Attention blindness and the social business
November 26, 2011
Cathy N. Davidson has studied the way we make sense and think. Her claim is that we often end with problems when we tackle important issues together. This happens “not because the other side is wrong but because both sides are right in what they see, but neither can see what the other does”. In normal daily conditions, it may be that we don’t even know that other perspectives other than our own exist. We believe we see the whole picture from our point of view and have all the facts. Focus however means selection and selection means blind spots leading to (attention) blindness. We have a partial view that we take as the full picture.
This is one of the reasons why people in companies are often stuck in narrow, repetitive and negative patterns that provide them with numbing, repressive and even neurotic experiences.
The opportunity provided by social tools lies in the widening and deepening of communication, leading to new voices taking part and new conversations that cross organizational units and stale process charts.
According to Cathy Davidson, attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain. Attention blindness is also the fundamental structuring principle of our organizations and our political system. We see and understand things selectively.
Knowing in the brain is a set of neural connections that correspond to our patterns of communication. The challenge is to see the filters and linkages as communication patterns that either keep us stuck or open up new possibilities.
The opportunity lies in the fact that as we don’t all select the same things, we don’t all miss the same things. If we can pool our insights we can thrive in the complex world we live in. In this way of thinking, we leave behind the notion of the self-governing, independent individual for a different notion, of interdependent people whose identities are established in interaction with each other.
From this perspective, individual change cannot be separated from changes in the groups to which an individual belongs. And changes in the groups don’t take place without the individuals changing.
Our attention is a result of the filters we use. These filters can be a mix of habits, company processes, organizational charts or tools. Increasingly these filters are social. They are the people we recognize as experts. Our most valuable guides to useful bits of insight are trusted people whose activities we can follow in real time to help us enrich our views.
Management research has focused on the leadership attributes of an individual. Leading and following in the traditional corporate sense have seen the leader making people follow him through motivation and rewards. The leader also decided who the followers should be.
Leading and following when seen as a relationship, not as attributes of individuals, have a very different dynamic. Leading in this new sense is not position-based, but recognition-based. People, the followers, also decide. The leader is someone people trust to be at the forefront in an area, which is temporally meaningful for them.
People recognize as the leader someone who inspires, energizes and empowers them.
Another huge difference from traditional management is that because of the diversity of contexts people link to, there can never be just one boss. Thus, an individual always has many “leaders” that she follows. You might even claim that from the point of view taken here, it is highly problematic if a person only has one leader. It would mean attention blindness as a default state.
We are now at the very beginning of understanding leadership in the new contextual, temporal framework. The relational processes of leading and following should be seen as temporary, responsive activity streams, not only on the Internet but also inside companies. They are manifested as internal (Twitter) feeds, (Facebook) updates and blog posts from the people you associate with.
Richer, more challenging, more exploratory conversations leave people feeling more alive, more inspired and capable of far more creative and effective action.
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Thank you Cathy N. Davidson and Doug Griffin
The future under construction
October 31, 2011
The approaches of industrial management have given us remarkable material well-being over the last few centuries, but are increasingly being criticized for not being suited to handling the needs of today. Organizations need to excel in innovation. Companies also need to embrace rapid change and uncertainty. Some of the most creative ones have even gone so far as to take a “let’s just do cool things and see what happens” approach, trying to avoid traditional governance systems. Is this yet another sign that management is in crisis?
The industrial theory of management is based on top managers choosing the future of their organization and guiding its development in the right direction. The belief is that managers can make useful forecasts and set goals. Their daily responsibility is to monitor activities to identify gaps between the goals and actual outcomes so that the gaps can be closed. Uncertainty plays a minor role. Managers know what is going on.
Every business is a set of assumptions that are taken as given, thus reducing the perceived uncertainty. The whole plan–execute cycle is a process designed to prove those assumptions correct. But assumptions are never totally right most often not totally wrong, either. Accordingly, it is quite seldom that ideas are turned into a successful business in just the way described in the business plan. Things change.
