Finding Your North Star: Synergy Is a Strategy

Why that one project that just worked wasn’t luck—and how to recreate it

We’ve all been part of a project that just clicked. The team stopped feeling like a collection of individuals and started moving as one. Showing up felt energizing, not exhausting. People stayed late, worked weekends, and somehow it didn’t feel like burnout.

You remember that project. Maybe you still talk about it. And maybe you think it was lightning in a bottle, that perfect mix of people, timing, and circumstances. It wasn’t.

Synergy isn’t accidental. It’s systemic. And once you understand the system, you can create those moments again. Not on every project—that level of intensity isn’t sustainable—but often enough to change how your team works.

The War Room

In 2012, I was consulting as a project manager for a global advertising agency. The client work was stellar 0 award-winning, industry-envied. But the agency’s own website was outdated and embarrassing. For eight months, the internal relaunch kept slipping. It wasn’t billable work, so it kept getting deprioritized.

Finally, leadership drew a line: thirty days to go live. One one month to complete UX, design, development, content, testing — all of it. And because this was 2012, everything had to be uploaded manually into a brand-new Sitecore CMS system. The executive leadership team took over a conference room so we’d all work together in a single war room, and the icing on the cake - they announced the challenge publicly, complete with a video livestream of all of us working in the war room.

By all logic, this could have gone terribly wrong. Instead, something remarkable happened: the team leaned in. The collective response was - challenge accepted.

When Everything Aligned

We worked side by side in rapid iteration—UX, design, development—no silos, no waiting on email threads. Everyone had to move together. We adopted a whatever it takes mindset. Egos were checked because we all shared one: the reputation of the agency itself.

That shared purpose became our North Star. We worked nights, weekends, from beanbag chairs to park benches. But it didn’t feel draining—it felt electric. We had momentum, not burnout.

After thirty days, the site went live. And every single person, from the senior developers to the interns uploading thumbnails, walked away changed. Walked away as part of something bigger than themselves.

Why It Worked

That project wasn’t a miracle. It was built on a formula—one that can be repeated.

At its core, people respond to one of two things: challenge or conflict. Give them a challenge worth solving, and they align. Remove the challenge, and conflict fills the vacuum. The energy that could go toward creation instead fuels frustration, over-innovation, and departmental friction.

Our challenge was clear: the agency’s own site had become an embarrassment. Leadership transformed that problem into a collective mission with visible stakes—a public deadline, a team assembled from the best across departments, and the eyes of the industry watching.

The company gained a fresh, modern site, and the accolades from their colleagues and clients for being bold and innovative.

The team gained a massive accomplishment and a very fun story to tell.

Every individual gained a defining career moment., as well as lasting friendships.

That’s what a true North Star feels like—a shared challenge that elevates everyone involved.

The North Star

Can projects have North Stars? Absolutely - The Project North Star is simple: loyalty to the successful outcome of the project. It’s the compass that keeps you centered when everything else is chaos.

What makes these experiences so powerful isn’t just the end result, but rather the alignment that happens when everyone rallies around a clear, shared purpose. That sense of direction transforms hard work into meaning.

Moments like that don’t last forever, but they leave something permanent behind: proof of what you’re capable of when everything aligns. The next time your team faces something daunting, that memory becomes the standard. We’ve done this before. We can do it again.

The Five Conditions for Synergy

Having a challenge isn’t enough. You also need the foundation to support it. Five things make or break these moments:

1. The Right Team You can’t pull off the impossible with a C team. When the stakes are high, you bring your experts—the people who know their craft, understand risk, and can deliver under pressure.

2. Culture Culture determines whether a project lives or dies. Ours was transparent and fast-paced. Mistakes weren’t punished, they were fixed. Decision makers were present and decisive. Trust formed quickly, and speed became our language.

3. Communication Framework Information flowed freely. No email trails, no bureaucracy, just direct conversations and constant alignment. Everyone knew what they needed to know, when they needed to know it.

4. Project Infrastructure Lean, flexible tools kept us moving. Heavy documentation would have slowed us down. Clean and simple project plans and task lists. Multiple daily stand-ups.

5. Change Management Everyone understood why the project mattered. That shared “why” made the long hours exhilarating instead of exhausting. Requirements and testing happened in near-parallel cycles. People took ownership because they believed in the goal.

The Human Element

Even with all the right structures in place, synergy ultimately depends on people. A leader with strong emotional intelligence can sense when energy shifts, when frustration creeps in, when focus drifts and can recalibrate the room in real time. That kind of awareness is the difference between a team that stalls and one that keeps momentum.

And while you can’t force these moments, you can't turn every project into a 30-day challenge, you can recognize when they’re forming. You can feel the energy shift. The stakes rise. People care more. That’s when it’s time to lean in; to let the work pull you forward.

We don't have to leave that up excessively to leadership. Anyone on the team can create microsynergy moments—those small bursts of alignment that build trust and rhythm: solving a problem together, closing a feedback loop, explaining why a suggestion can’t move forward instead of letting it die in silence.

Over time, those small acts create the runway for the bigger breakthroughs.

These experiences can happen anywhere: in a boardroom, a testing lab, a sprint review. I’ve seen it even in the least glamorous settings, like a business systems team testing financial formulas. When the impossible starts to take shape in real time, everyone lights up.

That’s the spark of synergy. It's the quiet realization that you’re part of something larger than yourself.

The Bottom Line

Synergy is a strategy, not an accident. Build the runway. Create the stakes. Foster the right culture. Read the room. And watch what happens when individuals become one unit moving toward a shared goal.

If you’re ready to create these conditions on your own projects, we can help. We assess teams and design the frameworks that turn projects into movements. Reach out—let’s talk about your team.

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