Applications

Synanim is optimized for a variety of applications and uses.

Mission-Driven Organizations

In this turbulent time, societal values are changing fast. The action plans and messaging that worked in years past — or even just last year — may be irrelevant and tone-deaf today. Many mission-driven organizations (MDOs) are struggling to understand and communicate with their donor base.

MDOs typically use surveys and focus groups to better understand their community but both approaches are unreliable.

Surveys require a fixed set of pre-selected questions. Word choice matters and it is impossible to know of any conceptual misalignment your questions may have. And focus groups may be tainted by the social influence of articulate, assertive, or attractive participants.

Hiring a consultant to administer these approaches may help or it might just produce a false sense of confidence.

Synanim avoids these pitfalls by starting with a blank slate. Your constituents build a vision from scratch. Sessions begin at the foundational level, shared values. From there, groups then construct a sense for what matters, what's missing, and how best to provide solutions.

Your constituents may develop a mission statement, strategic plan, or any consensus document. And the data is recorded. You may review the progression of ideas from all participants as they progressed to the final result.

Corporate Management

Peter Drucker states that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” asserting that no strategic plan will succeed without a workforce aligned and engaged to implement it.

Interacting socially as a workforce, your employees construct concepts that combine to form “culture.” Perspectives are shared and either supported or refuted. For instance, do your employees think of “quiet quitting” as laziness or as justified behavior? And if the latter, how do you change this?

Drucker hints at step one with, “What gets measured gets managed.” And there are many instruments available for surveying and assessing employee attitudes at scale. But what is step two? How can you steer attitudes to where you need them?

Synanim provides administrators with a scalable means of directing employee perspectives. It guides them along the only path that works: social constructionism, the process by which we construct our beliefs at the cultural level.

Starting with core concepts, Synanim gathers employees into small anonymous groups and directs them to answer questions such as, “What human values are important?” Employees are then presented with all the answers from their group and instructed to select one to build upon as they answer a next question such as, “How does our company support these values?” and later, “What challenges do we face in maintaining these values?”

The goal is to build a positive story for what you do that is anchored in the values your workforce shares. A poor culture is not a reflection of negative values. Choices that seem negative simply have a different conceptual rationale. For instance, quiet quitting is a response to feeling exploited.

Mental Health Providers

America is experiencing a mental health crisis. Pew Research confirms that roughly one-third of adults experience some form of depression. And many who report a need for mental health services do not access them due to cost concerns.

Synanim can help. Socially constructing perspectives with others helps ease alienation. And projects may be structured to engage narrative therapy, which establishes each of us as the expert in our own lives. We all have problems but they do not define us. We all have knowledge, skills, and values that can reduce the influence of our problems. We just need a positive inner narrative.

Synanim brings support groups together to collaboratively create positive narratives. People in need offer a self-assessment then they and their group write a positive, hopeful story.