In conditions of rapid change and uncertainty, there have to be systematic processes indicating progress and new opportunities as they emerge. This is much more important than forecasting or planning. It is about testing the assumptions continuously and signalling which assumptions are helpful and which are not. It is about finding out repeatedly which of the efforts are creating value and which are wasteful. Are we on the right track? Are we progressing? What new possibilities have become visible?
Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer. Anything else is waste. But what if we really don’t know? Then the most important business process is to find out. We have to learn what creates value for different customers in different situations. “Anything that does not contribute to learning is waste” as Eric Ries puts it. The business challenge for a creative company is to learn fast and cheaply!
Management theory needs to leave behind the industrial, mechanistic model of reality and the belief in linear if-then, causality. The sciences of complexity, non-linear dynamics, uncertainty and creative learning are the foundations of modern, human-centric management.
The task of managers is not the reduction of uncertainty but to develop the capacity to operate creatively within it. Ilya Prigogine wrote in his book “The End of Certainty” that the future is not given, but under perpetual construction:
“Life is about unpredictable novelty where the possible is always richer than the real.”
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Thank you Eric Ries, Stu Kauffman and Ralph Stacey
On trust
October 28, 2011
Dire economic outlooks typically lead to emotional reactions and social fragmentation. This always results in bad decisions and conflicts. Then frustrations increase further as the established ways of doing things come under greater attacks. Irritation over the perceived ineffectiveness of governance systems then creates the wish for a saviour, a strong person, to come and clear up the mess. This is how we create dictators, this is how they come into power. This is how Hitler was elected.
The same dynamic is still inbuilt in our political and social systems and should be taken into consideration when we try to figure out what may happen next. Rather than trying to resolve situations through discourse, populist politicians are increasing tensions through an “us versus them” rhetoric in pursuit of support among their own.
We face a repeating social pattern: with growing economic difficulties, the populist stance is to blame “others”, normally “foreigners”, for taking our jobs or for taking our money.
Aristotle had interesting ideas to explain what was going on in the economy. Aristotle made a distinction between two kinds of value added – one that we get from nature’s resources to sustain our lives, and another, which we create to facilitate our relationships and trade.
The value added in the latter does not begin from nature, but from the promises we make to one another – from money.
There are limits to what we can get from nature, but, according to Aristotle, since money is promises, there is no end to the amount of money we can aspire to collect. What is special about money, Aristotle says, is that its value is set by mutual agreement. It has no intrinsic use value, only an exchange value, and it keeps that value only as long as people agree to accept it in payment. As long as there is trust.
Therefore it is understandable if the expanding social dynamic reaches a point where promises are not believed any more. After that limit is passed, the result is a sudden and deep crisis. The whole house of cards crashes because it is made of promises that don’t have any value any more. Fear replaces trust. At the moment, it does not take much distrust to cause solvency problems to highly leveraged banks – or highly leveraged countries.
What is a fairly new phenomenon is that buying and selling are no longer confined to resources, to trading goods and services. The world economy mostly consists of buying and selling money, buying and selling promises according to Aristotle. This is why we are so deeply interdependent and why we are even more dependent on building and sustaining trust.
The only way to sustain democracy is to work together and share the burdens and the efforts – whatever happens.
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Thank you Ray Dalio and Mikael Jungner
Why do I have to cooperate?
September 23, 2011
Somebody recently asked me: “Why do we have to cooperate? I know my job. If I do my job and everybody else does his, we will be fine. The people I work with every day know what to do. I don’t get it why I need to be communicating with those other guys.”
Today’s organizations are complex systems that require continuous, responsive coordination to be effective. Work is much less repetitive than before. Job roles and work instructions can never be complete descriptions of what needs to be done. Work is not separate actions but connected tasks. It is all about links. Who needs to connect can never be fully planned in advance. Interdependence is contextual, situational. In order to be successful, the constantly changing people forming the organization have to be able to connect effortlessly.
The days when we could just do our own thing are over.
When it comes to understanding the organizations in which we work, most of us understand best our own jobs and the work groups we have been part of. As a result from individual, reductionist scorecards, most people are ignorant of the larger network in which they work. When problems arise, this unawareness of how things affect one another often leads to short sighted and suboptimal solutions. Issues are resolved in favor of just one point of view.
