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BEYOND THE ZERO-SUM GAME

To a mathematician, everything I've been saying might come as a big surprise. If you're used to making business decisions based on how well the numbers add up, you may take it as a surprise, too. But it shouldn't really be surprising. It's only in "pure" mathematics that nine plus nine has to equal eighteen. In applied mathematics, in real-world physics, and in the human versions of real-world physics, where you're dealing with human "quantities" and not integers, nine plus nine can equal anything you want it to equal. Put nine apples and nine apples together, and you're always going to get eighteen apples. Put nine people and nine people together, and you don't know what you're going to get. You might end up with a crackerjack advertising team that pushes your company from 12 percent of a hardball market into 31 percent in three months. You might end up with a skunk-works that produces nothing but stink.

The outcome in human "addition" like this is determined by more than the numbers. It's determined by what you do with the human potential you've got. You can start with the average side of nine and motivate them - with proper reinforcement - into the next World Series. Or you can start with the last Super Bowl team and demotivate them - by ignoring motivational principles - right into the next season's cellar.

A lot of business experts today like to talk about the "zero sum" model, where there is just so much natural resources, just so much capital expenditure, just so much revenue draw, and just so much human possibility that can be put into the overall social and industrial mix. When you strain the limits of that "just so much," these analysts say, you press the system beyond its limits, and something's got to give somewhere. Ask too much from revenue expansion, and the corporate sector has got to contract. And so on.

It's a neat enough picture, I guess, but it badly distorts one element. That element is human potential. What the dollars and cents boys and the revenue chart analysts and the rest of the zero-sum experts don't consider is the tremendous untapped potential in the human beings who do the work of this economy.  I believe that our capacity for invention and synergistic production has up to now barely been touched, and that if we can get our human material more Involved, more committed to teamwork, more focused on creativity, we will discover a mathematical miracle. I'm convinced we will discover that nine plus nine equals twenty-one. Or forty-two. Or God knows what "imaginary" number.  

The trouble with all the approaches to managing conflict that do not recognize synergy is that they assume, implicitly or explicitly, that nine plus nine equals eighteen. And they assume as well that, in the workplace, and political environment, and every place else where human beings come together, there have got to be losers and winners. There have got to be those who achieve and those who fall by the wayside. There have got to be the eagles and the mules. Therefore (they assume), there's no such thing as a 9/9 solution; that goes against the laws of logic.

This reasoning is OK as long as you're talking about you versus the competition. The problem is that many people in business say on the one hand that they want to motivate their people to beat the competition, and on the other hand that the best way to accomplish that is to beat them into submission. One episode of the coyote and the road runner can tell you that this ain't the way it goes down. You want to beat the bad guys, you've got to focus your hostile energies outward, and your productive, motivational energies inward. If you can't do that, you might as well be working for the competition.

Beat the competition? Fine. I don't have anything against honest, hard competition. What quarterback would have? But competitive energies are valuable only in so far as you know how to control and direct them. The drive to win is powerful as hell. It's easy to let it get out of hand. It's easy to let it take you over, convince you that it's an absolute, rather than a contingent, value. When that happens, you start to look at everything - including your teammates - as the competition. It should be obvious what happens then. You start to play against the very group that should be contributing to your success. You start to act as if conflict is not just an inevitable, energizing factor, but as if it's the reason for your being here. You start to think that competing, and winning, and beating the hell out of the other guy, are the reasons you've been playing the game.  When you start to believe that, you're trying to be saved on other people's sins - and you're going to fail, because you're pitting yourself against the very people you're supposed to be working with.

So ultimately the management of conflict means directing the energies of conflict - those disruptive but potentially creative energies - where they will do the most good: toward the discovery of better solutions that can satisfy everybody on your team. The danger is in seeing internal conflict in the same way that you see conflict from the outside: as a threat to your company, your person, your entire way of doing things. The experience of the most productive, most motivated, and most motivating team members gives the lie to that every day.

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