The Competition Myth (2)
‘But it’s a competitive world!’ I am told again and again. Certainly it is, and a very messy one I should say. Look around. And I should add, ‘It was also once a disease-ridden world and we are curing it.’
—Dorothy De Zouche 1945, teacher
with thanks to Alfie Kohn, who cites an expanded De Zouche quote in the notes for his article, “Only for My Kid: How Privileged Parents Undermine School Reform” (Phi Delta Kappan)
The premise of this post, so beautifully summarized in the above quote, is that competition is an idea whose time is done. And more than an idea, competition as a motivator, and as a lens through which we have been observing and evaluating our world, is not—and perhaps never was—the grand, driving force we have thought it to be.
Competition appears to work as a motivator because it gets people scurrying. Parents can get their children to clean their room if they point to a sibling’s tidier room (although the first few times we try it, we must pointedly add, “Look! Billy’s room is so much cleaner than yours!” Why? Because small children need time to learn from their parents’ cues that it’s not OK that Billy’s room is cleaner). In the workplace, managers can induce an atmosphere of fierce activity by announcing that the person with the most sales will win a cash prize.
Although there have been valuable innovations inspired (at least in part) by someone's drive to outdo someone else, the truth is that competition is a limited and limiting motivator. All that scurrying isn’t necessarily productive, and if it is, it’s generally short-term — it’ll end abruptly when the contest ends. For monthly or quarterly productivity races, it will spike in the last few days before Award Day and bottom out the rest of the cycle.
What have we been told about competition?
Competition promotes excellence
Only losers criticize competition
Competition is the pillar of capitalism
Competition is a (or the) biological motivation of all life
Competition is the driving force of evolution
Men are naturally competitive
Who am I to question why scientists — otherwise rightfully cautious of assigning human characteristics to non-human subjects — would think nothing of attributing avarice (for food and sunlight) to plants and animals? For that reason (and for brevity), I’ll leave that part of the list alone.
As for most of the other myths, here’s an excerpt from “No Contest”, an article by Alfie Kohn, the controversial and/or beloved education speaker and writer. Kohn sees a world beyond competition, and he’s got piles of research to back up his assertions:
David and Roger Johnson, professors of education at the University of Minnesota, have performed 26 separate studies to determine whether competition or cooperation is more conducive to learning. The results: cooperation promoted higher achievement in 21 of the studies, while two had mixed results and three found no significant differences.
—Alfie Kohn, “No Contest”, INC Magazine, November 1987.
Kohn goes on to demonstrate that instead of innovation and excellence, competition handicaps both children and adults by eroding their self-esteem as they turn their attention to external sources of approval, and by isolating them from each other, since a teammate’s or classmate’s gains represent their own losses in the race for the “prize”.
Motivated by competition, Billy and his sister are now room-cleaning enemies. “Whose room is cleaner! What? Help you with yours?” In the grown-up world, any person on the sales team who might have possessed a helpful inclination would now have to be a saint or a martyr to express it.
But without competition, won’t our creativity vanish? Won’t we lose our motivations for excellence and innovation? Won’t the world market collapse?
In “The Case Against Competition”, Kohn answers:
Most of us were raised to believe that we do our best work when we're in a race — that without competition we would all become fat, lazy and mediocre. It's a belief that our society takes on faith. It's also false.There is good evidence that productivity in the workplace suffers as a result of competition. The research is even more compelling in classroom settings.
—Alfie Kohn, “The Case Against Competition”, Working Mother, September 1987.
His suggested remedy is, of course, cooperation, and:
The foundation of cooperation is what social scientists call “positive interdependence”: a cooperative group sinks or swims together. In practice, that means all group members work for the same goal and use the same resources. The result is a shared group identity and a sense of accountability that comes from having others depend on you — a powerful motivator indeed. (In a competitive environment, the only stake others have in your performance is a desire to see you fail.)
Alfie Kohn, “No Contest”, INC Magazine, November 1987.A far more comprehensive treatment of the topic is available in Kohn’s book, No Contest: The Case Against Competition.
Pursuing the research for this article, I found workplace anecdotes and studies describing good productivity rates turned exceptional with the removal of competitive incentives. To be sustainable, it also required the unraveling of competitive culture, especially when it was extended to management.
In another article, I’ll share a few working examples that will hopefully inspire you to see the world from a different perspective.
Competition is a pair of tinted glasses through which we perceive our surroundings, and then set out to interpret what we have seen. If we were to stop teaching it, if we were to stop using it to manipulate our families, clients, co-workers, employers, employees, target markets and neighbors, the positive changes to our quality of life would be fundamental and pervasive.