The inner game of the contract
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
In the Inner Game of Tennis, the coaching instruction that seems to have entered the language is to watch the ball as it comes over the net to see which way it is spinning. It doesn’t matter if you know which way it is spinning, but concentrating on that gets your conscious mind out of the way of hitting the ball. What a beautiful, succinct metaphor. I can feel it in my bones, the sweet and fluent total body movement without the scratchy internal commentary.
Philip, in his insouciance, suggests that there may need to be a contract which describes what people are supposed to be doing, which way the ball is spinning, so that the real response to the challenges faced can proceed without conscious interference from “management”. Like the conscious tennis-playing mind, it would have to be focussed on something that is relevant, but tangential, to the desired outcome.
At the very least this would avoid premature closure, that is, the closing of minds and assumptions to what the real problem being faced is. That closure is common and deeply defensive, it seems designed to avoid the embarrassment of admitting that we don’t know the answers. “All our people are working really hard on this” is actually a terrible admission of failure.
I see many orgs holding their technical teams accountable for outcomes, very rarely the reverse. One-sided relationships aren’t, create toxic conditions, and fail ugly. Dan Creswell
I am not sure this quote is even grammatical but it has the ring of authentic suffering. The outcome is held to be only a technical result, of connecting the plumbing right, and the real challenge doesn’t exist. If the plumbers don’t know how to join things up, then they need training: someone must know the “correct” thing to do. I knew a high-tech company awash with cash that managed an interesting version of infinite regress. When they didn’t know how to proceed technically with implementing their mobile network design tools, they concluded that they needed a meeting with expert support to work out how to proceed. And when they couldn’t work out how to achieve the “how to proceed” they convened a meeting to design the meeting: and so on. This reminds Philip of the (sometimes helpful) step-wise approach of Prince 2, in which a document must be written to describe the document that must be written.
There is no avoiding the risk and commitment of wading into actually doing something. And sometimes it is necessary to be seen to be doing something else while that happens! I had a colleague, Ian Court, who was once a researcher at GE. He said you could only survive by having one (6 month) project complete “in the can” but undeclared, so that when you were pressed for results you could let them out in a managed way, making space for your current work, which then may become next year’s triumph.
There is something human in this playing of games over top of what earnestly passes for management in the name of efficiency; oftentimes it gets in the way of achieving the desired result. Rather like the project manager who, on the company’s award night, sheepishly confessed that his team only had a 100% completion rate for timesheets because he’d relieved them of the burden…
The game of tennis
In Bateson’s double bind, we have a concept of being dynamically stuck in a situation. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, impaled on the horns of the dilemma and in a Catch 22 with Yossarian. A bind is a bind is a bind, but sometimes people in a bind can view the situation from a higher cybernetic level and find a creative way to finesse their stuckness. Nora Bateson likes to point to Straight Outta Compton, and how utterly oppressed black youths invented a new language and a new music that turned them into superstar rappers and turned the tables on their oppressors.
In a work situation where outcomes are demanded (with menaces) in such a way that the outcomes become unavailable (cynically this is the norm) then the game being played in that way can, potentially, be transcended by a higher level game. Or, if you can follow this, the reason why the first game is so oppressive may be that there is already a higher level game being played where the first game is only a power play in some hidden battle. Here we can start to get insight into the nature of the Inner Game of the Contract.
“Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.”
― James P. Carse
In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse gives us some further clues. Once we have found how to play a higher level game, and especially if we are playing for the sake of the play NOT the outcome, then anything in the lower level game is only ever a move that can be worked with.
For David Graeber, children ask questions that come in sideways. They don’t relate to the way we are thinking about the problem and can seem zany or irrelevant or both. But when Graeber is working with his anthropology students at LSE, those are exactly the questions he wants. He can’t get those questions because the students have been learning for twenty years not to ask stupid questions, and he says it is nigh on impossible to get that cast of mind back once it is lost. Ironically, the most helpful ideas/questions are the ones that we’re most likely to reject out of hand, in blinkered pursuit of the unknowable right answer.
You see, the child is not trying to converge on a “solution” to the “problem”. The child is naturally curious and will poke something merely to see what happens. More importantly the child is passionately interested and therefore learns quickly. My youngest son went to Berlin after he left school and taught himself to be a sound engineer in a recording studio. When someone with their jaw hanging loose asked where he learned to use the new sound desk, he explained that he stayed up the night before with the manual. Everything is different when something is intrinsically fascinating.
There are games played by government departments, by big corporations, by megalomaniac entrepreneurs, indeed by anyone with enough hubris, that are not about what they say they are about. There are hidden agendas. In fact, what the agenda is or might be is at the heart of playing the game. In these games, good-hearted people striving to do their best get minced up and spat out. Because the game is not about the game, success is not success. The best example I can think of was of some property developers who worked with the Scout and Guide Association to get a lottery grant (£12M) to redevelop a campsite with a big sports centre. The sports centre was deliberately taken into bankruptcy to try and get hold of the land belonging to the scouts. In the end the brand new sports centre was left to rot.
