Every M&A deal I've worked on has included a synergy target, presented with impressive precision — a specific percentage cost reduction, calculated to the decimal point, justifying the premium paid. In my experience, the precision of these numbers bears little relationship to how reliably they're actually achieved.
Synergy targets get built during deal negotiation, under pressure to justify the price to a board or to shareholders, by teams incentivised to find a number that makes the transaction look attractive rather than a number that reflects genuine operational reality. The target becomes an input to the deal decision before it's been stress-tested as an operational plan.
By the time integration teams inherit the target, it's already politically difficult to revise downward, regardless of what the operational reality actually suggests — revising it means admitting the original deal case was optimistic, which nobody involved in approving the deal wants attached to their name.
The integrations that manage this honestly build an independent operational reassessment of the synergy target within the first quarter post-close, explicitly separate from the deal team that built the original number, and report the gap transparently rather than quietly redefining success to match whatever turns out to be achievable.
A synergy target that was never operationally stress-tested before the deal closed isn't a plan. It's a number that made the deal easier to approve, and treating it as a genuine operational commitment without revisiting it honestly is how integration programmes end up reporting success against a fiction nobody wants to name.