Compare two problems:

  1. If you see a young child playing with a sharp knife or pulling a cat’s tail, what can you do to redirect the child?
  2. If your friend has bought into a bogus conspiracy theory, what can you do to redirect this friend to a more complete picture of the issue?

In both situations, you are competing against a problem – not against the child or your friend.

  • You and the other person both lose if the situation doesn’t improve.
  • You both win if the situations improve.

Although competition is usually framed as people on different sides striving to outperform each other, we also compete against impersonal opponents such as pandemics, floods, sharks, injustice, and stupidity.  The skills need for competing on a win-lose basis against other people are fundamentally different from the skills needed to cooperate on a win-win basis with others.

For example, players on opposite sides in football communicate largely with body language such as head-fakes and other forms of deception to mislead or conceal plans.  Players on different teams in sports that keep score on a win-win or lose-lose bases (such as EnTeam Games) benefit by communicating accurately their plans, intentions, and strategies between teams because the combined score of all the teams increases when any team improves.

How can adults prepare children to cooperate in competition against impersonal opponents such as ignorance and fear?

If your experience is like mine, you’ve had extensive training for competing against people.  Parents and other educators use sports, spelling bees, debates etc. to prepare children for one type of competition: competition against other people.  The scoring systems for these contests assume that if one side wins, the other side must lose.  I grew up inundated with these zero-sum scoring systems.

How are adults preparing young people to compete against problems?  If you’re like me, you didn’t have well-structured training in competing against impersonal opponents.   Of course, each of us has a lifetime of experience that has taught us what we know about dealing with many problems.  And some have had formal training in areas such as biology, sociology, psychology etc. to solve specific types of problems.

What will happen to our culture if kids have a balanced experience with both win-lose games and win-win games?  Could we build a more productive economy that is more respectful by preparing parents –and other educators – to lead children in games in which both sides lose if they can’t improve the scores they can earn by working together?

If you would like an ebook of EnTeam games that keep score of improvements in cooperation, send me an email: ted@enteam.org.  I’ll send the book at no cost to you.  I hope you will share your experience with the games and their impact on those who play.

Ted Wohlfarth