No doubt we live in a hyper-competitive World. We are always encouraged, either explicitly or implicitly, to “be the best“, to crush our competition, to be the first.
We face life like we would face a race: you can win or you can lose, there is no middle ground.
Have you ever had the impression that there is something else, something missing?
We do. We’ve always had.
Our job is a matter of integration: we build pieces and parts that are not stand-alones, they need to integrate with something else, and something else after that, in order to contribute to the creation of something greater.
To move people, to make them feel safe, to put the human being at the center of a technological World.
It’s not a race: it’a a relay race. You only win if you contribute to your team’s success, if you integrate your skills with the ones who come next in line.
It’s an “infinite game“, as Simon Sinek puts it.
As we strongly believed this, we also knew that we needed to ingrain it into our mindset, across all the people at SPII.
So how to do it?
Change the game…of arm wrestling!
If you have read the previous articles about our Journey of Change, you know how we did it during SPII Evolution: playing.
Games are a powerful tool: they allow us to try things out in a playful environment, in fiction (or within a metaphor), but to learn the lesson for real in our lives.
So that when you change the rules of a game you have always given for granted, you change the mindset beneath it.
It’s like arm wrestling: if you partner up with someone, ready for a tug-of-war, your mind gets ready to beat your opponent, be stronger than they are.
But what if you are told that the goal is to achieve the highest score possible, and that each time your opponent’s wrist touches the ground, you gain one point?
Would you begin to see that…they are not your opponents?
That if you cooperate to bring each other’s wrist down as many times as you can…you both win? Your adversary becomes a partner, who can help you achieve your goals, while you help them achieve theirs.
It’s a win-win mindset. It’s cooperation over competition. It’s a completely new game.
One that you want to bring back to your everyday life, of course.
Bring the game into your life
SPII Evo worked on a key question that is broad and open, like “how to create integration?”, “how to create agility?“, or “how to improve the company for the benefit of everyone involved?”.
And it’s meta-work because you’re doing integration while you’re explaining it, you’re practicing agility while you’re creating it, and you are improving the company while you are brainstorming possible solutions.
It’s a powerful, powerful tool, something that can have side effects because it brings out the truth, it’s a litmus test. In fact, it can even be dangerous for a company, if the true intentions of the management are not coherent.
SPII’s desire was to create real CHANGE from within: so we needed to do a check on everyone involved, to see who was willing to see this change and be an active part of it.
Gaining a win-win mindset was essential to this process: we could not keep going forward in the direction we had set, if we were not all going to work towards the same goal.
We could not have the success we were hoping for if we didn’t learn to see 3 possible outcomes for every negotiation: either I win, or you win…or else, we both win.
This is what we should all aim for, always. And this is what we worked on during the months of SPII Evolution, and beyond them.
That is also why it was so important, few years later, to review our Vision and Mission, our Values, and to find new meaning within them.
Playing with it during simulation over simulation, game after game, made exactly this: it created something that got stuck in our minds, forever.
Do you want to try and change the game with us?
See you next time,
Ilaria Cazziol
