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Cooperative Games: Humans and Technology
In the last installment, I introduced team development activities in general, including engineering and software development, as being built on three foundations:
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Cooperative games
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Craft
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Lean processes
In this installment, I wish to expand on cooperative games.
Kinds of Games
There are many kinds of games, competitive, cooperative, short- or long-running, even “infinite” games (Carse, J, “Finite and Infinite Games”, Ballantine Books, 1987). Team development activities such as completing a project are cooperative and endpoint-directed, meaning that the people help each other to reach the goal, and they know when the goal has been reached.
A group of musicians playing in a jam session are playing a cooperative game with no declared end point--it only ends when they get tired and stop. Extending a house and evolving a software system are other examples of continuous or non-endpoint-directed cooperative games. In these two, the evolution of the house or software system only stops when the sponsor “gets tired” of it.
Carse introduces the idea of “infinite” games: ones where the point of the game is to keep playing the game--it is never supposed to end. Organizational survival is a prime example. The organization makes “moves” over …
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