Changing the Game
October, 2004
“Shouldn’t we realize that we are possessed so we can dialogue with our ideas, control them as much as they control us, and submit them to tests of truth and error?” — Edgar Morin
On a sunny winter morning in June 2004, I asked a group of community leaders in Inanda township at the outskirts of Durban, South Africa, what the word “game” made them think of. We were at the start of a workshop called “Changing the Game”, being held at a community center, and the twenty-five participants were leaders of community associations and cooperatives. Many of them were working voluntarily to try and address the complex issues facing Inanda and its neighboring townships, and feeling a pressure to learn as much knowledge and as many skills as possible to enable them to do this work.
I had arrived at the workshop feeling a bit anxious and concerned about being a European facilitator descending on a township for two days with my conceptual frameworks about changing the game and then leaving again. But what transpired was an intense and deeply real conversation right from the outset about the games we play, the rules we accept, why we keep playing, and what we can do to first see, and then change, the game.
In the initial exercise, the first association the participants had to the word “game” was the idea of “winning the game”. Then came comments like, “it’s about having someone to play with”, “knowing the rules”, “winning prizes”, “improving at playing the game”, and “training”. These points gave a perfect doorway to the conversation and into the following two days of exploring what it means to change the game.
They also provide a useful framework for my own reflections on the same topic.
Why this article?
Conversations around “Changing the Game” have recently gained fuel in the Pioneers of Change network. Since a meeting in December 2003 in Brazil, where this was a central conversation, it has been taken up in various countries and has led to a series of dialogues and workshops in the local networks and with partner organisations.
The conversation is inspired by the stated beliefs of Pioneers of Change which offer useful context:
“Life, in its essence, moves towards plurality, diversity, interdependence, self-constitution, and self-organisation — in short, towards the fulfillment of its own freedom. Throughout time, humans have built and reproduced systems of production, types of society, and frames of mind, that contradict Life. While we are taught to work within such a system (and the system learns to work within us), both our intuition and our senses tell us that it is fundamentally flawed, and that we can do something about it. We can change the rules of the game.” (from Pioneers of Change Charter, 2000)
The idea of changing the Game is, in many different ways, a thought we have had since the time of our founding. When Pioneers of Change was started, it was out of a concern that young people upon entering working life soon start leaving their values and idealism at the doorstep to the workplace, and playing by ‘the rules of the game’. They start to accept existing power structures and the prevailing definitions of success/ winning, and focus on moving “up the ladder”. Dreams, courage, and imagination start to take the back seat.
Now the conversation about what this means is deepening and becoming more sophisticated. In my experience, the idea of the “Game” is a generative one in these times for diverse groups of people: I’ve found that people I meet want to talk about it, and so do I. Passionately. It’s like starting to see everything in a different light, understanding the difference between the superficial approaches to solving our challenges — which seem to be most common and focus on addressing symptoms — and getting to the deeper level of transformation that is needed, while using language that is accessible.
My intention with writing this piece is to unpack this idea as a contribution to this global dialogue.
Returning to the story of the workshop in Inanda, the points identified by the community leaders are ideas we can all identify with when thinking about games. What happens if we look closer at each of them?
The first point they mentioned was “winning the game”.
Winning the Game
We are taught that the Game is about winning. In fact, as soon as the word “game” is used in organisational or social life, it is often to justify the existence of winners and losers. We are told that life and “survival” depend on your ability to compete and if you can’t accept that basic fact, you’re going to suffer the consequences.
Competition certainly has its time and its usefulness. James P. Carse in 1986 wrote a brilliant treatise called “Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility”, in which he speaks of “finite” games being played within a larger, “infinite” game. According to Carse, “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning. An infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
The dominant games we are playing in modern society are finite games. Life itself, as I understand it, is the great infinite game.
For me, Carse’s book is less about the actual games than about what kind of player we choose to be. We can choose to be finite or infinite players. The main difference essentially is that infinite players engage in finite games well aware that they are finite games. They choose consciously to play as long as it doesn’t jeopardise their infinite game. They don’t take the finite games too seriously.
