Habit 6: Synergize

Synergy is the result you get when two people, working together, produce something neither could have produced alone. It depends on the previous five habits — proactivity (you can act), end-in-mind (you know what you want), first-things-first (you've made time), Win/Win (you're not undermining each other), and seek-first-to-understand (you've actually heard each other) — and it produces the third alternative that wasn't on the table when you started.

Synergy is rarer than it should be because most collaboration defaults to compromise, where each party gives up something to settle in the middle. Compromise produces solutions that no one is excited about. Synergy produces solutions that surprise everyone.

The condition for synergy is genuinely valuing differences. If you go into a conversation already certain that your view is the right one and the other person's view is wrong, you'll negotiate compromise at best. If you go in curious about what the other person can see that you can't, you create the space where synergy lives.

The habit is to actively look for the third alternative when you find yourself stuck between two positions. It's usually closer than you think.

The essence of synergy, Covey insists, is valuing the differences: the realization that the person who sees the situation differently from you is not simply wrong but is seeing something you cannot. Two people who agree on everything add nothing to each other; the friction of genuine difference is the raw material of a better answer. He calls that answer the Third Alternative: not my way, not your way, but a way better than either of us brought to the table.

He charts a communication continuum to show where this lives. At low trust, communication is defensive and produces win-lose or lose-win. At medium trust it is respectful and produces compromise, where one plus one equals one and a half, because each side gives something up. Only at high trust does it become synergistic, where one plus one equals three or more, because the parties build something new together. The doorway is a posture, captured in a single sentence: you see it differently, good, help me understand what you see.

Covey points to nature as proof that synergy is a principle, not a slogan: two plants close together root deeper, parts of an ecosystem produce more together than apart. Its absence is negative synergy, the move of insecure people who clone themselves, surround themselves with yes-people, and treat difference as disloyalty. The applied practice: when you next hit a wall with someone, resist compromise and ask whether there is a third option neither of you has proposed yet.