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.