The word symbállein comes from the Ancient Greek and literally means “to put together”. This term is the root of symbolic, and designates the action of uniting, joining together and converging. The opposite of symbolic is diabolic “to throw afar”, which has to do with the forces of separating, parting and diverging.

As in social and personal life, life in organizations and businesses is marked by these two dimensions: the symbolic and the diabolic. Love, solidarity, union and convergence on the one hand; antipathy, hatred, unkindness and divergence on the other.

Conflict and separation have the effect of quashing any desire to cooperate or join forces in the quest for complex solutions, and make it hard to build up situations in which interdependency can be a driving force for competitive intelligence and innovation.

The outcome is chaos and disorder, which engenders mistrust and thereby raises the transaction cost between people. In an organization of excellence, the experience of cooperation shows that optimal outcomes are actually the result of structured processes. Our team jointly develops a vision of what this would look like: every person having the chance to add their own vision and encounter others that see things differently. They can test their differences in practice, work out where they can align, and maintain a natural level of disagreement that is necessary for productive dialog and interaction. People start to gain a shared understanding of what a process or a procedure is; what excellence, merit, ethics and leadership are.

This engenders effective communication and provides the structure for organizations’ recruitment, selection, promotion and dismissal processes. It is a way of ensuring that their members share the same view of the organization and their work in it. We therefore understand that as the people in a group interact, when they start to share the same symbol to reflect on their own experience and to structure their decision-making processes, they gradually form their own culture. Symbols are a way of sharing meanings and getting communication flowing more consistently, and it is in this sense that the term symballein reflects the essence of our work as consultants.