As a simple example, I have a good friend, Anthony, who shares my passion for sustainable living but like me, is not perfect at practicing it. We have a little competition going at the moment about who can live most sustainably. The desire for winning keeps us going, but we both know that our big Game is that as we both become better at living sustainably, we both meet our purpose. This is competition within a larger context of collaboration. We engage in a finite game for the sake of furthering the larger infinite game of Life. If our finite game were to start jeopardising the infinite game, we’d stop playing.
On the other hand, as was recently pointed out to me, what often happens is that we try to “cheat at the big game [the infinite] for the sake of winning at the smaller games [the finite ones]”. The win-lose worldview is becoming deeply engrained.
I personally experienced this when I spent seven years in a highly competitive educational environment where I and all my class members were ‘ranked’, so we knew how we compared to each other and who was number one. Four years of that was spent in an American university setting where the grading system is on a so-called ‘curve’. This means that all the scores are collected and graded in relation to each other, such that in effect, each student’s success depends on the failure of others. There must be losers for you to be a winner. Some students were generous and conscious enough not to let this affect their relationships — others became very secretive, and knowledge sharing was limited. Studying was a lonely exercise.
When I graduated, I returned to my home country Denmark and started a Danish university. In this system, we were set up as a study group of four people. Our papers were written together and exams taken together — and all of us got the same grade. Suddenly the rules of the game had shifted. My success depended on the success of my peers, how well we could teach each other, and on how well we could ‘play ball’ in an exam setting: making sure the one who was best at a given aspect of the subject had the ball at the right time, and that everyone’s talents were utilised and allowed to complement each other. This was a powerful experience of seeing the game I had been playing and how a different game based on a completely different set of assumptions could actually foster my genuine learning in a better way. It was also a tough process of needing to “unlearn” some of my old competitive habits and a wake-up call to my ego, which I now feel came just in time.
Having someone to play with
We all have a need to belong. If we want to play games, we have to have someone to play with. If we disobey the rules, or start playing a different game, we may not be allowed to participate in our group of peers.
The president of Inanda Soccer Association smiled as he shared a story of a young boy from the township who was used to playing rugby and who got so stressed during a football game that he picked up the ball and just started running to the touchline, pressing the soccer ball so hard against his chest that when he reached the end of the field, it was indeed shaped like a rugby ball! Of course he wasn’t allowed to play with the team if he wasn’t going to play football. You have to accept the rules of the game to be allowed to play. Instead, this little boy was an outcast.
C.S. Lewis in his famous speech, “The Inner Ring”, delivered in 1944 at King’s College at the University of London, asserted that “of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.” The “Inner Ring” is that imaginary circle of the important which people strive to belong to. This desire to belong is timeless. But Lewis warned that the Inner Ring is an illusion, that it is like an onion: once one is on the inside, one immediately sees another more exclusive layer or Inner Ring to strive for. He suggested that if one can break this desire to belong to an Inner Ring, a “surprising result will follow”. If you follow the desire to join the Inner Ring, you will “reach no ‘inside’ that is worth reaching, but if you follow purpose and build genuine relationships, you will find a friendship and meaning that no Inner Ring can ever have.
Prizes
When we play the Game well, we get rewarded. In a different workshop, I recently asked a group of youth what success meant to them. The answers in order of being expressed were: having a house, having a job, being your own boss, having a boyfriend/girlfriend, having high status, having power, having a nice car, having independence, having money…
…and finally one quiet female voice in the back of the room carefully said ‘joy’.
It almost goes without saying that these answers that first came to mind are often seen as the prizes for winning in the game. To ask the question of ‘how do you know you have succeeded’ is a good indicator of what are the prizes for winning the Game and what kind of attachment you have to the prizes. Through socialisation, school, peer pressure, organisational culture, and perhaps most importantly, seductive and sophisticated advertising and marketing, we are taught that these prizes are indispensable. Life is meaningless if we don’t have all these things.
