The Realm of Connectedness
Things that go beyond competition
Excerpted from Transcompetition, by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley, McGraw-Hill/Business Week Books, 1998
(c) by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley
Though competition is important, there are lots of behaviors it can't account for:
- It does not explain species identity. Higher animals don't devour their own. Dogs don't really eat dogs, unless they are awful hungry.
- It does not explain "biocivilization" -- the grouping habits lots of species (ants, wolves, elephants, geese) besides ourselves have to work toward common goals.
- It does not explain the interesting mutual relationships between species, like the cleaner fish that passes safely between the killer shark's teeth, picking out the tasty tidbits that lodge there.
- It does not explain how some current human societies, ones we are told are "primitive," value group involvement over individual circumstances -- while showing more genuine respect for individuals than our ultra-individualized society does.
- It does not explain families -- individuals who help and support one another, the capable attending to the less capable, often at great cost to themselves.
- It doesn't explain the kindness of strangers, why we have hospitals and social agencies, why we lend a thousand helping hands to people who have demonstrated their inability to compete.
- It does not explain organizations themselves -- people banding together and working not just for individual aggrandizement but for a collective cause.
There are in fact two contradictory impulses in human nature, the urge to wrestle and the urge to embrace, competition and collaboration. Together they encompass a characteristic called connectedness. Connectedness is just what it sounds like, the range of ways in which members of a species connect with one another. It describes how social we are, how we deal with one another, how important the self is versus the group.
The scale of connectedness ranges between the two extremes of competition and collaboration. Competition, which says that individual well-being and short-term success are the most important things, occupies the left half of the connectedness scale; collaboration or cooperation, which says communal well-being and long-term survival are more important, occupies the right half.
There is a balance to be maintained between the two extremes of connectedness, one that is right for you and for your organization. The part most people have trouble with is telling if your current "balance" is really balanced, or if you are listing perilously to one side.
- |
+ |
Competition Collaboration |
| PREDATION |
$ |
MARTYRDOM |
From eating one's own live young to
competing for the joy of victory. |
From choosing group fulfillment over individual fulfillment to waging war by suicide. |
| WIN/KILL WIN/LOSE LOSE/WIN LOSE/DIE |
The extreme ends are occupied by a supercompeter, or predator, on the left, and a supercollaborator, or martyr, on the right. The closer to the center of this graph your organization is, the healthier it is. The farther you are to the outsides of this graph, the sicker you are.
Both extreme poles are ultimately destructive to their professed objectives: survival and community.
Here are the four varieties of connectedness that typify organizational dysfunction:
- Win/kill. The extreme end of supercompetition is sadism: "I shot a man in Laredo, just to see the look on his face." Many blood-and-guts managers measure their success not by profits or per-share price but by the amount of pain they inflict on their way to victory. What surer way to guarantee victory than to exterminate the opposition? This kind of winning goes beyond putting the opponent's king in check, to grinding up his chesspieces with a pestle.
Win/kill is blood sport -- obsessive, ritualistic competition -- and it occurs not infrequently among humans but seldom among other creatures. Genocidal wars such as those fought in Europe in World War II, and more recently in Yugoslavia and Zaire, bear this imprint. Win/kill doesn't occur often in business, although you have a kind of mock win/kill in the extreme competitive styles of people like Nike's Phil Knight.
- Win/lose. This is what most of us mean by competition: "It's not enough that I win, I also have to make certain that you lose." To people caught up in this habit, the brutal trashing of the opposition is the heart and soul of competition. It is more important than whatever is "won" -- market share, prestige, an award, etc. Indeed, those are just benchmarks for the real competition, which is for dominance of the other.
While win/lose works pretty reliably in the short term, in the longer term it tends to fail because those on the losing side eventually get even and make the winning side pay for its victory. In politics, win/lose is the main game: in the U.S., Republicans win until they annoy enough people with their negativity, then it's the Democrats' turn. The pattern looks like this:
Win/lose almost always invokes what we call the Brute Cycle, which we'll describe in just a few minutes. (No, it's not an exercise machine.)
- Lose/Win. This is the martyr's position: "I will lose on purpose, then redefine defeat as victory." This is the perverse strategy of the passive-aggressive.
Many workers and middle managers cast themselves in the role of lose/win, dragging their feet or maliciously complying with the terms of an agreement. "But you said ..." is how they defend actions that undermine organizational goals. Some managers show it by indecision, trying to achieve contradictory goals simultaneously and thereby dooming both.
Former tennis champion and commentator Rosemary Casals said she could tell the moment when every match changed, from a contest to see who would win, to a search by the loser for a reason for losing. It is a sad aspect of human nature that, faced with probable defeat, we search not for a solution but for an alibi.
Lose/win can be a victim mentality often displayed in codependent and dysfunctional relationships. We blame it on nature by calling it "mother love," but it is devious in the way only humans can be.
- Lose/Die. This is anti-competition arising out of hatred, as when Samson brought down the temple, killing both himself and his enemies the Philistines. "If I can't win, I can at least prevent you from winning." The kamikaze pilots of the Pacific War were knights of lose/die. Bees that give up their lives in order to defend their community are lose/die. Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City probably saw himself this way.
- In business, we see it in companies with troubled pasts, like Eastern Airlines, that have to ask the same employees they have systematically betrayed to make concessions "for the common good." Eastern's employees took twisted pleasure in voting the company out of existence and themselves out of jobs.
People who decry lack of participation in elections or avoidance of organized conflicts such as collective bargaining should consider that the disenfranchised see voting and organizing as lose/die propositions. Staying away from the polls, or refusing to stand up for better conditions, weakens the hand of whatever government or management is put in place, while undermining their own influence over affairs. But at some desperate level it is a statement they feel compelled to make. Their vote for despair is the only "victory" they feel they will experience.
What links these four categories? First, that they all lead to behavior counter to the interests of any sensible organization (though they can be found in every sensible organization).
Second, they focus on short-term, not long term results. As such they are emotional indulgences, not part of a rational plan for sustainable success.
Third, the fact that they are all habits. They are patterns of behavior that we all characteristically slip into. They require little actual thought. We see the green light, and we step on the gas, and go off in our customary direction.
As we move along here, our goal will be to surface these unconscious mental models at the outskirts of the scale of connectedness, and to replace them with rational choices closer to the center.
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