|
ARTICLE: LOSERS CAN BE WINNERS TOO!
Imagine that you
are participating in a knock-out tennis tournament. If you
are a tennis player this would sound rather a routine event,
but wait…there’s a catch. The tournament rule of progression
is inverted. In every match the loser (yes, the loser!)
progresses to the next round and the winner is knocked out.
Imagine also
that you are the local tennis champ and entered the
tournament before knowing the changed rule. You have been
told about this new rule a short while before your match and
you are now contemplating the best strategy to employ.
On the one hand
you need to win to maintain your standing as the best player
and on the other hand you realize that winning the match
would knock you out of the tournament. What would be your
strategy for the match? Equally what is your opponent’s
strategy as he is also playing by the same rule?
You have the
choice of playing badly to ensure that you lose. It is
possible that your opponent would also choose the same
strategy and the match would end up as a series of
intentional mistakes and, while you might progress to the
next round(s), you are unlikely to obtain any satisfaction
from your playing performance. Or, you might decide to win,
maintain your standing as the champion player and not
progress further in the tournament. But, the fact your
performance was not rewarded in the conventional sense would
likely make you unhappy.
Effectively,
therefore, you lose whichever strategy you select?
Busy high
performing executives in the business world face similar
decisions many times in a working day. The problem is that
most often they do not realize that the decision-situation
is as simple (or complex depending on how you view it!) as
the one described earlier. And at the end of a busy day, if
they were to take stock of their decisions they would recall
that many times the end result was distributed between
“losses” and “wins.”
But, corporate
executives are measured on the quality of their decision
making and it is necessary to have greater wins than losses.
To resolve this dilemma, let us return to our tennis
champion and assist him in selecting a match strategy.
Imagine, that
you – the tennis champion – decide to change your mind-set
and no longer look upon the match as a lose-lose situation.
Instead you decide to go out, play your natural game and
irrespective of the real outcome consider that you have won.
What is the likely outcome? Once the pressure of winning in
the conventional sense is removed you will discover that you
are actually enjoying the game.
In his early
twentieth century masterpiece, “As a Man Thinketh”, the
novelist James Allen captures this situation aptly in this
couplet:
Defeats are steps by which we
climb
With purer aim to nobler ends;
Loss leads to gain, and joy attends
True footsteps up the hills of time.
In actual fact,
when players were placed in this tournament situation many
of them claimed that they had played the best games of their
life. In some respects the description of their feelings
during the game coming close to a state that athletes
describe as “playing in the zone.”
In technical
terms this state is also known as the Flow state – a state
where the person is totally absorbed in his task, where
distractions are excluded from the consciousness and the joy
of undertaking the activity is its own reward.
We may now ask
ourselves, what can the busy corporate executive learn from
the experience of our tennis champ?
He can learn to
cultivate his thought process so that he believes himself to
be in a win-win position, whatever the decision-situation.
In the process he will find himself gradually working in a
state of flow. A state where there is no difference between
work or play, defeat or victory. A situation best summed in
this short poem attributed to the Zen Masters.
The Master simply pursues
excellence,
in whatever he does.
He makes little distinction between,
his work and his play,
His labour and his leisure,
his mind and his body,
His education and his recreation,
his love and his religion,
He hardly knows which is which,
for he is always doing both.
|