When the circle of involvement is larger many changes occur. When people see where they fit in the bigger picture they are able to see the interdependencies and are able to respond much, much faster to changing conditions. Our research shows that transparent processes are more than four times faster than corresponding processes where people just see their own part.
Any one person or any one function cannot meet today’s challenges alone. We need a community of people who willingly participate and provide their insights to address the increasingly interdependent issues. Cooperation is necessary because one person no longer has the answer. Answers reside in the interaction, between all of us.
The challenge today is engagement. Widening the circle of involvement means expanding who gets to participate. It is about inviting and including relevant, new and different voices.
The unfortunate misunderstanding is that engaging people requires managers to let go. As managers contemplate to widen the circle of involvement they sometimes believe that it means to have less ability to provide input based on their knowledge and experience. Paradoxically, engaging more people requires more from managers than the current management paradigm. Instead of being responsible for identifying both the problem and the solution, they are now responsible for identifying the problem and identifying the people whose voices need to be heard. Who else needs to be here? How do I invite people who do not report to me? How do I invite people from outside our organization?
Success today is increasingly a result from skillful management of participation: who are included and who are not, who are excluded.
Another misunderstanding is that productivity will suffer if larger numbers of people are involved. The new social platforms and interaction technologies have dramatically reduced the cost of participation. Temporal communities can be formed to solve a problem or to tackle an opportunity easier, cheaper and faster than ever before – if people are invited and if people want to engage.
We all have the experience of teams discussing among themselves about what is working and not working. People often degenerate into blaming the parties that are not present. “If only the other group would get their act together!” This kind of thinking never produces learning, responsiveness and agility. Bringing more people into the conversation is essential. When you widen the circle of participation, you widen the solution space.
“If there are enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow” as Linus Torvalds put it
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More on the subject: Lessons from wikipedia. A HBR blog post by Gartner.
Patterns and social objects
February 27, 2011
Complex systems are, as their name implies, hard to understand. The main difference between the sciences of certainty and the sciences of complexity lies in the different causal frameworks they are built upon.
Up to now, we have seen the world around us as systems that, we thought, could be described and understood by identifying causal links between things: if I choose X, then it will lead to Y. If, on the other hand, I choose A, it will lead to B.
We are accustomed to drawing boxes and lines between the boxes. We try to model the world as predictable processes that we can control.
The mainstream ways of thinking about management are based on the sciences of certainty. The whole system of strategic choice, goal setting and choosing actions to reach the given goals in a controlled way depends on predictability. The problem is that this familiar causal foundation cannot explain the reality we face. Almost daily, we experience the inability of leaders to choose what happens to their organizations – or to their countries.
We live in a complex world. Things may appear orderly over time, but are inherently unpredictable. If a system’s long-term behavior is unpredictable, goals can still be set, but there is no certainty that the actions taken are going to realize them.
Complexity refers to a pattern, a movement in time, that is at the same time predictable and unpredictable, knowable and unknowable. Healthy, ordinary, everyday life is always complex, no matter what the situation is. Human patterns that lose this complexity become repetitive and rapidly inappropriate for dealing with life. Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity. An exact replication of behavior in nature would be disastrous. For example, a failing heart is typically characterized by loss of complexity.
Human interaction cannot be understood as predictive processes but as patterns
A pattern is something that unfolds through the complex interactions between elements in a system. Although there is apparent order, there is never exact repetition if the system is viable. This is why human interaction cannot be understood as processes in the way they were used in manufacturing, but as patterns.
Patterns that are more repetitive are normally called routines or habits. However, those routines do not cause our behavior. Instead routines are emergent patterns. They emerge in what we do. They continue to be sustained only as long as they are present in our everyday interaction.
The American sociologist George Herbert Mead (1863 – 1931) distinguished between two types of objects: physical objects and social objects. While a physical object may be understood in terms of itself, a social object has to be understood as being composed of patterns of interaction.
Mead referred to a market as an example of a social object. The acts of buying and selling define a market. Markets cannot exist without these social activities. When one person offers to buy something, this act involves a range of responses from other people. A person making an offer can only know how to make the offer if she is able to understand the attitude of the other parties to the bargain. The ideas of buying and selling are thus always interconnected. This is why it is called a “social” object.
