No contest: cooperation rules

While the hosting of the football World Cup was a wonderful victory for all South Africans, I keep thinking back over those fabulous five weeks and the fierce national pride of the fans. Pride that sometimes turned to anger and vitriol at bad refereeing decisions and Uruguayan handballs and to incredible sadness and sometimes even suicide when teams lost.

It made me recall something I read a few years ago on the subject of competition. Something we are told is critical to a successful free market economy. Essential business strategy. No question. Cast in concrete. No argument.

Well, Alfie Cohn doesn’t agree. He’s the American author of “No Contest: The Case Against Competition”, which won the National Psychological Award for 1987. After going through more than 400 case studies, Cohn came to the very firm conclusion that competition is destructive and counter-productive not only in excess.

“It is destructive not merely because we are doing it the wrong way  –  it is destructive by its very nature. I think the phrase ‘healthy competition’ is a contradiction in terms and the ideal amount of competition [notice that he doesn’t say conflict] in any environment  –  the workplace, classroom, family, playing field  –  is none.”

Cohn draws a distinction between what he calls “structural competition” and “intentional competition”: “By structural I mean ‘mutually exclusive goal attainment’, which is a fancy social expression for ‘I succeed only if you fail’.” There is a stronger version of this, which is ‘I succeed only if I make you fail’.

“In the first case you may be talking about golf or tenpin bowling  –  I do something, you do something, I do something, you do something and at the end, of course, we have to have a winner. We compare scores, but we don’t interfere with each others’ performance.

“The stronger version, we find in war or tennis in which for me to do well I have to actively interfere with how you do it. This doesn’t mean that all tennis players are nasty and malicious. It means the rules of the game require us to succeed at the expense of other peoples’ failure.

“By intentional competition I mean simply the need for one person to be number one. Here we are talking not about the rules of the game but about the personality.”

Cohn says his studies have shown that in both classroom and workplace, “not only is competition not required for excellence, its absence is required for excellence”. There are numerous studies, he says, which show that both in terms of structural and intentional competition in the workplace, people do better when they are working together rather than trying to beat each other.

There are three reasons, says Cohn, why competition is destructive. First, it causes anxiety which is hugely distracting; second, it is inefficient in that it excludes sharing of ideas, and third, is the simplest and most subtle  –  not only is the idea of success or excellence completely different from victory or beating other people, but in actual life they pull in opposite directions.

Cohn adds that competition is destructive in another respect: it destroys self-esteem. “In any competitive encounter losing is always possible and inevitable. Now that feels lousy (for a company or individual). But even when you win, you gloat, for a while you soar and you are impossible to live with. And then you come down, in fact you crash down and you need more of it in order to get that same feeling. It is precisely like building up a tolerance to a drug, or like drinking salt water when you’re thirsty.”

Cohn demonstrates the dangers  –  or rather the futility  –  of competition with a delightful story of the children’s game, Musical Chairs. What happens is that we have ten kids and nine chairs and when the music stops all ten rush for the nine chairs and the one who doesn’t make it is out of the game. Chairs are removed after each round until two kids are left rushing for one chair. At the end of this game, which is usually played at birthday parties where everyone is supposed to be having fun, you end up with one smug, smiling little child and nine miserable losers.

Add to that the strange habit we have of punishing kids in class when they’re caught copying from a neighbour and then punishing them again a few hours later on the football field when they try and score on their own instead of passing the ball. No wonder our kids get confused.

Wouldn’t it be better in the musical chairs of children’s games and in the workplace to start with all ten kids trying through teamwork and cooperation to all get on to one chair?