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Are You a Player?
Hosted by Patrick O'Heffernan (November 2006 - Closed)
Are you a player? We all are, according to The Elements of Influence, a new book by Alan Kelly, and we need to learn the games we are playing and their rules. Kelly works in the for-profit arena, but is keenly attuned to the NPO world and wrote this book with both in mind (Full disclosure: my wife was VP of his firm a few years ago).
In The Elements of Influence, Kelly lays out the plays for winning strategies in games you may not have realized you are in. He calls playmaking what we all do in our negotiations, advocacy, and even managing our staffs - a discipline in which you know and understand the moves you use to get what you want, and that others use either with you or against you to get what they want.
What Kelly outlines is not game theory or negotiation techniques, it is a handbook for how to cooperate, negotiate, advocate and win… and know exactly what you are doing at all times because you know and use specific "plays".
Kelly lays out the Playmakers Standard a carefully crafted table of 26 plays - with names like The Pause, The Bear Hug, The Disco - in three categories and eight subcategories, and explains each one through examples of how profits and non-profits have used them successfully and unsuccessfully.
For instance, Kelly describes the use of the Disco play by Johnson and Johnson in 1982 when cyanide-laced Tylenol tablets were found to have killed seven people. In the Disco a player agrees to concede an element of its case to preserve or advance its overall agenda, and disarms critics or enemies. J&J accepted responsibility, pulled 31 million bottles from the shelves, and blazed the trail for the now-standard tamper-proof containers. The Disco cost J&J millions, but it preserved future revenue in the billions and protected the company's good name while quieting regulators and critics.
Other companies would have used a Deflect or a Red Herring - plays intended to shift attention, or a Filter - a play to confuse the issue, or even a Jam - a move to handle it quietly and keep information from the press and the government. Kelly notes that the US Catholic Church, when confronted with sexual abuse charges, tried all of these unsuccessfully and ended up wounding its reputation and its finances.
After reading the book, I set it down and said to myself: That is what I have been doing all of these years; if I had only known I could have done it much better.
Much of the book is based on the for-profit sector, and most of the stories are about companies, not organizations, but the techniques work well -- we have all been using them without the kind of understanding that Kelly brings.
I am adopting this system and would love to hear about your systems for creating and executing strategies.
Jump in the conversation.
Jeff.Mowatt - Nov 29, 2006 2:22 am (# Total: 11) P-CED
A phrase from the review of this book which struck a chord, remembering first, the words of author Laurie Lee, in describing the influence which disarms by being itself disarmed.
Some years later, as the web opened up new horizons. I stumbled across a real black belt of influence, who by some incredible coincidence happened to have the same name as me, finding much more in common too.
http://www.jeffmowatt.com/articles/humilityadvantage.html
So, yes, in many ways I've made the same discovery.
Jeff.Mowatt - Nov 29, 2006 9:19 am (# Total: 11) P-CED
Patrick, Something striking about the examples above is that they describe a defence strategy for dealing with a flawed product or reputation. Surely the best game play, is the no game?
By that I mean ensuring that the starting point is one of integrity, the people we return to because we recogmise the value they offer. Game play, only entering the negotiation process at the point where defence is necessary. From the sound of it, Oracle and IBM started with the zero sum game, ie the world isn't big enough for two database servers.
A couple of years back, just before I joined him, my colleague faced a real zero sum game finding his project blocked by corruption. An ultimatum was delivered £4m in personal tribute or a foreign goverment minister would block the project.
Naturally he objected, pointing out that the project was intended to help people in poverty, not the minister himself.
Countering this, the minister announced that my colleague was no longer significant, he'd deal direct with US sources and just go around him "It's not your money, so you have no power"
That's where he miscalculated, when my colleague pointed out that it was indeed his money, his and every other US taxpayers, Furthermore having taken the precaution to copyright his project plan, he'd enforce his IP rights, ensuring no agency dare touch it rather than let him profit at the expense of his own people.
Leaving the minister with a well know colloquial expression suggesting he perform an infeasibile act upon himself, he observed the man actually banging his head against the wall in rage and frustration.