The routines define the object. The social object can only be found in the conduct of different individuals engaged in the social act. Thus, there is no market that can be understood as an “it”. Mead’s social objects are not things but generalized tendencies to act in similar ways in similar situations.
We find it easy to regard social phenomena as things with an independent existence. We talk about financial markets being “nervous”. We want more people to recognize patterns “to predict what is going to happen”. But patterns can only be found in the experience of interaction itself. They have no existence separate from interaction and we cannot influence the patterns as separate entities.
We can just participate in interaction – in a dull and repetitive way or in a creative and rich way.
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Thank you Jyri Engeström for opening this discussion on the 13th. of April, 2005, with “The case for the object-centered sociality“. Thank you also Melanie Mitchell, Ralph Stacey and Keith Sawyer.
More on the subject: Venessa Miemis. Thierry de Baillon. JP Rangaswami. Article on Wired magazine. Blog post on Complexitys. Gartner on “Emergent Structures” Deb Roy in TED
Social media, start-ups and the system of management
February 24, 2011
In a start-up, the coordination of work takes place through the transparency of activities, close proximity of people working together and mostly informal, responsive, ongoing communication.
I have often wondered when and how the transformation to the world of formal reports and meetings takes place.
After closely studying several case companies, it seems to me that it is not at all the growth of the company that requires the development of formal communication systems. That takes place as a result of the managerial thinking that has evolved in response to growth.
The mainstream view of management science sees the organization as having a separate existence from individuals. In organizations, as in machines, the interchangeability of parts is thought to promote efficiency. This means that processes retained in workers´ interaction should be recorded in documents and passed back to govern work. The aim is to rise above the individual memory and to establish an organizational memory. This is what mainstream knowledge management was all about twenty years ago: “If only HP knew what HP knows”.
Industrial management has been about depersonalizing the workplace in the interest of efficiency, even up to the point of seeing people as (human) resources or (valuable) assets. Because of the strong desire to outdo the individuals, the communication habits of a “managed” company need to be different from the start-up. You have to go from conversations to documents.
Management is a system of communication
In this system you talk about flows, not people. There are flows of information to allow middle and upper management to monitor and control what goes on at lower levels. There are flows to guide the lower levels and to coordinate process steps. The ideology of management demanded “exact” written communication. It dismissed ordinary conversation as just talk. The controlled form of talk was a meeting with an agenda and clear outcomes. And you were supposed to come well prepared.
Industrial management is a particular pattern of communication based on specific assumptions about causality and human agency. This approach to coordinating activities was technically based on the high price and low quality of communication tools.
What social media allow us to do in organizations is to create transparency of activities, close proximity of non-co-located people and active, ongoing, responsive communication that coordinates and controls. The price of communication has gone down and the quality of tools is dramatically better today.
It is time to rethink some major issues.
What an organization is emerges from the relationships of its members, the interacting individuals. It is the people! The efficiency and creativity of the organization is a result of the efficiency and creativity of daily communication. We all enable and constrain one another all the time, meaning that we coordinate and control one another all the time – as we talk.
Changes in the organization always mean changes in the patterns of communication and vice versa. Novel patterns of communication necessarily change the organization. This is why social media challenge management as a system of communication and coordination.
Management as we are used to seeing it is getting more and more outdated.
We have started a research program on management in complex, responsive work. We study human-centric value creation that builds on the Internet and the very latest digital interaction technologies. If you want to be involved in the group of academic researchers and practitioners, please contact me or professor Doug Griffin.
We know that even very big corporations can be like start-ups!
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Thank you @jobsworth for being the inspiration for this post. I hope the discussions around the “systems of engagement vs. the systems of record” continue
Thank you Doug Griffin, Ralph Stacey and Clay Shirky
More on the subject: Steve Denning. Umair Haque. Peter Stoyko.
What does the “social” in social business really mean?
February 19, 2011
We have assumed that if we each looked after our own interests, an “invisible hand” would arrange things so that everything worked out for the best for everyone. Game theory has also made it clear to us that in the short run, those who take an I win – you lose approach, will always win out over those who try to employ an I win – you win strategy.
