Competition comes naturally, but cooperation is learned

The topic this past week in our Communication Technology class has been how to be most effective in implementing new technology. To me, this is the crucial stage of the process and most prone to failure.

The literature on technology adoption presents many varied techniques for getting the foot soldiers to accept and use new equipment or software. But the authors all agree on one thing: cooperation is a key ingredient.

Our conceptual framework takes the name of organizational alignment, defined as the extent of systematic agreement among strategy, structure, and culture in an organization. This agreement creates an environment within the organization that removes internal barriers to cooperation and performance.

That word “cooperation” reminded me of a reception I attended where the talk turned to Little League baseball. In the early 1990s, I coached my daughter’s team in Skokie, Ill., where they followed the peculiar practice of not keeping score in games for 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds. That changed when they turned 9 and played for a citywide championship, and then the competition was intense.

As I described how it was done in Skokie, a fellow teacher was shaking his head.

“Children need to be taught to compete,” he said. “Competition made this country great.”

Now, I agree that competition is good in the business world. It’s the essence of capitalism. But the idea that we need to “teach” competition is one of the two of the great myths of learning. In every sport I’ve coached, competitiveness has never been a problem. Just the opposite.

The 6-year-olds in Skokie came to the game with a wicked sense of competition, honed through years of day care. Every kid wanted to pitch or play shortstop. We instituted a rule that the player who said, “I wanna bat first,” would bat last. It was that or a colossal pushing and shoving match. Not keeping score had nothing to do with building self-esteem or with “socialist leanings,” as I’ve heard some say. By not keeping score, we dampened natural competitiveness enough to allow kids to trust each other, to work with each other and to learn together.

Cooperation is the difficult thing to teach, not competition.

Competition often is a roadblock to learning. When the only objective is to win, a child quickly learns that this can be accomplished two ways: She can work to succeed or work to make the other child fail. If a teammate is a rival, what does the player gain by making him look good?

The second myth is that individualism is superior to cooperation in all areas of endeavor, the Ayn Rand myth. On the ball field, the player who cares only about himself will quickly sour a team. Even though baseball is really a series of one-on-one confrontations, players rely on each other, to break up the double play, to be on the bag for the pickoff throw, to make contact on a hit-and-run.

Not long after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, I read a commentary about the passengers of Flight 93 who forced the hijackers to crash their airplane in a Pennsylvania field rather than the White House, the apparent target. This author wrote that the passengers might have failed “without the powerful driving force of competitiveness.” But the accounts of what happened on Flight 93 tell a different story.

Tom Burnett of Bloomington, Minn., has been credited with leading the move against those who hijacked Flight 93. In articles about Burnett, his playing football often was cited as an important experience. Football, perhaps the most American of games, is the sport most dependent on teamwork — on cooperation. Sure, being competitive was part of Burnett’s package, but he didn’t go it alone. He huddled up with fellow passengers, formed a plan, then carried it out.

Children see plenty of individualism on television or in professional stadiums. They often are surprised when coaches ask them to put this aside and play as a team. Often these children are hard to persuade.

Those many years ago in Skokie, our Little Leaguers pestered us to keep score, so we devised other measures. For example, we told them that the the team with the most assists would win. Assists happen when a player throws to another to put out a baserunner.

It calls for cooperation, and the kids got good at it. When they turned 9, they made it to the league championship and won — on a perfectly executed cutoff play from right field to the first baseman to second for the final out.

The fishbone sticks in the throat

Hospital A followup

Welcome to this blog. It stems from a class I teach in communication technology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.

Last Thursday the "students" did an exercise in problem solving that used the fishbone diagram invented by Professor Kaoru
Ishikawa of Tokyo University. I say "students" cautiously because the people in this class, all business professionals, teach me more than I teach them. It was a difficult assignment, but not too far removed from the real world.

The biggest difficulty was in not having deep, intimate knowledge of Hospital A’s systems. Hospital A is a fictional composite of several real hospitals.

The class textbook (Bouwman, Harry, et. al. Information and Communication Technology in Organizations: Adoption, Implementation, Use and Effects) stresses in Chapter 4 that in the process of adopting new technology, “not much is certain even with regard to the ‘objective’ factors of technology and economy (costs and benefits): technological developements take place at a breathtaking pace, and it is extremely complicated to determine which technologies are essential. … In short, the decision whether or not to adopt a certain ICT application is based on rational considerations only to a limited extent, depending to a large degreeon intuition and experience — and perhaps even coincidence” (page 74).

Given this, the Deming idea that the most important numbers are unknowable becomes more clear. Anything solution to this problem will be proposed without knowing how many lives will be saved, how employee costs will be reduced, how time will be saved.

Here are some things I observed about the class as it went about the exercise:

• In their groups, the students concentrated to a large extent on the people involved: doctors, nurses, housekeeping. The human element is obvioulsy important, maybe most important. As a question for further thought, What would be the ideal membership for a real-life study group from Hospital A? But people are just one part of the system. Another way to look at this problem is as one of quality control across the entire system. I went partially through the fishbone chart exercise on my own, and the results are in the image below.
• Halfway through the exercise, playing the part of the hospital administrator, I announced that I had become enthralled with RFID technology during a convention in Las Vegas. The annoyance factor on the part of the students was obvious. My goal was to emulate the pushy, clueless kind of boss I’ve worked for in many of my past jobs, and apparently I succeeded. But I’ve also learned two things: The boss isn’t always wrong, and when I’ve chosen to ignore the boss, I’ve done so at my own peril.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

This last item addresses a crucial aspect of Deming’s methods: If any task, such as in this exercise, is given over to a group of employees, managers must commit themselves beforehand to allowing the group to work independently. Even tougher is that the managers must promise resources to implement solutions (within reason, of course).

The class also tried to incorporate the Five Whys method invented by Toyota Founder Kiichiro Toyoda’s father Sakichi. This was less successful perhaps because asking why, always a valuable process, requires that intimate knowledge of the system Deming insists we must have.

The main take-away is the method. As we heard from one class member who has been part of such a group, these methods can be an effective way of focusing a group on the real problems and causes.