“This is not working.”
"This is not working. We are six weeks in this project and haven't achieved what we planned." This is how a project review meeting with my team used to start. "The customer is not doing their part. We need to push harder," the team continued. These challenges derail the project's timeline, which is always a major issue when there is so much to deliver. What would you do if you were the manager of this team?
Team meetings like this are typical in many organizations. It is all about pointing out what we are doing wrong and where we are failing. The boss blames the team for not trying harder. The team ends up finding more tasks to do and consequently gets stressed out. Not even entrepreneurs are spared! A friend of mine, who is the CEO of a major company, shared her frustration of not seeing results during the pandemic, even when working a lot harder. I asked her, "isn't it time to work smarter instead of harder?"
There may be many reasons why we believe we must work harder after every meeting. Here is where it comes from: it is a habit you learned in your school years! In previous articles, I emphasized the importance of forming habits. It takes 10,000 hours to become an expert on anything. You spent 16,800 hours in school, kinder through 12th grade, sitting and waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Then came that test, and a BIG RED pen pointed out your mistakes. You were told you must try harder, or you will never get into college and never succeed in life. Do you believe this is true? Then reflect on this: did Michael Phelps need to ace literature to become the most decorated Olympian of all times?
We formed the habit of laser focusing on our school years' mistakes and solving them by trying harder. We bring this habit to work later in life. We become perfectionists, stressed out about what the boss will say in the next meeting. We prepare to blame someone else whenever there is a flaw in the project, like blaming teachers for not teaching well. Is there a way to fix this? It all comes down to playing the infinite game!
In my book Becoming Einstein's Teacher, I use game theory to explain the importance of self-assessment that can be developed while students are in school. "There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite," philosopher James P. Carse wrote in his book "Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility." Finite games, he explained, have clear rules known by all players, and end when a single player wins. Because a finite game must have a winner, there is a huge focus on enforcing the rules to maintain "fairness" to all players. Card games, sports, board games, and video games are finite. Players compete against each other, someone wins, and the rest of the players lose.
An infinite game's objective, on the other hand, is never to end. Rules, boundaries, and even players may change along the way to keep the game alive. In Carse's definition, "finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries." In infinite games, players contribute to keeping the game alive with a clear purpose. Players have continuous awareness, able to identify the required resources and skills they need to develop. There are no losers; everyone is a winner as long as the game continues. The challenge is to keep the game alive.
Standardized tests evaluate students' capacity to remember—or memorize—what they have, in theory, learned throughout the school year. They create a dynamic of competition because their nature compares one student's testing performance to another's under the same set of rules and gives those students A to F labels: winners and losers. This culture becomes prominent throughout learners' lives: Striving to be "the best" gets in the way of being better than they were yesterday. Like finite games, standardized tests require rules set by a third party—the education system—to compare students to each other. The students end up frustrated when they do not win.
If we teach students to play an infinite game, they will learn the habit of continuously transforming themselves, which is a key to happiness in this ever-changing world. Continuous self-improvement creates inner peace, and therefore, a better quality of life. And, putting educators into an infinite game instead of a finite one will lead to happier teachers focused on innovation and finding new ways to bring out the best in each learner.
Take Amazon, for example. Its CEO Jeff Bezos says that a customer will never say, "I want more expensive products" or "I am willing to wait longer to get my order." They want to pay less and have it faster. So, its ultimate focus is to improve the shopping experience and shorten the delivery time continuously. That customer will always come back over and over. This is an infinite game.
Children CAN learn to play the infinite game of life with appropriate practice while in a safe school environment. By allowing learners to choose a path, experience, and self-assess the consequences of their choices, we also will enable them to gain awareness of how decisions impact their reality under the coaching of their teachers. The infinite game enables children to become life-long learners because they develop the habit of continuous improvement of the best version of themselves.
You may be asking yourself: I already have this bad habit you talked about. Is there a solution for me? Well, start your team meetings by highlighting your achievements so far and recognizing the team's strengths. Then evaluate what areas need improvement. Self-assess the execution process rather than just trying harder using the same process. And if you want to learn more to continuously improve yourself, read chapters 8 through 13 of Becoming Einstein's Teacher!
