“Yeah?” Miller said, his face lighting up.
“Yeah,” she repeated, climbing back into the ring. “I didn’t knock out your hearing, did I? I know you took a couple solid blows to the head there.”
Miller gave her a withering look and followed her. They came together in the center of the ring, bowed, tapped gloves, backed away a step, and entered a fighting stance.
This time, Mackenzie forced herself to adopt a defensive state of mind, anticipating his blows and dodging them without returning the hits. Miller started with two quick jabs that she avoided easily, blocking the first and sidestepping the second. His next blow was a knee to her ribs. She had to step away to avoid it, but she blocked the next punch while spinning back into his personal space, seeing easily where she could have elbowed him in the face if she had wanted to.
She grinned at him and backed up a step, allowing him to disengage and start again.
This time he came at her faster, in a flurry of fists and knees and elbows, but now it felt as though everything were happening in slow motion. She was already moving away from each blow in the very moment he began to throw it. Effortlessly. Mackenzie saw them all, each in turn, the inertia of one flowing smoothly into another, always limited by the ways in which the human body can move.
She stopped taking any steps away from him at all, blocking each new blow as it came until finally, unable to help herself, she caught a punch neatly under her arm, locked his elbow into a submission hold, and forced him down to the mat where she lay on top of him for a moment, her right shoulder driving into his chest, her face mere inches from his own, before she finally moved to let him up, both of them breathing heavily from the speed of their exertions.
As Miller stood up, he stared at her in awe.
“How did you learn to do that?” he asked, his chest rising and falling dramatically with each breath. “I’ve never seen anything like it! Can you teach me?”
“That,” Ammu interjected quietly, “is our ultimate goal, Staff Sergeant Miller.”
Mackenzie only smiled.
? ? ?
“So, this morning we were talking about teamwork.”
Christina was standing near the blackboard in its new orientation, with her side to the door, the students of the ICIC arrayed in the chairs in front of her. She turned toward the board and underlined the last thing she had written down: ‘BIGGER - LIKE MAGIC.’
“We said that sometimes, given the right circumstances, a team can become greater than the mere sum of its parts, able to accomplish things together that they could never accomplish alone. This afternoon, I’d like to focus on the conditions that can bring this about. What is needed to bring such a team together? Anyone?”
Sam sat closest to the door, frowning, her shoulders slouched low in her chair, her arms crossed defiantly in front of her chest, the seat next to her standing empty. No one said a thing.
“Daniel?” Christina finally asked after several painful moments of silence. “You mentioned this morning that a band can be this kind of team. What makes a band become something bigger than just a handful of musicians?”
Daniel shrugged, embarrassed to be the center of attention, but Christina smiled and waited, not ready to let him off the hook so easily.
“Well, they all have to know the music,” Daniel offered.
“Good!” Christina exclaimed, obviously trying to sound encouraging. “What else?” She flipped the whiteboard over and drew a vertical line right down the middle of the new, clean side. On the left, she wrote: ‘Know the Music.’
“They have to be decent musicians,” Daniel said, warming up to the topic a little. “They can’t just know the music, really. They have to be able to play it well.”
“Excellent,” Christina agreed, nodding, and she wrote ‘Good Musicians’ underneath ‘Know the Music.’
“They have to play in the same key,” Daniel said, more hesitantly now, “and with the same timing. But that’s kind of obvious, I guess.”
“No, no. That’s very good,” Christina said, writing these below the first two items on her list. “Anything else?”
“I don’t know… they have to kind of… synch. You know? It’s more than just timing. They have to be in the same groove, vibing the music together. They have to… like… feel it. Does that make sense?”
“Perfect sense,” Christina confirmed. “People who study teamwork have a name for it. They call it ‘synergy.’
“People have observed this phenomenon in many different kinds of teams, working under very different circumstances. A team of soldiers might start moving as a unit without any discernible signals between them, or a corporate team might start building on each other’s ideas to come up with a whole new product design, or an advertising team might offer up a suggestion for a new slogan and somehow everyone knows immediately that this is the right slogan for the campaign.
“Although there does not seem to be any specific formula for creating a synergistic team, experts agree that certain factors are necessary for it to exist, and believe it or not, you have hit on several of them already with your band example.”
Christina beamed at Daniel and turned back to the whiteboard. Next to ‘Know the Music,’ she wrote ‘Expertise’ on the right side of the board. Across from ‘Good Musicians,’ she wrote ‘Proficiency.’ For ‘Key’ and ‘Meter,’ she wrote ‘Place’ and ‘Time.’ Then, on the left side, she wrote ‘Vibe/Groove,’ and on the right side, she wrote ‘Synergy.’
“For a synergistic team to form,” she said, “the team must co-exist in space and time. This does not have to be literal. Teams can work together in virtual space, for example, and can contribute to a process at different times, but studies have shown that synergy appears much more consistently when a team is located together in the same physical space, collaborating simultaneously.”
As long as they all have their own expertise, Sam thought bitterly. As long as they’re all at least marginally proficient and not pathetic losers who don’t know what they’re doing on the team in the first place.
Sketch leaned forward and turned to stare straight at her. Sam had no way of knowing that out of the corner of his eye, Sketch had noticed a sudden change in the flames that zipped around her, or that he had seen them start to slow down, changing gradually from their usual white to a deep, indigo blue. All she knew was that he was staring at her, silently accusing her of not belonging there at all.
“What are you looking at?” she demanded. “You’re not really a team with Rush, either, you know. There’s no magical synergy there. He totally carries you on that stupid video game, and he only plays with you because he feels sorry for you.”