Two years later, a democratic revolution, gave the opportunity to finally remove the minister from office. Nobody profited from this zero sum game, at least not yet.
Surely then, game play only arises from a position of anticipated defeat? If our "opponent" invokes such a strategy, we might well consider they are in doing so, exposing a weakness.
I remember with some amusement when first travelling in this Post-Soviet world and for the first time, detergents were being advertised on television. The response was not as anticipated, in a country well acquainted with propaganda. Elderly women were in uproar - Look at this terrible stuff on TV, it's so bad they have to advertise it! In retrospect, a profound observation on how we are far more readily decieved by our would be manipulators.
Alan Kelly - Nov 29, 2006 1:20 pm (# Total: 11) Author, The Elements of Influence
Patrick -- You're right, you've always been a playmaker.
What this work amounts to is a descriptive system of what influencers of all stripes do, either as reflex or according to plan. The certain breakthrough is that it isolates the influencer's moves and counter-moves into 25 irreducibly simple strategems (what I call "plays") and then places these into the first useable strategy framework. Now we know, for example, that a simple Trial Balloon is a testing play, well to the left on the playmaking spectrum and, correspondingly, that a Crazy Ivan is an attacking strategy on the far right. (See http://www.plays2run.com/table.php)
There is an important predictive component to this system, too. For every one of the plays in The Playmaker's Table there are recommendations for decoding that play and, even better, for countering it. If I run a Filter on you, you're often well advised to run a Mirror on me.
Insofar as my own experience is rooted in corporate games (e.g., Oracle vs. IBM), plays are run on both sides of the collaborative/competitive spectrum and, certainly, well outside the for-profit world. Think of the Pope this week as he tip-toed into Muslim Turkey. His play was a "Recast," an attempt to morph his ill-advised comments of last September into something more akin to a diplomatic bridge. Watch him, now, as he runs "Screens" to advance his agenda through symbols...not words.
On game theory and negotiation, you might think of The Playmaker's Standard as a welcome interpreter to some pretty balky disciplines. Plays can explain the strategies that players choose whilst in their respective games of chicken, prisoners dilemma, zero-sum, etc. That's a breakthrough for the frustrated mathematicians and economists who don't quite understand what it is the rest of us don't understand about game theory.
Thanks for the good words. Keep running those plays.
Alan Kelly
Patrick O'Heffernan - Nov 29, 2006 10:06 pm (# Total: 11) But I guess you are not the Canadian environmental writer! But very good points. I love the story of detergent on Soviet TV. As to your observations, I will look to the author for a reply. Alan??
Patrick O'Heffernan - Nov 29, 2006 10:11 pm (# Total: 11) The Pope's visit to Turkey does respond to Jeff's question on tactics, but what about the underlying qauestion - what if the game is not as we see it. What if,for example, there IS room in the world for two server manufacturers (there is), or if the best play for the Pope is to revise his thinking and not make the comments in the first place? Can a focus on playmaking obscure the nature of the game? Alan??
Jeff.Mowatt - Nov 30, 2006 1:21 am (# Total: 11) P-CED
That's who you're thinking about Patrick, Something of a social entreprenuer in his own right, having made a compelling case for the wolf in the scheme of things to later influence government policy towards hunting them in what was then the Soviet Union.
Now the Oracle ascent has professional interest for me. I worked for Honeywell in the 70's and 80's finding a niche specialty in the interface between structured (Bachman) databases and relational which came from the development of MRDS under the MIT backed Multics development. Never met Ted Codd, though his protege Chris Date once dropped into the office for a chat. So this is an area I have some grounding in. This, IBM's DB2 and others, were at the time mainframe offerings and Oracle to their credit, saw the way forward in porting this concept to emerging hardware platforms. Back then, we sold bundled hardware and software packages and having an RDBMS component was part of the bundle.
It was Larry Ellison buzzing around in a MIG that brought something else to mind, which was put into print in a book called "The Wrong Stuff". It described the discovery that the culture of selecting test pilots for their qualities of independent and macho personality was in fact mistaken. Too many people were being killed because these personalities lacked the capacity for the collaborative effort that was needed to preserve human life.
