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… lesson from the London Olympics

Over recent weeks I have spent several late nights watching live TV coverage of the London Olympics. I am sure that many readers also watched the Games, hopefully they were on at a more convenient time in your location.

There are many lessons that can be learned from sport and applied to our lives in organisations. The lesson I want to highlight comes from a sport I did not even watch.

In London the Badminton tournament highlighted an important lesson for organisational life, and resilience building. It is called “gaming the system“. For those who missed the story, 8 players (4 teams from the pairs) were disqualified for deliberately trying to lose games in the preliminary round.

They had already qualified for the knock-out stage and wanted to avoid playing the stronger opponents early in the knock-outs.It was reported that the potential for this behaviour was raised in a meeting prior to the tournament but was dismissed.
We normally don’t like to acknowledge that this may occur in our organisations either, especially where “Our Values” are explicit and published. Current political correctness generally requires ‘collegiate’ behaviour. It would be bad form to mention gaming let alone to highlight those who are doing it.
Whenever we make some sets of rules or behaviours explicit, then we open that system to the concept of gaming. If all we measure is the specific set of metrics we have explicitly stated as demonstrating results in these areas, then we should not be surprised when these are the target of gaming.
Sometimes this gaming can go to extremes and create potential damage to others. The research linked here describes a US school system that classified academically weaker students as disabled and needing special education so their test results would not be included in school performance rating tests.
In “The Risk Management of Everything“, Michael Power discusses the contemporary obsession with risk management and how explicit process is central to how we manage all aspects of public and private entities. This includes the growth of the internal control agenda, the development of quality assurance models and the way these approaches are embedded into ‘management systems thinking’.

“Such systems have been criticised for being excessively bureaucratic and for concentrating on auditable process rather than on substantive outputs and performances. Worse still, they distract professionals from core tasks and create incentives for gaming.” [p26]

Just something to think about, and perhaps become conscious of the strengths and the weaknesses of management systems and process (rather than just blind faith).
Consciousness is key to Zen and Resilience.
Your state of mind needs to include an understanding of where and when you. and your programmes, can be gamed. 
What do you do to limit gaming of your system?

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