Nearly forty years ago, a small book called out to me from the shelf of our local public library: Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse, then a professor of history and religious studies. As I read through it, I noticed that many of the book’s examples drew heavily from recent U.S. experiences in Vietnam. Some of Carse’s conclusions struck me as overly simplistic. Still, I liked his basic premise, summarized as:
“ There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities … in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game … includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game.”
A few years before I encountered the Carse book, I’d been involved in a set of human potential workshops. My recollections of that overall experience are somewhat hazy, but I distinctly remember one simulation involving finite and infinite game possibilities. Late into the evening of the next to the last day of our multi-day workshop, we participants were divided into two teams of about fifty people each. All of us were tired. Still, we all wanted to “win” by showcasing our full potential to our workshop leaders. Each team was then led into its own separate soundproof room, isolated from the other team. We were very limited in our inter-team communications—only short written messages could be exchanged by “runners” between the rooms.
During successive rounds of the simulation, we could vote as a team either to cooperate with the other team, or to compete with it. Our leaders had deliberately kept vague any rules about how to decide our team’s vote, how to guess the other team’s strategy, how to know when the game would end, or even to know what the object of the game might be. Not until after the simulation ended were we asked to consider whether the aim of the game might have been to maximize our overall results by consistently cooperating. (Similar games have been used by game theorists to examine human behavior in a wide variety of circumstances. Some such simulations are labeled “the prisoners’ dilemma.”)
Later, while our children were growing up, I became acquainted with one of the teachers in their school system’s enrichment programs. Though John Hunter didn’t directly interact with our children, some of his ideas percolated throughout the system. Near the end of his school teaching career, he became something of a celebrity by publishing a book about a term-long simulation he had engaged in with many successive classes of elementary school students.
The book, World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements, has since spawned a TED talk, a film, and a non-profit, The World Peace Game Foundation (worldpeacegame.org). To “win” his world peace game, Hunter established that by the end of the multi-round simulation, the inhabitants of his four mythical countries must not be engaged in active conflict. Also, their collective total resources must be greater than when the game started. He didn’t try to prefigure the outcome of any of the simulations. He let the students work through their own process, being available only to answer process-related questions. Often, he was sure until the very last minute that he and his students would “lose” the game. He was/is sometimes amazed at the creativity and empathy of nine and ten year olds tasked with solving 50 interlocking and mutually reinforcing problems.
By the time this blog entry is posted, we will be less than 60 days from the 2024 U.S. elections. If this election cycle is like most recent ones, inflammatory rhetoric among candidates and their partisans will be escalating. “Facts” will be cherry-picked, sometimes not facts at all.
So I take heart from a sequel to Carse’s book that came out in 2019, Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game. The author, a management consultant and bestselling author, begins with an acknowledgment of Carse’s precursor work. Sinek then expands on Carse’s premises with examples from his consulting practice. He also sets out five guidelines for playing an infinite game, regardless of the stances of the other players around you:
—advance a just cause (not just increasing shareholder/stakeholder wealth)
—build trusting teams (partly by modeling empathy and inclusion, partly through coaching)
—study your worthy rivals (they can help you improve)
—prepare for existential flexibility (sometimes you have to bet the ranch)
—demonstrate the courage to lead (don’t expect the process to be easy; do your best to stay both humble and connected)
Whatever putative leaders we may choose during this election, afterwards we will each have the option to orient (and/or reorient) our life choices. We can tilt toward playing more finite or more infinite games. Maybe in the long run, whether we know it or not, we’re all playing an infinite game.
Jinny's Occasional Poems 