But like the onion of the Inner Ring, the prizes are also never enough. Perhaps because what we really need to be happy is not to be won through a finite game. A friend of mine, Collette Kariuki, from Kenya recently remarked to me “it’s nicer to ride a bicycle to the beach than to drive a Mercedes to work”. Personally, I find “it’s nicer to ride a bicycle to work you love and believe in, than to drive a Mercedes to work you are doing for the money.” Others may have other sources of joy and priorities, some may have Mercedes and meaningful work. The point is to question whether the prizes are really so important, to be aware of what we are sacrificing for them and to put them in their proper place.
Why we play
These first three of the points mentioned by the group in Inanda reflect James P. Carse’s three reasons why we keep playing finite games:
- Because we’re taught that the Game is about winning, and we’re blinded by maintaining progress. We start to believe that we don’t have the choice of moving in a new direction.
- Because we can lose permission to play if we disobey the rules or if we don’t maintain a certain level of performance according to our role in the game.
- Because it may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensable, that without them life is meaningless.
These forces in our life can be strong, and so there are real reasons why we keep playing, linked to real human needs. The problem is that we’re not even aware of these concerns as reasons to play a game. If we were, we could consciously weigh them up against reasons not to play, and make a wiser choice. We don’t ask that question. As Edgar Morin states, “If we can hope for basic progress in the 21st century, it would be that men and women could stop being the unconscious toys of their own ideas and self-deception.”
Having covered these three concepts, the remaining associations listed on the workshop flipchart in Inanda are related to each other: “knowing the rules”, “training” and “improving at playing the game”.
Knowing the rules
There tends to be an inherent unfairness in the way different people have access to the rules of the Game and the qualities it takes to play. What kind of access do people have to knowledge of the underlying structures influencing their reality? Most formal schools are still teaching one set of rules. The materially poor schools just churn out graduates who are less well trained in the rules. The focus in helping them is on their lack of training in how to play the game, not on how they could create new games, or what alternative games they might be adept at playing.
One of the resourrces I’ve found useful from the “Training for Transformation” series of development literature is their outline of four different responses to poverty:
- Welfare
The problem is due to circumstances beyond our control, bad luck, fate. We need to relieve immediate suffering through charity. - Development
The problem is a lack of education, resources, opportunities, and technology. We need to raise production, provide training and equal opportunities, and help people to help themselves. - Liberation
The problem is due to exploitation, domination, oppression, and alienation. We need to challenge and overcome the exploitative structures and fight evil. - Transformation
The problem is due to inadequate structures and values. We need to build alternative economic, political, legal and educational structures, create new forms of education and share responsibility.
I don’t usually like to force things into boxes too much and of course this model is also brutal in that sense. Still, I do find it useful to distinguish things by what they are not, and I found the terms of this model are familiar, and help to exemplify what “Changing the Game” means.
The first two responses to poverty, welfare and development, could broadly be seen as accepting the current Game and focused on “knowing the rules”. The welfare approach is really just alleviating the impact of the current Game. The development approach is enabling more people to play the Game — provide training, technology, get more and more people into the Game, make the rules more accessible. But it doesn’t change the Game.
The liberation and transformation approaches both see the problem as structural. The liberation approach is more aggressive and potentially destructive, freeing us from this game without necessarily giving a lot of attention to what comes instead. You may still need to know the rules, but here, you need to know them in order to change them. The “no” tends to be clear in this approach, the “yes” less so.
Each of the three first approaches have their time and place: I am currently involved in giving money to charity and in developing a course for social entrepreneurs involving training in organisational strategy, marketing, and fundraising (the first two models). South Africa is a testimony to the importance of liberation, and I doubt that this model has lived out its usefulness yet.
But only the transformation approach is really about creating new games, and I believe we live in a time when transformation is needed. We need to be supporting those experiments that are testing out and building up alternative forms of organising, being, learning, working and relating to one another.
Seeing the game
So what is it that we’re needing to learn as pioneers? If we want to change the game, we have to first see the game that we’re playing and our role in it. This conversation is the first step — realising that we’re playing finite games, that there are reasons for playing them, that there are rules, and that this is a choice we are making.