This then is my assertion, that in business we still need to tackle the "Wrong Stuff", because just like Farley's wolf, there is scope for all of us to prosper, My colleague and now I, tackle this head on in in our condemnation of unrestrained oligarchy in the former Soviet Union, the macho zero sum game which is now so out of control, it threatens us directly (eg recent activities involving Polonium-210).
This oligarchy, which has no regard for human life, is to my mind, the ultimate consequence of "Wrong Stuff" business, For me, it is diametrically opposed to Mohammed Yunus's endorsement of the Social Business Enterprise, a philosophy which I'd align myself with completely and for me a must do in future Social Edge commentary.
Alan Kelly - Nov 30, 2006 5:17 am (# Total: 11) Author, The Elements of Influence
To Patrick's question...can playmaking get in the way? Can it obscure judgment and progress? Yes, but only if it's viewed (and used) as weaponry. Good playmakers know, however, that strategy is as much a sword as a shield and that it can be used to massage as much as to tear. In The Elements of Influence, I don't prescribe these tendencies. I only describe them.
Look at the subclasses of playmaking (http://www.plays2run.com/table.php): Detach, Test, Divert, Frame, Freeze, Lure, Press, Attack. Collaborators tend to run Testing and Framing plays (like, for example, on a prospective donor). Blood-sport competitors tend to run Pressing and Attacking plays (like, for example, on a House Bill).
And what of the zero-sum game? Can there be muliple winners? Marketplaces decide that question, not the playmaking system, but my own view is that any player in any marketplace should want and welcome competition. Without it, there's less opportunity to create relevance and topicality. And without these, there's less opportunity to prosper. So, personally, I always look for counterparts. They can be complementary or competitive, but it's tough to run even Testing plays if noone's paying attention.
However you may approach your market -- whatever your philosophy, ground rules or circumstance -- I believe that all of us, as influencers, are "always" running plays. We're also the target of plays. You might often run a strategic "Pass" so as to take on another opportunity. You might run a careful "Pause" so as to let a market build. These are as "left-sided" as one can be on the playmaking spectrum. But, even then, you're in the business of playmaking because your strategies are being employed with purposeful effect.
Can anyone think of a marketplace where strategy and influence don't abound? I think they go hand-in-hand, so best we have our own periodic table to guide us.
melomara - Nov 30, 2006 11:47 am (# Total: 11) Corporate Coach, Innovation Leader
Interesting categorization of plays (sometimes intentional, and sometimes not) that we often see in business. I have not read the book, but I would pose the question - which play serves the player, and the Bigger Game they are playing? Here's a link to a nifty little model - called the "Bigger Game" model, that I have used extensively. I suspect that all social entrepreneurs and conscious capitalists will immediately find clarity by looking at their current "game" (e.g. what they are "up to") through the lens of this Bigger Game model. What is your compelling purpose? What comfort zones are you leaving? What are your gulps? What bold action (play) will best serve the game now? What play will most resonate with potential clients or allies?
Bigger Games are everywhere. I think that the Bigger Game model helps give context to the process of choosing your play.
Patrick O'Heffernan - Dec 1, 2006 12:29 pm (# Total: 11) I checked out the Bigger Game model and found it immeidately useful in another project. I recommend it to everyone. It does exactly what you say...provides context for the game you are playing
Patrick O'Heffernan - Dec 1, 2006 12:34 pm (# Total: 11) Jeff, I think that the wronjg stuff model actually applies to a lot of business promtional practices. Business is seen as - and often is - a highly competitive 0-sum game. But in the information world, collaboration and partnerships bring power, and the macho types don't do this well. Women do, which may be why more of them are moving into senior postions in the high tech industries. Also, the wrong stuff tyupe seem to dominate the miniong, logging and extraction induistries where their job is seen as "dominating nature". And look where that has gotten us.
Patrick O'Heffernan - Dec 4, 2006 9:11 pm (# Total: 11) I think a lot of pauses are in order, to ask those questions .
