How to Use Synergy to Communicate with the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram

Synergy builds on the principles that shape group behavior when making big decisions. Synergy is the second S in the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram.

Synergy is the second “S” in the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram, and it may be the most misunderstood. Many technical professionals focus on individual personalities, but when the stakes are high and the uncertainty is real, individual traits take a back seat. Group effects dominate. Decisions are shaped not by one person’s logic but by the gravitational pull of an inner circle. If you want to communicate effectively in these environments, you must understand Synergy and, more importantly, work with it rather than against it.

Why Synergy Matters More Than You Think

In complex decisions, no one—no matter how smart—can process everything objectively. Decision makers rely on trusted advisors to help them interpret the noise. That inner circle becomes the filter through which information flows, and the group’s collective behavior becomes the real audience for your message.

This is why Synergy sits on the bottom fin of FINESSE, alongside Empathy and Structure. These three bones are all about the audience. They remind us that communication is not about what we say; it’s about how the group receives, interprets, and reinforces it.

If you’ve ever watched a technically sound recommendation fall apart because one influential participant wasn’t on board, you’ve seen Synergy in action.

Three Group Effects That Shape Synergy

Recent FINESSE posts on Frame and Illustrate emphasize clarity, simplicity, and the discipline of staying focused on what matters. Synergy builds on those same principles by helping you understand the forces that shape group behavior.

Here are three group effects that matter most:

1. Loyalty

Loyalty is the price of admission to the inner circle. It protects the organization from external threats, but it also slows change. Alliances form. Members “stick together.” A technically superior solution can be lost simply because it disrupts existing loyalties.

What to do: Identify the influencers early. If you can’t get the decision maker, get the person the decision maker trusts.

2. The Planning Fallacy

Groups routinely talk themselves into unrealistic expectations—budgets that have never been achieved, schedules that have never been met, and performance levels that defy historical evidence.

What to do: Use Illustrate (the second bone of FINESSE) principles. Show the historical record visually. Make the unrealistic obvious.

3. Performance Culture

As organizations grow, the focus shifts from individual work ethic to group norms, political considerations, and survival instincts. People align with the group to stay in the group.

What to do: Frame the decision in terms of organizational priorities, not technical logic. Show how your recommendation supports the group’s shared interests.

Why Advocacy Fails—and Dialogue Works

One of the strongest messages from Facilitating with FINESSE is that advocacy rarely works in complex decisions. A team spends months developing a recommendation, presents it once, and hopes the group adopts it. But the group hasn’t processed the information together. They haven’t reinforced it among themselves. They haven’t built Synergy.

A dialogue decision process works better because it brings the group along. It gives them time to absorb, question, and share information between milestones. It acknowledges that advisors change, politics shift, and uncertainty evolves.

Dialogue builds Synergy. Advocacy breaks it.

How to Use Synergy in Your FINESSE Communication

Here are three practical ways to apply Synergy when using the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram:

• Engage the inner circle early. Don’t wait for the final presentation. Build relationships before you need them.

• Communicate through influencers. Outsiders are often seen as invaders. Insiders carry messages farther and faster.

• Give the group time. Big decisions require social reinforcement. Rushing the process creates resistance.

The Bottom Line

Synergy reminds us that communication is not a solo act. It is a group performance shaped by loyalty, norms, and shared experience. When you understand these dynamics—and design your communication to work within them—you move from presenting information to facilitating decisions. That is the essence of Communicating with FINESSE.

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The elements of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® are Frame, Illustrate, Noise reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics.

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JD Solomon Inc. provides solutions for program development, asset management, and facilitation at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment.

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 JD Solomon writes and speaks on decision-making, reliability, risk, and communication for leaders and technical professionals. His work connects technical disciplines with human understanding to help people make better decisions and build stronger systems. Learn more at www.jdsolomonsolutions.com and www.communicatingwithfinesse.com

Why Asset Value is Poorly Done in Asset Management Programs

Treating asset value as a last step in the process or an administrative burden will simply not get the job done.

When asset managers claim their Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) or Enterprise Asset Management System (EAMS) data is 90-95% accurate, they are referring to asset attributes. In my three decades of experience, the “asset value” in the databases is usually 20-25% complete. That’s a shame because how can an organization manage “anything of value” (your assets) if you don’t understand what they are worth?

