We are always in the grip of an idea. | Anonymous
Over the years, some approaches I have stumbled into have had quick results while other strategies evolve slowly. The rapid changes are more fun, more encouraging and even more lasting. They have the feel of someone flipping a switch – people see differently, they act differently and they bump into the furniture less often. Given this, I have been wondering lately what approaches create unusually rapid, sustainable change in family cultures. This seems to be a useful question.
An Emergent Idea
I have recently had a series of experiences that have prompted me to go to the roots to rethink the typical consulting process. In most of these approaches, the theory of change and interventions are founded on notions of liner progression, rationality and cybernetic systems thinking (that is, chains of definable cause and effect in sequential feedback loops). These approaches and the practices follow a progressive series of rather well-worn “steps” and “cycles” where the consultants first gather data, which is then synthesized, then turned into recommendations, which in turn generates family reactions, which engenders a plan that is then implemented. Families tend to find this laborious, slow and repetitive of other consulting experiences. Given their limitations, these processes can be seen as broken (or at least sub-optimized) forms of consulting.
What began to emerge from this radical re-examination of the typical consulting cycle is a different approach to systems engagement that induces holistic and sustainable transformation and does so quickly and with a reasonable degree of certainty. There are various elements – or technologies – in this emergent approach. Until now, I have not put them together in a cohesive way or looked at the gaps between them that could be intentionally filled to create a more comprehensive approach. To date, I have only known that they work in isolation. They are now falling into place in a larger context and with some modest clarity of how they might fit into a broader, more conscious methodology.
I certainly don’t have all the pieces, but I believe I have put my finger on a number of them. A few of these include silence, mirroring, narrative, principles, moral imagination, covenant, inflection points, reconciliation, morphic cascades, and deep reframing. All of these are non-linear in the sense that they have no ordered sequence. They are more or less useful in kaironic, not chronoic, time (more on this later). These modalities are simply tools on the workbench. I use a number of them frequently and some only occasionally.
One of the more intriguing of these that is emerging and is adumbrated in earlier work, seems to be a core metaphor for family engagement. This emergent lens has to do with the use of “games” within family systems. I am leery of this term because it could imply a kind of trivialization or generate fields of judgement or denigration. I am looking for a better word or metaphor. But for our purposes here, I will provisionally adopt it. Beyond the dangers of the term, what is useful about the word “game” is that it quickly and accurately describes a complex reality that we all know. With this caveat, we will look at the theoretical grounding of this emergent perspective, keeping in mind that, just because it is theoretical, doesn’t mean it won’t be immediately practical. After all the “theory” of gravity has proven quite useful on an almost daily basis.
Types of Games
For our purposes, there are three types of games to distinguish here: finite games, meta-games and infinite games. Each of these types of games has its own characteristics and each is played out (by analogy) in family systems. One way to view a key aspect of family culture is to consider it to be a series of games played within interlocking games in a context of even larger games.
Finite Games
To begin, let’s look at finite games. Finite games are played within boundaries of time. There is a point at which he game “ends”. Finite games require that “players” take on roles. These roles are based on social contracts that cover the rules of the game and determine the game’s purpose and outcomes. In finite games, there is typically a “winner” (though in some finite games, everyone wins).
Roles in finite games are interesting. James Carse notes that in finite games, any person playing the game must assume a role and must commit to that role. He or she must play that role convincingly and others must believe in the performance for the game to work. For example, those playing “Classroom” must believe the teacher to be the teacher for the game to continue. If enough people doubt, the game crashes. To the extent the person is enacting a role, that person is “veiled” – he or she is bringing only a partial or abstracted self to the game – and it is through that veil that the person is interacting within the game.
In this sense, the finite game is always performed or enacted. In playing a role, the person must chose to forget or effectively bracket his or her deeper identity. The role of, say, “father” is different than the whole person – the person is more than just “father” – but to play the role well requires a kind buy-in “as if” the role and the person are one and the same. The player must sell that role and the rest of the players must be complicit in supporting that role. If some players no longer buy into their role or the roles of the other players, they must either adapt the game, leave the field of play or cause the game to stop. To this extent, finite games are “serious” and for the game to work, it must be taken seriously by the players.
