ON CNERGI

Cnergi is a deliberate misspelling of the word 'synergy' and represents both the meaning of the word synergy which means the creation of a whole that is greater than the simple sum of its parts and it also stands as a short form for 'CeNtre for the EmeRGence of Inclusive identities'.

The word 'synergy' comes from the Greek word ‘synergos’ (συνεργός) meaning ‘working together’ and illustrates our mission of bringing diverse, even conflicting elements of a system to work together in creating a whole that is stronger and better than its individual elements.

We aim to facilitate this process of emerging such a ‘whole’ at various levels:

• The Individual: where we work with inner identities, internalised normative frameworks that lie behind our individual motivation, sense of meaning in life and also behind the internal conflicts we experience.
• The Organization: where we work with the experience at various levels in organizations, including informal or invisible hierarchies, issues around working with diversity and in establishing structures of inclusion and collaboration across the organizational systems.
• The Community: where we work with bringing together diverse voices in our society and facilitate the expression and integration of these voices to facilitate a deeper sense of relatedness between ‘I’ and ‘You’, and ‘We’ and 'They'.

PRINCIPLES

Empowerment: we believe that all change begins with empowering the self and the ability to bring about this change within the self is a prerequisite to bringing about any change in the world. We believe this requires an identification and appreciation of the centres of our inner identity, the recognition of our own patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that create our experiences, an awareness of how we respond to the circumstances we may find ourselves in, in our work and life, and a construction of a strong inner sense of self informed by this knowledge.

Empathy: we see empathy as the capacity to understand and feel what another being is experiencing from within the other being's frame of reference. It enables individuals to develop more satisfactory interpersonal relations, increases cooperation in situations of conflict or competition and improves attitudes toward stigmatized groups, or simply those groups with which one does not identify. Through the design of human interaction and reflection, we facilitate the emergence of such empathy.

Emergence: we believe that the whole is greater than the simple sum of its parts. Emergence is a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties. But the value added by the system as a whole, beyond that contributed independently by the parts, is created primarily by the relationship among the parts, that is, how they are interconnected. We focus on creating and deploying requisite structures and processes to create such relationships and interconnectedness that would facilitate emergence.

Centre for the Emergence of Inclusive Identities