Before Adam Smith wrote “The wealth of nations” and came out with the idea of the invisible hand, he had already written something perhaps even more interesting for our time. In “The theory of moral sentiments” he argued that a stable society was based on sympathy. He underlined the importance of a moral duty – to have regard for your fellow human beings. Those who developed a win – win culture would always do better in the long run.
What defines most problems today is that they are not isolated and independent but connected and systemic. To solve them, a person has to think not only about what he believes the right answer is, but also about what other people think the right answers might be. Following the rhetoric of game theory: what each person does affects and depends on what everyone else will do and vice versa.
When it comes to understanding the organizations in which we work, most of us best understand our own jobs and the work groups of which we are part, our strong ties. When problems arise, this disconnectedness and unawareness of how things work in the larger system often leads to shortsighted and suboptimal solutions. A person or a group is essentially looking after their own interests. As a result, problems are solved in a way that easily leads to more problems. These behaviors often mean that I count and you don’t, resulting in people being pushed away from one another instead of coming together.
The word communication means to make something common. To make things common, we shared ideas and information. But a social business is not about senders and receivers of information. It is not about content that is conveyed from one person who acts as an authority to the others who act as instruments of this authority.
A social business arises as a result of self-organizing interaction within the always developing, jointly constructed reality.
Our experience is that when one person says something, the other person does not respond to exactly the same meaning. Thus when the second person responds, the first sees a difference between what he meant to say and what the other understood. On considering this difference, he may be able to see something new, which is relevant both to his own views and those of the other person. Thus people coming together in conversation are always creating something new.
Connected people are able to create value and solve problems together on a totally new scale and with unprecedented ease. The challenge, however, is still the same as it was in the time of Adam Smith. We need to have regard for fellow human beings beyond our strong ties. We need to value how they think!
Perhaps stable social businesses are based on social value and sympathy?
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More on the subject: Mark S Granovetter on The Strength of Weak Ties. The Washington Post on the Economics of Cooperation. Luis Suarez blogging about Louis Richardson “A Copernican revolution to become a social business “
From systems to ecosystems
February 12, 2011
In the past, the influence of external forces on business was not significant. The industrial factory was a fairly simple, isolated machine. The rest of this system was designed around the machine with tightly integrated supply chains and optimized use of coupled resources insulating the machine from shortages and stock-outs. Being efficient and productive inside the system was enough to prosper.
The assumptions of industrial management are not suited to today’s business environment. In contrast to the industrial era, when value was added primarily in the repetitive manufacturing processes, value is today created elsewhere, outside of the old industrial system. Value is co-created in the context of usage through customizable, reconfigurable and more or less unique solutions aggregated by the customer, not the manufacturer. There are no consumers any more!
The new environment is marked by conflicting constraints, variables that shift very rapidly and value creating relationships that change constantly.
Linear methods of management are not effective in a complex environment.
The ecosystems approach to efficiency is not designing processes but recombining successful elements to create new versions, some of which may thrive. Global coordination arises, unplanned, from the local, responsive interaction of the elements.
The traditional management approach was to require each worker to assume a predetermined responsibility for a specific role in the process sequence. The ecosystem approach represents a different logic of organizing based on neither the traditional market nor the process. Whereas processes involve relations based on dependence and markets involve relations based on independence, ecosystems involve relations of dynamic interdependence.
Minimal hierarchy, organizational diversity and responsiveness characterize ecosystems. Ecosystems are a response to the increasing complexity of strategic horizons and short half-life of designs. To cope with the uncertainties firms see themselves and the world around them as ecosystems, where every unit, every node in the network, should engage with learning. Instead of centralized design and planning, the activities of exploration are the responsibility of the whole network. Because of greater complexity, coordination and communication cannot be planned in advance, controlled or managed hierarchically.
Authority needs to be distributed; it is no longer delegated vertically but emerges horizontally in the networked ecosystem. Under distributed authority work teams and knowledge workers need to be accountable to other work teams and other knowledge workers instead of a single boss. You need to have many “bosses”. Success at ecosystems depends on learning by mutual accountability and responsiveness. This is much more than matrix organizations or internal markets.
