WHEN GROUPS COMPETE AGAINST THEMSELVES
Groups of people fail to deliver results that cohere towards their
collective benefit when people in a group do not share the same
measure of priority for tasks they need to complete.
Imagine three people---Bob, Alice, George---bound together into some
kind of arbitrary grouping: a company, an organization, or a team.
Bob has a task he needs completed. After doing his part, the task can
only be completed when Alice pulls some lever. To Bob, completion of
this task is essential.
George also has a task he needs completed. After doing his part, the
task can only be completed when Alice pushes some button. To George,
completion of this task is nonessential.
Alice has two tasks she needs to complete: Bob's and George's. She
sees Bob's essential task as nonessential. She sees George's
nonessential task as essential.
Described above are four distinct priorities for two tasks in one
group of people. But what kind of group contains multiple
incompatible, subjectively measured priorities for a single task? The
very idea is incompatible with the workings of a group. In competitive
arenas tasks are given singular priorities: the ball must enter the
opponent's net. This task has a single essential priority shared by
all people in the competitive groupl.
In our imaginary group, there are two incompatible measures of
priority for pulling the lever or pushing the button: to one person it
is essential, to another it is not. If Bob, Alice, and George were in
a competitive arena they would be competing with their opponent and
also with themselves. Bob needs to compete against George to get Alice
to complete his task first. Alice needs to compete against Bob to
maintain she completes his task after George's.
At this point the problem and its solution should be obvious: Bob,
Alice, and George need to share the same measure of priority for the
tasks they need to complete. By some means they need to reach an
agreement of what gets done first. They can arrive at this agreement
computationally or collaboratively. In the end, the objective is the
same: measures of priority for each task must be the same among all
people involved in each task's completion. In effect, when everyone
agrees to a single measure of how important each thing is, they agree
to becoming not individuals working together but a group working as
one.
My experience working within groups of people lead me towards this
conclusion. Time and time again, the essential tasks I needed
completed by others were ignored. After numerous repetitions I
eventually I understood why my colleagues were not completing their
part in my task: to them the work was nonessential. Thus the only way
I could get them to do their share in my task was by bothering,
pestering, and bugging. In effect: wasting my capacity to work on
sabotaging their capacity to work. Only by this collective defeat and
gross inefficiency was I be able to get my tasks completed. Indeed, it
became an essential task for my colleagues to disburse themselves of
my annoyances. This was a task in my favor but against the favor of us
all together in the "group", if you can call it that. In fact, the
"group" was just a number of individuals in competition with each
other.