If a player comes to fully identify with his or her role when the game comes to an end, that person is undone. They have subsumed their true identity in their role. By way of example, in family work, this failure to abandon roles can show up in “Entitlement” where parents and children have over identified in roles as “providing parent” and “dependent child”.
This all means that finite games are “dramatic” – they have an arc that keeps us wondering not about the nature of the ultimate outcome, but about the tension created by the progression of events within the boundaries of the field of play. This drama provokes a kind of anxiety or tension. “Close” or dramatic games where we have suspended our disbelief put us on the edge of our seats.
Beyond roles and drama, finite games include notions of mastery. Carse suggests, that people can become masters of the finite game they are playing. Becoming a master requires recognition by the other players and any relevant audience that a person has come to have achieved mastery. In this sense, mastery involves the minimization of surprise and novelty – the point of mastery is to control the field of play, contain risk, minimize the possibility of surprise and, to some degree, control the roles of the other players.
A Finite game is also repetitive in nature in each game or round follows the same general script. While there is infinite variation within a finite game in the way the play unfolds, the outcome is largely known in a broad sense. For example, in competitive games, the suspense is not that there will be a winner, but who that winner will be.
This brings us to the notion that finite games are most often premised on notions of scarcity and competition. Consequently, they are driven by aversion and desire. Controlling outcomes becomes critical and the way outcomes are achieved is by following rules – there is an ethics in playing finite games. Cheaters are not thought well of, though the stakes of the game may drive people to cheat. In all of this, to play finite games is to put oneself at egoic risk – a failure of role bruises pride. If one has come to over-identify with the role, then finite games have the potential to pose existential risk as well. Who am I without my role in my game?
Infinite Games
In contrast, there are also infinite games. These are games that are played on a much broader canvass over long periods of time. They may span many lifetimes or they may take up central space in a single lifetime. Here the goal is not for the game to end, but for play to continue. The point of the game is the game itself. In this sense the infinite game is not so much dramatic as it is “heroic” – it appreciates journey not arrival. (Arrival itself is impossible by the nature of the game.) Infinite games are deeply human endeavors – involving the whole person and calling forth the best in individual players and in others.
Because the entire point of the infinite game is to keep the game alive, what rules exist serve that end. Rules do not determine a pre-ordained outcome. In this sense infinite games are open systems designed and evolving to perpetuate play. In this broader scope, infinite games are more about horizons than boundaries. No matter how much progress is made in the infinite game, the horizon shifts. Players in finite games play in boundaries, players in infinite games play with boundaries.
Infinite games tend to be best played in non-linear time – they are played in moments of significance and in states of flow. Time becomes elastic with an experiential blurring of demarcations of past, present and future. When played fully, infinite games serve to experientially confuse categories and blend polarities such as immanence and transcendence, good and bad, power and love. We discover in infinite play that our mental maps of the world are not equal to our experience of the world as it is and that we are playing in games above our mental constructs. When an infinite game is well played, opposites begin to blend together with harmonic resonance.
The motif of infinite games is not “mastery”, but apprenticeship. The goal is not knowledge or skill but wisdom, facility and adaptation. Pablo Casals who, at 93, was asked why he still practiced daily after his profoundly successful career replied “I am beginning to see some progress.” This was a player who had mastered his craft but was apprenticed to a much larger game.
The only cheating that occurs in an infinite game is cheating or deluding oneself and play is ultimately in service of something larger than the self, but that larger something gives back to the self both meaning and significance. Infinite games are full of surprise and the outcome is impossible to know – and in this sense they put the players at risk – not that they may fail themselves or others, but that they may fail to wholeheartedly play the infinite game. In this sense, infinite games are not driven by ethics, but by moral imagination.
Infinite players also take on roles, but they take on those roles with a very clear understanding that they and everyone else in the game is not the role they are playing. There is a recognition that the game is an abstraction of reality, not to be confused with the whole of reality itself. Thus being human and how one “occupies space” becomes important. Infinite players recognize that descent into taking the roles too seriously – to treat the abstracted game as reality – will kill infinite play and force the determination of winners and losers. For that reason, they are able not to take the game too seriously. They play with abandon, but because the game will continue, they, in a sense, play with their own sense of play. They are both in the game and outside the game at the same time.
