Enabling Synergy to Achieve Transformational Change

The potential conflicts between providing power and electricity to maintain society's demands while doing so in a way that is sensitive to environmental consequences is an ongoing source of tension between energy companies and environmental campaigners.

The HBR archive features an interview with Duke Energy CEO James Rogers which highlights these tensions when he arrived in role over 20 years ago, just after the company (PSI as it was then) had written down a $2.7bill loss on a half constructed nuclear plant. It also describes how the instincts of one person to try to achieve 'Synergy' rather than pursuing conflict can pay dividends. Below are extracts from the interview under the 3 headings of 'Willingness', 'Viewpoints' and 'New Ideas', which reflect FranklinCovey's Synergy model

• Willingness - "All the members of my management team were much older than was, and all of them advised not to meet with any environmentalists. It was an emotional time, as their largest construction project had just been killed by the very groups I was planning to talk to and PSI was on the verge of bankruptcy. Internal opposition to my proposal was so strong that I considered changing course. (But) I believed in the power of collaboration to address tough problems (and) I strongly believed that we needed a culture respectful of divergent views, in which problems could be identified early and unconventional solutions could be found".
• Viewpoints - "I developed a plan I called 100 days of listening. I sat down with leaders from the environmental groups that had blocked the plant. I started by telling them that I was new to the job and wanted to better understand their point of view. Soon enough they were talking straight about their perspectives and I learned that their opposition was based on three beliefs. (Another Issue) near the top of my list had arisen in a meeting with a state senator who chaired the environmental committee: PSI needed to integrate environmental risks into its decision making. Failure to do so had nearly caused the company to break down. Prior management hadn't seen the risks from environmental opposition until it was too late."
• New Ideas - "I proposed that we study the corporate environmental charters of other utilities and then create one for PSI. To my surprise, we found not one utility with a board adopted public statement about environmental considerations in its decision making. We decided to write a charter by convening our diverse stakeholders: customers, investors, state government, officials, consumer advocates, employees and environmentalists. Some members of my team worried that dialogue would further empower groups that opposed us and would evolve into a negotiation. They were right - but that was part of the reason for doing it. We wanted a charter that established enough common ground that we would never again waste billions of dollars on half-constructing a plant. We held meetings with about two dozen leaders from different stakeholder groups. Each meeting began with an acknowledgement of our objective: to provide clean, affordable and reliable electricity to our 575,000 customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Everyone agreed with this mission, but environmentalists focused on 'clean', consumer advocates stressed 'affordable' and factory owners put a premium on 'reliable'. Nevertheless the framework gave everyone insight into the practical trade-offs involved in providing universal access to electricity. Using that framework, we negotiated a 10-point corporate charter, (which our) board ratified and we printed in our annual report. We had planted a stake."

We hear many people use the word 'synergy' and still more talk about the ambition of achieving these kind of outcomes for their business. The real issue then in achieving this either at an executive level or further throughout a business is knowing 'how' to do it, and the elements above provide strong framework for getting started. Beyond this, FranklinCovey's work with diverse groups hoping to achieve synergies is to help them develop the mindsets and skillsets that sit within each area - for example within 'Willingness', the recognition of abundance vs scarcity mentality, within 'Viewpoints' the ability to communicate empathically so that we can truly understand other's perspectives and also have our own effectively understood and within 'New Ideas' a model that allows people to consider both prototypes and countertypes as an effective mechanism for identifying third alternatives.