synergy equals P squared - P divided by 2.
Let’s take a look at it. Let’s say that P is 6.
What’s six squared? 36.
P divided by two is 3. So 36 – 3 = 33.
So the synergy of 6 is 33.
The law of synergy is at work in nature. For example, one stick of dynamite yields a measurable explosive force. But get this. When you put two sticks of dynamite together and detonate them together, you don't double the blast, you quadruple it!
Is the same power of synergy released when people Co-operate?
Perhaps the greatest illustration of just what can be achieved via cooperation is what was achieved when President John F. Kennedy set a national goal:
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.
That’s a big objective. No one could achieve that.
Fact is from time immemorial, people have dreamed of going to the moon.... But it’s always been just a dream.
Lucian of Samos wrote a story about it 150 years after Christ, and in that story his sailing ship was lifted up into the heavens through a tremendous storm.
Another dreamed he went to the moon in a hot air balloon.
In a book published in 1865 by French writer Jules Verne, a 900-foot cannon what used to launch the travellers into outer space.
So a lot of ‘individuals’ have had the dream of going to the moon.
But what it actually took to turn that dream into reality was dozens astronauts, hundreds of industrial firms, many thousands of workers and a cost measured in thousands of millions of dollars.
In July 1969, the goal was achieved. The first man set foot on the moon before the decade was out; a dream had come true.
JFK concluded his speech back in 1961 by saying, ”In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon - it will be an entire nation.”
The is the power of synergy... Co-operation!