Management and strategy used to be about rational choice between a set of known options and variables. Under circumstances of rapid technological change, the challenge is to create openness to possible options. Management of ecosystems is about facilitating continual renewal. Organizing in ecosystems is not something you do before you can work, but work is organizing. Success is based on continuous redefinition of the organization itself. It is about recombining options and contributions in a competing and collaborating environment.
The industrial model was based on thinking alike and subscribing to the same goals. The ecosystem model is based on diversity. New forms can emerge only if the nodes of the network differ from each other enough.
Instead of focusing on whether some managers institute more efficient processes or design the division of work better than others, ecosystem theory suggests that the properties of communication and connection between people are the causes of success. What the ecosystem becomes, emerges from the relationships of its members.
Value creation cannot be understood as industrial systems any more, but as continuously developing, complex, responsive ecosystems of connected people.
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Discussions around the Nokia / Microsoft ecosystem: TechCrunch. GigaOM. Scobleizer. The official Nokia blog. GigaOM. The Intel opinion. The Wall Street Journal. Asymco on the Burning Platform Strategy.
More on the subject: Consumer innovation by Eric von Hippel. Blog post by Stowe Boyd. The connected company by Dave Gray. From products to ecosystems by John Steen. Blog post by Michael Anton Dila.
How to fight group-think
August 29, 2010
The mainstream approach to groups and teamwork underlines the need for consensus and cohesion. It is believed that members of an organization should commit themselves to its policies and chosen direction. Many writers claim that people should share the same vision, be positive and work harmoniously together. Seeking consensus often becomes so dominant in a group that its members tend to leave out of any alternative thinking. The symptoms of what is called group-think arise when people are not motivated to judge or criticize views and assumptions. People are positive and seek harmony on issues with no conflict to spoil the “we” atmosphere.
Often the more cohesive the group, the greater the inner compulsion on the part of the group members to avoid creating a disturbance. This often leads to people believing in the soundness of whatever proposals are promoted by the leader, or by the majority present. The danger is not so much that each individual will fail to reveal ideas that conflict with what the others propose, but that he will think that the proposal is a good one, without attempting to carry out any critical study of the possible alternatives. When this kind of group-think becomes dominant, there is often a considerable suppression of deviant or creative thinking. But it takes the form of each person deciding that his differing thoughts are not relevant and should be set aside.
Evidence of the group-think symptom is that things are left unsaid.
James C Thomson was a historian who studied the Vietnam War through observing decision making in the US State Department and at the White House during the war. He writes about the victims of group-think ignoring warnings. People collectively construct rationalizations in order to discount any negative news and feedback that, taken seriously, might lead the group members to reconsider their assumptions, as they recommit themselves to past decisions. Thomson’s findings came into my mind as last Wednesday I listened to Anssi Vanjoki defending Nokia’s past strategic decisions – no mistakes have been made!
Thomson writes about the fall of 1964. Just before the bombing of North Vietnam began, some of the policymakers predicted that six weeks of air strikes would force the North Vietnamese to seek peace talks. When someone asked: “What if they don’t?” the answer was that “Another four weeks would certainly do the trick!” The assumptions behind the decisions were never questioned.
What is being discussed in groups is often unclear. The lack of clarity is the very reason for having the conversation. We come to know what we are talking about as the conversation develops over time, if it develops. Communication is not one person saying something and others listening in order to understand what is being said, and thus formulating a joint decision. Whatever people do in groups is accomplished in communication, which always has a thematic pattern. The thematic patterns are, in turn, iterated over time as repetition, group-think or creativity. The demand that (management) group meetings are carefully planned and agenda-based may actually kill the possibility of any new meaning to emerge.
A group’s ritualistic adherence to meeting procedures and idealized rules of behaviour may create a false justification of the decisions made.
Research on complexity and creativity has shown the importance of diversity. If members join a group and have nothing in common at all, obviously, joint action will be impossible. But perhaps the bigger challenge today is if they conform too much in the name of group cohesion and thus block the emergence of the new. Organizations have the capacity to change only when they are characterized by diversity and deviance.