A Word about Time
Because finite games are played in boundaries of time and infinite games are played within horizons, the sense of time within these games is different. The ancient Greeks had two words for time –chronos and kairos. Chronos is linear time – it is measured by clocks and it consists of time where attention is focused on one thing following another. In chronos, there is a clear beginning, middle and end. Kairos is about significance. It is about the in-breaking of moments of time that we experience as extraordinary or luminous or meaningful. It is not so much about progression as it is about the ordering of things and the sense that is made of events. Apart from those with hyperthymesia, no one remembers every event of their lives – what we remember are salient events that have personal significance for us. That memory reflects kairos. Most of chronos is actually lost to our conscious selves.
Infinite games reflect the meaning that is created in kairos. As such there is a fluidity of past, present and future (not “objectively”, but in the way we experience time). In this sense chronos is ultimately about endings, time periods marked by events, and is thus filled with a sense of mortality (thanatos). Kairos tends to be about openings in time and is filled with a sense of possibility, sustainability and perpetuity (eros). Again these are not set against each other, for indeed Kairos is wholly dependent on chronological time to hold it and Chronos is purely mechanical – and bereft of living meaning – if there is no Kairos.
Playing infinite games
In his book, Carse writes as though finite games are bad and infinite games are good. This seems unnecessarily reductionist to me. Indeed, after giving it some thought, I cannot think of any infinite game that is not played through finite games. For example, “Learning” can be seen as an infinite game – it is a deeply human endeavor that has no boundaries played out in kaironic time. Yet learning occurs only in the abstracted experiences of finite “games”. We build skills and capacities in these finite games that are potentially open and which can build greater capacity to play the game of “Learning”. We play a finite game of “School” with the roles of teachers, student, administrators, parents, and so on. We participate in “Books” with roles of authors, readers, booksellers, publishers, and so on. We learn by joining with others in conversation and action in “Projects” or “Associations” or “Friendships” or “Family” with all the various roles implied and developed in these games. There is thus no Learning without engaging in specific behaviors and activities that have all of the hallmarks of finite games.
The question as to what form of game we are playing (finite or infinite) is answered by the point of view of our participation in the finite game. (In this sense we are always in the grip of an idea – which comes from the Greek word meaning “to see” – we are always coming from a particular vantage point or perspective.) If the game is seen as a finite game, it will be played one way – I will want to achieve an A in the class and thereby “win” at the game of “School”. If it is seen from an infinite frame, then the goal is different – it is about “Learning”. “Winning” in this larger game is measured by wholehearted participation and pushing of boundaries. I may still want to attain an A but only because it is an external validation of my growth and devotion to “Learning”. This makes learning a hero’s journey and one infused with moral imagination. The audience in this sense is myself and the authorship of my own experience arises in the context of self-development in community. Indeed, I may not care about the grade if I believe the infinite game has been well played. After all, the professor who graded Frederik Smith’s paper with a C didn’t dissuade him from playing the larger game of actually creating Fed Ex – which, quite dramatically, “changed the game” in its field of endeavor.
In my estimation, we actually cannot play infinite games as infinite games – we must play finite games as though they were infinite and we must, at times, be serious about finite games. Likewise finite games are richer, more fluid and a lot more fun when they are approached as infinite games. As infinite games infuse finite games, finite games gain meaning, and elevate the human spirit. They engender creativity, innovation and joy. Becoming more skilled and capable at finite games allows for greater enjoyment of infinite play. Yet we are playing not to “win” but simply to perpetuate play.
Choice
Carse has much to say about choice and freedom in games and there is a great deal of attention that could be given to this aspect in both finite and infinite games. I find that I don’t agree with a great deal of what he has to say (this is one of those few times when I read a book that has something quite useful to be gleaned, but actually wouldn’t recommend it to others). With that caveat, I am willing to say that, to be effective, games require participants who have chosen to play a particular game. Carse would go so far as to say that all participants are willing to play (at some level). To me this comes dangerously close to making players in some games of oppression responsible for their own victimhood. That said, there is a sense that in less coercive games there are people who might be considered players who opt out – whether that choice is physical or psychic withdrawal. To the extent, as a player, I am not committed to the game and making effort, I am either resigned to losing a finite game or I simply choose not to play in that particular infinite game.
