Prerequisites for Synthesis

Last week, I wrote about one of the essential skills for startup leaders: synthesis.  Synthesis is collecting and quickly combining ideas and parts of ideas together into a coherent whole, to provide a critically important framework of ideas that informs startup planning, decision-making, and storytelling. As I reflected further on the core enablers for effective synthesis, three essential prerequisite elements came to mind.

1. Access to Necessary Context

Successfully synthesizing information into a coherent and actionable whole picture requires access to the right information in the first place.  Essentially the prerequisite to mapping out the relationships between the relevant dimensions is having information about those dimensions in the first place.

This prerequisite has important implications for startup leaders. If you are asking people on your team to help synthesize options, remember that they need the raw material to do the job. That means being intentional about making sure that team members responsible for planning, leading, directing, architecting, storytelling, and other high-synthesis jobs must routinely receive the relevant detailed information to combine into effective mental maps for decision-making. I have been in organizations that closely guarded information and tried to control and limit the information people had about how their work affected the work of others as well as the bigger picture of the organization’s priorities and context. This was a recipe for disaster because the synthesis output can only be as good as the inputs that go into it.  And one of the tricky things about synthesis is that it is not always immediately apparent what information will be relevant, so you need to cast the net wider than you think. 

In general, someone is only going to be able to synthesize effectively within their personal span of control. Generally, they won’t know enough of the greater context to move outside that range unless they are actively supported in doing so.  That often means that the CEO can do higher-level synthesis simply because their role means they are being fed with a much broader array of input dimensions. It would be unreasonable to ask someone in charge of manufacturing to synthesize the options for a new product launch marketing plan because they would likely lack the necessary context. When working with my leaders, I try to think broadly about what might be relevant to their planning and make sure they have that input on a continuing basis. I particularly appreciate leaders who are actively seeking out context and asking questions about the implications of decisions they make on other areas so that the whole can be best optimized, and we do not run into problems of the right hand not knowing enough about what the left hand is doing.

In general, I make a point of trying to actively and intentionally cross-pollinate information across my startup team to continually provide information about our priorities, new learnings, insights, problems, external factors, direct customer feedback, experimental results, and any number of other things that might provide important context for decision-makers who are trying to decide how to prioritize their own and their team’s work to best accomplish our objectives. I am actively on the lookout for when something in one part of the organization might provide important context to another part – and constantly encouraging team members to share what they know to enable better thinking by all.  

2. Mental Horsepower

While certainly synthesis can be formulated at different levels – someone can make a comprehensive plan for a Thanksgiving dinner or figure out the architecture and design of a novel software product or develop the approach for getting massive new legislation through the U.S. Congress – the more complex the synthesis required, the more mental horsepower helps. In other words, smarter people with greater skill sets are better equipped to do sound synthesis.  In addition, higher education helps because gaining education cultivates abstraction, comparison, knowledge, and analysis skills that are useful in formulating a synthesized whole from many constituent elements.  High-potential startups, with their aspects of pathfinding novelty, many critical moving parts, and uncertainty, demand excellent synthesis – and corresponding mental horsepower — from the entrepreneurs who found and lead them simply because of the complexity of building out all the design elements.

3. Tenacity

Make no mistake – synthesizing information into a coherent and actionable picture takes work. Oftentimes, lots of work! This means that a strong work ethic often is a prerequisite to achieving sound synthesis. You must be willing to roll up your sleeves and wrestle with the ideas, turn them over in your mind, develop different constructs to see which fits best, and revise and edit to hone your thinking. For complex situations, full-blown synthesis demands time, effort, and drive as well as a commitment to your goals and a desire to find a great solution to the multi-dimensional problem at hand.

A colleague and I often joke about the challenge of “forced synthesis,” which is what happens when you have limited time and need to cram out a practical synthesis anyway. This is a challenging problem because synthesis often benefits from working on it, stepping away, and coming back to work on it again. If the time is not available for such cycles, it can often result in sub-optimal results and resulting in sub-optimal decisions. Of course, having the context, mental horsepower, and tenacity to focus and leverage your experience doing other synthesis work makes it possible to pull off. However, it is not the most comfortable of processes and requires persistence and tenacity to get through.