When we play tennis, we need to hit the ball in such a way as to keep our opponent off-balance, and the first step is hitting the ball. So watching the ball as it comes over the net focuses our being on the crucial issue. When someone is playing a game we don’t understand, what we need to concentrate on is less obvious. In fact, we must focus away from the manipulation into something more like how the situation can unfold so that everyone gets to do what they need to do. This is the opposite of paying attention to the literal stated objectives and how they might be decomposed in Prince 2.
It’s a little more like our researcher friend who is operating a sort of skunkworks to be able to give management what they need in order to feel confident that enough of the right things are occurring in a controlled enough manner. In turn, this is the flip side of the cynical coin; playing games with contracts can be done in pursuit of noble ends as well as for personal politicking. Playing a different game and bending the official rules seems the likely source of every triumph, every project of which we’re proud, every legendary endeavour. Like the child who pokes at the world to discover the boundaries of the possible, it’s inevitable that there will be games within games. It’s a question of learning to play.
Learning to play games
What do people actually learn when their life is spent on games that are not what they seem? This is a really important question.
In general, they learn to keep their emotional response to what is going on out of the picture, to repress it. When we repress emotion, we cannot repress selectively: we become numb to what is going on. This somewhat zombie-like attitude to high pressure situations is common and easy to observe.
Conversely if we are to learn anything we have to have a playful engagement (Rev’d Carse again):
“We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out — when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.”
Another thing that is repressed in the name of efficiency is curiosity, because what will be learned is not knowable in advance, and it could be dangerous to the continued existence of the contracted project, or to its schedule, or promised benefits, etc. And yet, for the good of the whole, it could be dangerous not to learn whether the avenue dictated by a particular contract is no longer worth the candle (if ever it was).
One route out of this bind is to recognise that the rules are not the rules, and that even if they are, they can be changed, or forgiveness secured. Of course, this route out also leads back in.
Sometimes we learn to play a higher game for the good of the system, at least as we see it from what is necessarily a limited perspective. If our masters need to see a concrete and ‘winnable’ project, then perhaps we can fashion something rather like a tennis ball that must traverse the net, and so can be observed. Perhaps this next level game could involve a learning-focussed contract, one that allows for the evolution of continuing play.
Notice that if objectives are not objectives but moves in the game or the enclosing game, then accountability vanishes. Or accountability becomes a move in the game too. I know of major public sector contracts that were cynically succeeded with in such a way that the supplier needed to be paid do the work again. And indeed the Thames Barrier is where it is because the Port of London Authority asked for four openings for ship traffic believing they would be negotiated down to three! At huge cost to the public purse, and possibly to the effectiveness of flood defences. The “cost” mooted for any major project is a political figure precisely because the game changes once the project is committed to.
The morality of the inner game
“The curious thing is that the righter you do the wrong thing, the wronger you become.” -Russell Ackoff
Is it OK just to be a better game player than the people you are playing with? A sort of benevolent dictator stance? I have suffered all my multiple careers with people who asked me to hold off doing important things because some political gain needed achieving first. That is a really bad feeling and the political coup never happens.
Where we started this exploration was that releasing your body into the tennis is a glorious thing, or can be. The aesthetic is that we can enjoy wonderful tennis for its own sake, played by us or by Roger Federer. In an interesting way it is not about winning. So the point of having a formal contract to release space to do what is needed must share that aesthetic: it must feel right and sometimes glorious. And that is interesting because work almost never feels that way. Does it to you?
If we simply become more devious game players than those around us, we endlessly complexify the situation so that nothing means what it seems to mean. That feels negative to me: it feels more and more distant from the possibility of fluent and flowing action that is rewarding in and of itself. The challenge therefore is to be able to channel game playing into the right aesthetic. And since the world is going to remain manipulative and hostile, to do so without agreement or consensus. We can’t get there by trying to agree desired outcomes or value systems or rules of engagement. The sort of learning we will achieve is not on anyone’s list of capabilities or skills.
We still tend to value the “skill” of doing something the “correct” way. We value the certainty of best practice. We don’t want to have to trust someone to do what it takes without resorting to game playing and appearances. And yet Hubert Dreyfus claims that skilful coping, meaning dealing skilfully with an arbitrary and novel situation, is the very crowning glory of being human, the very pinnacle of our abilities. A great basketball player, in Dreyfus’ example, knows where everyone is on the court all the time. That enables a game aesthetic of another order. It just does.
What if we were to become less devious game players? I’d like to return to the potential unfolding, to the inclusion of emotion, and of bringing our “whole selves” to the work. That seems as though it might be a route to rediscovering the glorious aesthetic. It requires a setting aside of the fear that by doing so we will become mere pawns of the devious politickers, balanced by a confidence in our ability to muddle through, to cope skilfully, and that we shall ourselves be queened.