An asset is an item, thing, or entity that has potential or actual value to an organization. – ISO 55000

A Story As Old As Time

My company is usually called in to help asset management programs that are struggling or, at least, not delivering the value that senior management wants. Here is a recent version of a common story related to asset values.

“We’ve been doing formal asset management for over a decade,” explained the 40-year-old asset manager who is assigned to the engineering department. “We have patterned our program on best practices from ISO 55000.”

I asked, “Well, what are some of your accomplishments?”

“We have stood up our EAMS, built our asset hierarchies, populated most of the attributes, and started a condition assessment program,” the asset manager confidently replied. “It took some time, but we finished our asset management policy, performed a level of service assessment, and started doing risk assessments.”

“So, how is it going with assigning values to your assets?” I asked.

The blank look told me all that I already knew, “We have not gotten to that part yet. We know we need to eventually get to it, but we have had too much other stuff to focus on.”

[“Well, after a decade, how do you know the value of what you are doing?” I rhetorically asked myself.]

Why Asset Value Is Poorly Done

Large organizations manage tens of thousands of assets, each with multiple attributes. Resources and processes are rarely sufficient to maintain accuracy across this scale. Acknowledging the gap is difficult, but ignoring it undermines planning, risk management, and being able to express the value of what you are doing.

1 No One Uses It, So No One Wants to Admit It

Many asset management programs exclude asset values from their CMMS or EAMS because most systems are designed as work order engines rather than strategic investment tools. Maintenance, operations, and engineering teams typically prioritize technical attributes like horsepower, pressure ratings, and PM schedules, but view financial valuation as "accounting data" that belongs exclusively to someone else.

Without a clear mandate to link physical performance to financial outcomes, the effort required to develop and update these values is often dismissed as a low-priority administrative burden.

2 Our Databases Are Poorly Configured

An organization’s CMMS or EAMS should capture the asset value, source of the value, and year of the estimate to establish a baseline for defensible decision-making. All three fields are essential for understanding the context of any rolled-up system valuation and for indicating potential data deficiencies. Additionally, without this information, asset managers cannot accurately adjust for inflation or validate the integrity of their lifecycle cost models.

3 Asset Managers Have to Work with Accounting

In my experience, most asset managers have their technical roots in engineering and operations. That’s ironic because the traditional driver for asset management is financial accountability.

It’s easy to fall into the trap that the physical side doesn’t match up too well with the fiscal side. In practice, there are plenty of examples of that. But that’s not really the deeper issue because most asset managers fully grasp the math of accounting and understand the basics of GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles).

The friction between asset managers and accountants persists because asset managers prioritize future performance and functional risk, whereas accountants focus on historical costs and standardized depreciation. This disconnect is not a result of technical ignorance but rather a mismatch of data application and functional objectives.

While an accountant sees a fully depreciated pump as a zero-value item, the asset manager sees a critical node in the system that requires a $50,000 overhaul to prevent a million-dollar outage.

Implementation Solution: Asset Value is Equal to Asset Condition

Treating asset valuation as a periodic, standardized engineering process mirrors the rigor of condition assessments and ensures that data remains both defensible and operationally relevant. Like implementing a condition assessment program, key aspects of executing a reliable asset value program include dedicating specific teams to review these values, funding the teams similarly to the condition assessment team, and updating the database every 3 to 5 years. This systematic approach establishes a reliable baseline necessary context for long-term capital planning, risk mitigation, and achieving a fundamental outcome of any asset management program.

Solution: R&R Forecast

A Renewal and Replacement (R&R) forecast is a long-term financial projection that identifies when and how much capital will be required to renew (rehabilitate) or replace assets as they reach the end of their useful lives. The forecast serves two purposes: it shows the peaks and valleys of financial needs (which the asset management program can level and show values) and the forecast acts as a stress test for the integrity of the CMMS/EAMS database. Senior management is particularly interested in the first purpose, so getting a mandate from above is not difficult.