Three years ago in Pioneers of Change, we started running a series of sessions called the “Hypocrites’ Club”. The Hypocrites’ Club was for change agents who recognise that they are a part of, and dependent on, the very same system they are trying to change. We often hear the familiar saying “if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem”. Instead, the Hypocrites Club said “if you’re not a part of the problem, you can’t be a part of the solution”, that is, if you can’t see how you’re involved in playing the very same game, how can you be involved in changing it?
During the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg 2002 we held our most successful and well attended Hypocrites Club ever, perhaps because hypocrisy was in such plain sight and yet never spoken about in the formal conference settings. Throughout Johannesburg during the two weeks of the Summit, there were billboards everywhere, buttons on people’s shirts, stickers on people’s folders, with the same slogan: “I’m doing my bit, are you?” It infuriated me for its lack of introspection and invitation to critical dialogue. Who was this anonymous “you”, who wasn’t doing its part if we were all wearing these buttons? One of our partner organisations, Imago, printed t-shirts saying “What if I were the problem?” and we wore those instead.
In learning to see the Game, we need to ask ourselves some important questions:
- What games am I playing right now?
- If I win, who loses, and does it have to be that way? Does it matter to me?
- What are the beliefs and assumptions behind this game?
- Who knows the rules? Who is helped to learn them?
- What defines success? How important is it to succeed?
- Whose interests does this game serve?
- Where does this game come from? Who defines/d the rules? (We all legitimate them)
- And I’m sure there are many more…
One of the exercises we have found useful in Pioneers of Change is to share stories of a time in which we each discovered a game which we were playing, which we didn’t have to play. One of the pioneers, Linda Mbonambi, who works in the Durban municipality office responsible for Inanda township, shared how he was taught at university that life is organised in sectors — you study engineering, medicine, social service, law, or other specific disciplines. This continued when he started working for government with local community development. There was the health sector, the education sector, the environment sector, the public works sector — all not talking to each other and not taking each other’s priorities into account. When a leader with a different paradigm came into the organisation and changed it to a “customer-focused approach”, putting the community in the center, he realised they could be doing it completely differently.
Another good approach is to look for the paradoxes. When we see paradoxes and inconsistencies, it’s likely to be a sign that the Game needs changing. For example, why do we have so much unemployment when there is so much work to be done? Why do we go to war in the name of peace? Why are people hungry when there is enough food for everyone? Try to put on the lenses of the little boy in the HC Andersen fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, start noticing the inconsistencies with a child’s perspective and asking these questions. The answers aren’t obvious, and the questions are open, but the paradoxes can be powerful conversation starters, and can generate important learning.
None of us will individually ever be able to see the whole Game. Recently, one of our mentors, Oscar Motomura, said “Liberate yourselves from this mandate!” What we need is a collection of stories from a variety of perspectives, good questions, and sharing of paradoxes. Diverse people each bring a piece of the puzzle and as we join together and share the games we are seeing, we can start to understand the patterns.
Choices
At a Pioneers of Change event in Johannesburg about “The Corporate Game”, someone made the statement that we choose whether we want to play or not. My feeling is that this is too simplistic. It’s not that easy to just pull out of the Game in practice. My own approach so far to change is that the solution is not for us to retreat from engaging with the system — hence the Pioneers of Change principle of “engage with others”. Engaging with others to some extent requires practical compromises.
However, I do think it is possible to pull out of the Game in your mind. To take a powerful metaphor that is also real, I think about Nelson Mandela — you can be mentally free while being physically in prison. Meanwhile, many of us could be said to be mentally in prison while having a world of opportunities in front of us.
Of course we are at the moment dependent on, if not imprisoned by, the way society functions. On the way back to Durban from Inanda, one community development worker said he was sick and tired of hearing people saying that the poor are in control of their own destiny and that change has to come from them. He felt the power lay elsewhere and that such philosophies were just another way of keeping the poor in their place. I suppose his comments would fit in the liberation box among the four responses to poverty.