What is needed in groups, is paradoxically, conformity and deviance at the same time.
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Thank you James C Thomson, Irving L Janis, Clay Shirky and Patricia Shaw
(Mårten Mickos blogs about this topic in Finnish)
More on group-think
Competitive and collaborative games
May 9, 2010
When coordinated behaviour takes place without the intervention of a regulating authority, we often attribute the coherent action to the existence of values and ethics. We tend to think that the existence of a strong value base means that less or even no regulation is needed. A decay of values conversely means that rules and regulation are needed.
A game theory approach to values assumes that people choose the kind of behaviour that gives them the highest expected benefit over time, given their expectations about what the other players will do and the rewarding or punishing feedback they get as a result of their own actions. Players learn by trial and error, keeping strategies that work and altering the ones that turn out badly. Players always observe each other. Those with a poor performance often tend to imitate those who are doing better. What has worked is likely to be used again.
In most games who wins and who loses is the whole point of playing. It would be hard to imagine a more unpopular outcome in the reality TV-series that today are watched by millions, than an announcement that all the players ended up as winners! It is, of course, beneficial that the place of the lazy, the incompetent, and the unmotivated is taken by better-motivated and more enterprising players.
Competitive games require rules to prevent players from cheating. Competition should be as fierce as the existing laws allow, we think. Any ambiguity in the regulations is immediately exploited. This is where our thinking does not serve us any more. Innovations by the players often make existing rules obsolete and call for new ones, as we have recently experienced in the financial markets. The present relationship between regulators and financial institutions is a competitive game in itself. Instead of a home audience watching, here we have the markets watching. The principle is the same.
There are also other growing problems with the games we play. In competitive games, there is always a lack of appreciation for the need of complementarities. You are supposed to manage without help from others. As a result of competition which excludes, diversity is reduced in the system that the game is played in. There are also more losers than winners in our games. Losers multiply as winning behaviours are replicated in the smaller winners’ circles and losing behaviours are replicated in the bigger losers’ circles.
As losers are excluded from the game, they are not allowed to learn. The divide between winners and losers grows constantly. This is why, in the end, the winners have to pay the price of winning in one way or another. The bigger the divide, the bigger the price that has to be paid. The winners end up having to take care of the losers, or two totally different cultures are formed, as is happening in the big US cities today. Psychologically, competitive games create shadow games of losers competing at losing.
The games we play have been played under the assumption that the unit of survival is the player, meaning the individual or a company. However, today the reality is that the unit of survival is the player in the game being played. Following Darwinian rhetoric, the unit of survival is the species in its environment. Who wins and who loses is of minor importance compared to the decay of the (game) environment as a result of the competition.
We need a new concept of the game
In games that were paradoxically competitive and collaborative at the same time, losers would not not be eliminated from the game, but would be invited to learn from the winners. What prevents losers learning from winners at the moment is our outdated zero-sum thinking and the winner-takes-all philosophy. In competitive/collaborative games the winners would be all those whose participation, comments and contributions were incorporated in the development of the game.
The most important reason why we need a new concept of games is because the players and their contributions in the real world are, at best, too diverse to rank. They are, and should be, too qualitatively different to compare quantitatively. In competitive games the players need to have the identical aim of winning the same thing. Unless all the players want the same thing, there cannot be a genuine contest. Zero-sum games were the offspring of scarcity. In the era of creativity and abundance, new approaches are needed.
In competitive/collaborative games the approach to rules is very different from before. The rules should be created, agreed upon and changed by the players themselves as the game continues. As there absolutely cannot be pre-existing rules for every conceivable situation that might arise, we have to move beyond seeing the players and the rule-makers as separate parties. The games are too complex to be governed totally from outside. We desperately need values-based participation as a prerequisite for taking part.
The players have the responsibility not only for adhering to the existing rules, but also for developing the rules further – specifically when the game (environment) decays as a result of the actions of the players.
The criteria for success in competitive games do not lie solely in winning but in the development and continuation of the game itself through collaboration.
Thank you Fons Trompenaars and Robert Axelrod
Background
