Synergy and the Allegory of the Long Spoons

Synergy is defined on Wikipedia  (I know, I know. This is not the most credible source I could have chosen, but it serves my purpose for this post.) as  two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable. We commonly talk about this phenomenon by saying, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." This quote is often attributed to Aristotle although there is no place in Aristotle's Metaphysics where the phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" or anything similar can be found.


The Allegory of the Long Spoons is a story that we all know in some form or another. I would like to relate it to you, with some artistic license, as I tell it to my children.

In a land far, far away lived a group of small, colorful and furry creatures called the tots. There were two different kids of tots, the long-arms and the bendy-arms. The long-arms could stretch up very high into the sky, and the bendy-arms, while their arms were much shorter, could move their arms around any way they wanted.The tots' favorite food in the whole world was the sparkle-fruit. It was a fruit so delicious and juicy that the tots wanted to eat it all the time. It was very hard for the tots to eat a sparkle-fruit though, for you see, sparkle-fruits grew in trees  high up in the air. Each day the long-arms would go and stand under the sparkle-fruit tree and dream of eating the delicious fruit. The long-arms could reach the delicious fruit, but they could not bend their long arms to their mouths so that they could eat it. Since they could not eat the fruit, they would not pick it. The bendy-arms would also go and stand under the sparkle-fruit tree each day and dream of eating the fruit. If they could just get one of the fruits, they knew they could eat it, for their arms were short and bendy and could reach their mouth. The bendy-arms were not, however, tall enough to reach the fruit high in the trees.One day a very smart your tot named (whatever one of my children I am telling the story to... yeah, that is right, earning brownie points with the kids!) had an idea. He said that the long-arms should pick the fruit for the bendy-arms, and in return, the bendy-arms could feed the fruit to the long-arms. The tots learned to work together and ate sparkle-fruit as a team ever day after that.

As you can see, the story here effectively illustrates the idea that we can achieve more as a team than we can as individuals. I encourage each of you to keep this story in mind, or even share it with your team/children as appropriate. One of the key ingredients to a well-oiled team or family is, after all, teamwork - or synergy.