It may be true that there is more power to change the Game elsewhere, but who has an interest in changing it and what is going to happen if we don’t start with ourselves? This is a mindset to carry with us in our daily lives. As one of the insights emerging from the Inanda workshop, Hlengiwe, who works in the Sakhu-Umnotho Cooperative, pointed out that she might not be able to influence all the causes of crime in her community, but she can ask questions about where the goods she buys come from. We always have a choice to start with ourselves and to change our own game and our own participation in however small a way.
Capacities of the pioneer
What are the capacities I and we need to develop in ourselves as we go about our pioneering work of changing the Game? I believe this is the most important question for us to engage with, even more so than starting to envision what games we want to be playing.
One of the ways we have described what Pioneers of Change does is to look at our work along two axes, one axis is world/system <-> self and the other is reflection <-> action. We try to make sure we work across both of these two axes. We can use this image to understand the capacities we need to develop to change the Game as well. This table illustrates an initial brainstorm of what these capacities might be:
This is not a metaphor
I don’t consider the Game or the games to be a metaphor. It’s a way of looking at reality. These are genuinely real games that we are playing — which play themselves out in many settings. It’s easy for one to dismiss the bureaucracy game, the capitalist game, or the corporate game as the ‘bad game’, and to feel ourselves above that because for example, ‘I work for an NGO’. But there are multiple games that we are playing along with in society. Recently I named some games I have personally been playing: the ‘globetrotter game’, the ‘development game’, the ‘perfectionist game’ and the ‘we are the ones we’ve been waiting for game’, not to mention the ‘consumption game’ which we are all trapped in to a greater or lesser extent.
Imagining new games: An invitation to reflection and action
A month after I facilitated the sessions at Inanda, I met Vuyiswa, one of the participants who had been a bit reserved throughout the workshop. She told me she had learned something profound through an exercise we had done on the topic of crime, where we had looked at the attitudes of the offenders, the victims, the citizens, and the justice system, using roleplaying and human sculptures.
She had realised that her own “us and them” attitude toward crime, seeing the offenders as inhuman and separate from herself, was not helping the situation. She had since hired two ex-convicts in her organisation and was now working with them to become reintegrated into the community. “I am playing a new game now,” she said with a big smile and somehow a look of relief on her face. Just that one encounter alone warmed my heart and made me feel like the whole exercise was worth it. My hope would be that each of the participants would have such a story to tell.
Oscar Motomura once in a conversation described the alternative game we should strive to design as one that will by design root out unethical behavior. I don’t know how to design and bring to life such a game and of course it is a very tall order, but to me it is a powerful and challenging thought worth sharing.
At the same time, if we take this too explicitly as an aim, the enormity of the task can paralyse us. I like to be able to think big and to feel that there are many of us who are part of shifting the current reality, while acting within what is my realistic sphere of influence.
My current suggestion is that, as pioneers, we need to focus on learning to see the Game together, to challenge it articulately and through our actions, to collect and tell thousands of stories about both old and new games, and to work on developing those qualities of a pioneer that will enable us to change the Game. For this we need to be engaging in action, in multiple experiments, and reflecting intensely together on what we are learning. If we can do this, we will start imagining and generating new games that do not compromise the big infinite game of Life.
This is a slightly condensed version of an article originally written in 2004 as part of a global dialogue in Pioneers of Change on “Changing the Game”. The article was followed by comments from 11 pioneers to stimulate the dialogue further. The original version including these comments is available on google drive here.
Pioneers of Change was a global learning network of young people, aged 25–35, who committed to be themselves, do what matters, start now, engage with others, and never stop asking questions. The “pioneers” included social entrepreneurs, corporate and NGO professionals, civil servants, artists, teachers, and free agents from a variety of cultural and social backgrounds. Founded in 1999, Pioneers of Change was at the time of writing this article engaging over 2000 participants in over 70 countries.
The network was actively cultivated for about 10 years from 1999–2009. The insights gained, commitments made, and relationships forged continue to strengthen and inspire those who were involved.
