Synergy does two jobs and we use it for both without embarrassment. The first is the math that makes 1+1>2: Two companies that have nothing in common discover, in the months before the deal closes, that together they are worth considerably more than the sum of their parts.
The second job is smaller but more frequent. Two people from different departments share a spreadsheet. A designer attends a meeting. This also called synergy. The word elevates it into something that sounds planned, resourced, and intentional, which is a considerable improvement on the truth.
The verb form is where both uses converge. Someone has to do the synergizing. That person schedules a kickoff. The kickoff produces a working group. The working group produces a Confluence page that fourteen people have access to and only three have opened. The scale of the original problem is immaterial. The process is the same.
What makes the word durable is that it absorbs almost any outcome. Two colleagues who nodded at each other in a hallway have technically synergized.