Games and Family Culture
So what does any of this have to do with families? For some this may be self-evident. Those of us working with families often see our clients locked in finite “games” that produce very real suffering. Indeed, one lens for thinking about family culture is to consider it as a complex fabric of finite games. This notion of a matrix of games raises the concept of yet a third form of “games” not explored in the literature – namely meta-games. A Meta-game would be system of interlocking finite games that come to comprise its own game. These interlocking finite games create substantial complexity. Every person has multiple roles and each of these roles can be seen as being a “player” in a different game system. How these roles interact in us and then in our families adds complexity to any particular “game” we might be observing. Being a parent, a friend and a breadwinner might cause us to be playing games of “Parenthood”, “Work”, “Friendship” and “Work-Life Balance” all at the same time. In this case, “Work-Life Balance” is what I might call the meta-game. Each game affects the others and the meta-game hovers over the swirling mix adding its own complexity.
In my experience most suffering in families (and individuals) arises from stuckness in the patterns of engagement and interaction. Without minimizing the pain of this stuckness, these patterns might be treated “as if” they were finite “games”. This again is not to trivialize what is happening – the suffering is real and there is an intense seriousness in the way this is working out. This is not a playful thing – and it has very real human consequences. Nor do I want to over-simplify what are very complex problems. The patterns internally, externally, interpersonally and structurally can be daunting and almost impossible to tease apart. This is particularly true when it comes to family culture – the entire notion of family culture itself is amorphous and difficult to describe. This complexity and ambiguity can give rise to tremendous amounts of anxiety, reactivity and drama within family systems.
With all of these caveats, as a lens to tease apart complexity, the notion of “game” is a clean metaphor that allows us to gain useful handles around what is going on. In that sense, it provides a rubric. Again, we do not believe the complex reality is in fact a game, but look at it “as if” it was a game to help us gain some critical insights. Most often the greatest amount of suffering is generated by the ways in which the family is playing what we would see, and they would recognize if it was called out, as having analogous characteristics to a finite game as we have described it.
Alleviating Suffering
When families come to me, there is most often a problem to be solved. Treating the problem “as if” it was a game simplifies the problem and makes its complex component parts visible to the family itself. This allows distance and safety to step back and look at how the family is actually enacting certain patterns of behavior based on persistent attitudes and beliefs that are generating results that increase human suffering in the family system. Treating these patterns “as though” they were a finite “game” – with roles, scripts, defined outcomes, boundaries, and so on – allows the family to make its own complexity visible to itself. It makes their culture an “object” they can examine and thereby allows them a degree of “objectivity”. For example, a “game” of “Succession” in a family is socially fabricated by the family through roles, scripts, patterns of behavior, objectives and so on. Once the family can have a conversation about how it is actually enacting that experience and make sense of it through the metaphor of “game”, and they have thoroughly dissected the implicit and perhaps explicit structures of that “game” of Succession, they are in a position to be empowered to make different choices.
Once the “game” has been thoroughly assessed, meaningful conversations can be had about choosing to play a different game or play the same game differently. To play this new game inevitably requires shifts in roles, rules, scripts, definitions of outcomes, boundaries and so on. This means that complex changes no longer need to be linear – they may be played out on multiple levels in non-sequential fashion. This also allows for imperfection. The shift of game takes on the experimental nature of infinite play and learning occurs until the new game becomes settled. Because this is reframed as a game, people can be invited to be more tolerant and forgiving of themselves and others. The stakes go down in one sense, but the existential satisfaction goes up. This all becomes a lever for more rapid change that occurs on additional levels and results in recursive positive reinforcement in a morphic cascade.
The trick in all of this, of course, is in how the old game is made visible to the family so that they can see it themselves and then in the design, prototyping and development of new games that allow families to gain more skills, see new horizons and begin to play with each other with the flavor of the bigger and perhaps even infinite game. This process (with its mix of other high impact strategies described earlier) becomes the secret sauce of shifting family culture. Gamification alone will not get you there, but it is an important piece. Families that learn to see their own games and redesign them, can change the game. Those who are stuck in finite games will typically flail their way to the end of the finite game and miss the opportunity to play the longer game.
— October 17, 2015