Cooperation or Competition?

  

Cooperate or compete? It’s a daily decision faced consciously and subconsciously by workers. Humans are selfish creatures by nature, wanting the maximum output possible, even if it’s at the expense of someone else. This leads us to a process scholars call the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a decision process mixed with motives and actions that are not zero-sum. Either both groups win, one wins and the other loses or both lose.

You probably made a few decisions today that involved this thought process. If you create a successful sales technique for converting customers in your territory, do you tell your colleagues or keep it to yourself? On the one hand, if everyone could improve their sales, the company wins overall. On the other hand, if they don’t know your secrets, you remain the star for a very long time. This is the heart of the dilemma. Do you give away all of your secrets altruistically, hoard them selfishly, or is the answer somewhere in between?

Competition within an organization has its positives; it stimulates improvement and encourages refinement. It’s like the sandpaper of an organization; necessary in short spurts but not beneficial all the time. A work environment of all-competition-all-the-time creates a “dog-eat-dog” environment where someone has to lose so that another one can win.

Think about the inner workings of your organization. Could you succeed with only half of your existing departments? Would your organization thrive if you had marketing but no one to develop your products? What about if you had sales without strategy? Or what if you had math teachers but no science teachers?

You may not realize it, but if you aren’t creating a system to drive cooperation instead of competition, you are indeed sacrificing one area for the other. It’s impossible for two people to win when the system rewards only one winner.

So how do you get people to cooperate?

I present to you two examples: the “Solomon Solution” or the “Jiffy Answer”. Whichever you prefer. Two examples of twisting the system and creating a forced decision process that encourages the maximum output in the long-run:

Solomon’s Solution

King Solomon was faced with a dilemma: two mothers, two babies – one dead, one alive – and one story, both claiming to be the mother of the live baby*. In this dilemma, there was an ideal solution but little control. So Solomon created a Prisoner’s Dilemma, letting the system drive human nature to reveal the ideal outcome. Solomon offered to split the baby in half, giving one part to each mother, in order to satisfy their demands. The mother’s could both come out with something, nothing, or one could come out with much more than the other. Either way, the mothers were going to have to take ownership of the decision. The real mother condemned the recommendation (not surprisingly!), which revealed her true identity; as opposed to the non-mother who agreed that the baby should be split in two. Solomon created a self-regulating environment that punished selfishness and rewarded cooperation. He didn’t force the decision; he let the decision process force the most beneficial outcome.

Jiffy Answer

For the “Jiffy Answer”, you’ll see the same decision paradox here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdYFVN35h5w. The two brothers are faced with the familiar equity argument. Two hungry stomachs, one piece of peanut butter bread and the dilemma of splitting the bread in two. In the short term, one brother may benefit more than another. In the long-term, it’s in their best interest to cooperate.

It’s nearly impossible to force different people to work uninhibitedly and full-heartedly towards a common goal. But by creating a system that puts human nature at the center of the solution, you can sit back and watch the paradox unfold within your organization, receiving the dividends while you wait.

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*1 Kings 3:16-28

Filed under: Management