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The Small Group as a System 55

championship. Why? The Golden State Warriors were favored to win; they
had won the year before and had the best single season record in NBA history.
The Cleveland Cavaliers were underdogs with bench players, a 52-year-old
curse, and a 3 to 1 deficit in the finals. Yet their positive synergy bested the
negative synergy of the Golden State Warriors. Their fortunes reversed in
2017, as the Golden State Warriors bested the Cleveland Cavaliers! Each team
or group is a living system in which everything is interdependent, and no one
can predict precisely how the new system will function during any particular
time or how the parts will affect one another.
A team takes on a life of its own and becomes a real, living entity capable
of both positive and negative synergy. Positive synergy, known traditionally as
the assembly effect, occurs when a group’s output is superior to the averaging of
the outputs of the individual members. For example, the then–Southwest
Missouri State University Lady Bears basketball team, whose players were
shorter, slower, and less experienced than many top-tier women’s teams, won
the National Invitational Tournament in 2005. On the other hand, negative
synergy can emerge even between knowledgeable, intelligent, and dedicated
scientists and managers at NASA who collectively made a flawed decision in
1986 to launch the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded just after liftoff.
No one can predict for sure whether a group will experience positive or
negative synergy. Yet there are some factors that may help give us insight into
these processes. Groups with deep diversity (see Chapter 6) or a vast array of
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abilities are a fertile ground for positive synergy. Salazar has posited that the
amount of ambiguity a group faces and how it handles the ambiguity play
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major roles. Ambiguity determines the types of obstacles a group will
encounter. Whether the obstacles are dealt with in a helpful or disruptive way
determines whether a process loss (negative synergy) or gain (positive
synergy) will occur. Another factor is team learning, or the extent to which
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members have learned “how to play the game together.” Savelsbergh and her
associates found that, through interaction with one another, members listen to Equifinality
others’ perspectives, integrate these with their own views, and collectively The system’s
learn. Teams whose members explored different perspectives and developed principle that
collective meaning performed better than teams that did not. Google found different systems can
this out in its quest to find the secrets to the “perfect team.” They respect each reach the same end
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other and support their contributions to the group. Group members that are point.
motivated and enact a respect for their interdependence give rise to positive
synergy. 11
Multifinality
3. Predicting where a group ends up by knowing where it started is not possible.
The principle of equifinality, literally, equal ends, suggests that different The system’s
systems can reach the same outcome even if they have different starting principle that systems
places. The related principle of multifinality states that systems starting out at starting out at the
same place can
the same place may reach different end points. Both principles refer to the reach different end
same idea: It is impossible to predict where a system will end up by knowing points.
only where it starts out.

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