Asset Value is a Core Component of Asset Management

Asset value is not an optional enhancement to asset management; it is proof that the program matters. If you cannot articulate what your assets are worth today and what it will cost to sustain them tomorrow, senior management has no rational basis for funding, prioritization, or tradeoffs. Treating asset value as a last step in the process or an administrative burden will simply not get the job done. Until you can quantify the value you manage, you are not managing assets, you are simply watching them age.

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Need help getting started? JD Solomon Inc. provides practical solutions to align asset values and forecast future operations and capital improvement funding needs.

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JD Solomon is the founder of JD Solomon, Inc., the creator of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram®, and the co-creator of the SOAP criticality method^©. He is the author of Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand and Facilitating with FINESSE: A Guide to Successful Business Solutions.

12 Ways to Look at How Long an Asset is Useful

Management teams often try to answer different questions despite using what they believe is a common term related to asset life. There are many ways to express asset life.

Understanding how long an asset will remain useful is one of the most fundamental questions in facility, infrastructure, and asset management. Yet it’s also one of the most misunderstood because different disciplines approach the concept from different angles. “Useful life” is a collection of perspectives shaped by engineering, finance, and operations. Getting clear on those perspectives is the first step toward making better decisions.

The Big Three

Before we discuss the twelve ways to express asset life, let’s define the three foundational concepts that underpin many of those terms.

Mean life is a statistical term used by reliability engineers. It attempts to answer, “Based on a large population, when will the average asset or system fail?”

Useful life is an accounting term. It attempts to answer, “At what point does the asset no longer make sense to keep?”

Service life is an operations term that frames the actual asset or system life. It attempts to answer the question, “How long will this pump, pipe, vehicle, or control system actually last in service?”

Three Ways to Look at Asset Life

 So, each term reflects a different way of thinking about asset longevity. Which is best depends on situational context. The real-world issue for most management teams is that we are trying to answer a different question. More on that later.

12 Ways to Express Asset Useful Life

There are at least 12 commonly used terms for asset useful life across engineering, finance, and operations.

1. Mean Life (MTTF/MTBF) — statistical average time to failure

2. Rated Life — manufacturer’s estimate under ideal conditions

3. Design Life - how long engineers intend for it to last

4. Expected Life - life predicted under local conditions

5. Useful Life - economical or financial worthwhile period

6. Service Life (Actual Life) - how long we can make it last in its operating context

7. Remaining Useful Life (RUL) - forecast of how much longer it will be useful

8. Remaining Service Life (RSL) - forecast until the end of physical service

9. Economic Life (Functional Life) - the time that minimizes the total cost of ownership. (Obsolescence is a form)

10. Technical Life - maximum time before physical degradation makes operation impossible

11. Financial Depreciation Life - life defined by tax or accounting rules (e.g., straight-line depreciation schedules)

12. Warranty Life - period of guaranteed performance or replacement by the manufacturer

    
    

Context Matters

One of the best examples from my practice is estimating “remaining useful life” to forecast future renewal and replacement (R&R) needs.

In practice, "useful life" (accounting) and "remaining useful life" (engineering/asset management) sound alike but differ conceptually, causing confusion.

RUL is a condition‑based estimate of how long the asset can continue to perform its intended function. It’s based on degradation, inspections, performance, and failure modes. RUL is used for maintenance, risk management, and operational planning, but has nothing to do with accounting or depreciation schedules.

It’s Critical to Communicate Effectively

It’s important to know the question before you provide an answer. In the real-world, members of management teams are often trying to answer different questions despite using what they believe is a common term (“useful life” in this case).

That’s where the first F in the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® comes in. The Frame establishes the boundary conditions and the key definitions. As with useful life, there is a causal relationship between getting the frame correct and achieving effective results.

“A problem well framed is a problem half solved” – George Box.

How to Communicate Asset Life

Useful Life Requires Systems Thinking

Determining useful life is ultimately a systems-thinking exercise. No single definition or metric can stand on its own without context, and no forecast is meaningful unless everyone involved answers the same question. We reduce confusion and improve outcomes when we take the time to align terminology, assumptions, and decision needs.

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Need help getting started? JD Solomon Inc. provides practical solutions to align asset useful life and strengthen your asset management program.

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 JD Solomon's work connects technical disciplines with human understanding to help people make better decisions and build stronger systems. Learn more at www.jdsolomonsolutions.com and www.communicatingwithfinesse.com.