On this episode we sat down with Curt Stedron, director of NCSL’s Legislative Training Institute, to discuss a presentation he made at this year’s Legislative Summit in Boston on how game theory can help legislative leaders better understand the notion of leading in an infinite game.
On this episode we sat down with Curt Stedron, director of NCSL’s Legislative Training Institute, to discuss a presentation he made at this year’s Legislative Summit in Boston on how game theory can help legislative leaders better understand the notion of leading in an infinite game.
Stedron draws on the work of game theorist James Carse and author Simon Sinek, who popularized Carse’s theories. Stedron explained that the legislature, like many other areas of life, is really an infinite game, where the purpose is to perpetuate the game rather than win it.
However, as Stedron explains, most people, including many of those in the legislature, actually approach their work as a finite game and that misconception can hamper their efforts to be effective leaders.
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ES: Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m your host, Ed Smith
CD: Part of the goal is understanding that you're just a player on the stage for however long of the tenure that you're going to be in the legislature. It could be term limited, it could be a long career. At some point you're not going to be doing it anymore.
ES: That was Curt Stedron, director of NCSL’s Legislative Training Institute and my guest on this podcast.
At NCSL’s Legislative Summit in Boston this year, Stedron made a presentation about how game theory can help legislative leaders better understand the notion of leading in an infinite game. I asked him to come on the podcast to share his thoughts.
Stedron draws on the work of game theorist James Carse and author Simon Sinek, who popularized Carse’s theories. Stedron explained that the legislature, like many other areas of life, is really an infinite game, where the purpose is to perpetuate the game rather than win it.
However, as Stedron explains, most people, including many of those in the legislature, actually approach their work as a finite game and that misconception can hamper their efforts to be effective leaders.
Here’s our discussion.
Curt, great to have you on the podcast.
CS: Great to be here, Ed
ES: Curt, as director of NCSL’s Legislative Training Institute, you do a lot of thinking about leadership and you're here at NCSL’s Legislative Summit at Boston to lead a session about leading in an infinite game. And I found that a really compelling way to frame the legislative world. And I wonder if you can start by explaining what you mean by an infinite versus a finite game.
CS: (00:28):
So, in game theory, and by the way, full disclosure, all this stuff is not my own original thinking. It comes from two sources, a game theorist by the name of James Carse, and then was more recently popularized by the author Simon Sinek. But essentially there's two types of games. One is what's called a finite game, which is what kind of sounds like a game that ends, that there's a clear winner and it's got several definitions to it. And the players don't change the rules, stay the same as the game is being played. And you have this agreed upon set of some kind of metric of success of who wins a game. Football is a finite game. The players don't change once the game starts. The rules don't change when the game's going on. And we know who wins at the end because at the end of 60 minutes, whoever has the most points wins.
(01:10):
So that's a finite game. An infinite game by contrast, has almost everything's different. Players can come and go at any time. The rules can change at any time, and there is no agreed upon objective. The game never ends. The goal of an infinite game is to perpetuate the game, to keep the game going, and for a player in it to last as long as you possibly can to perpetuate your own existence within the game. So those are the two types of games according to game theory. And the argument that I'll be making tomorrow is that the legislative world, the game of politics, if you will, with you can't hear them or you can't see them, but quotation marks around it, is an infinite game. And I think, we think of it as being a finite game. And so, this is just another way to conceive of the type of competition that a legislative environment has.
ES: (01:58):
You point out that many people who are playing the infinite game think they're playing a finite game. And why is that and what kind of complications does that create?
CS: (02:09):
Well, I think the reason they think they're playing a finite game is because they assume each finite moment in the game is the end of the game itself and not understanding it's just a chain of events that leads to an infinite game. And if the mindset is finite, but the game is infinite, then there's this disconnect between the game you're playing in the game. I think the reason that that happens, at least in the legislative setting is because there are natural competitive things that feel finite. So, an election feels finite. I won the election on Tuesday night, Wednesday morning I woke up the victor, but not realizing that the game continues to go on after that or we passed a piece of legislation, which we got it to the finish line, the governor signed it, therefore it feels finite, it feels defined at the end, and yet the legislative process keeps going on and on and on. So, I think that's the reason it happens and I think that's where the conflict arises.
ED: (03:08):
So yeah, I can follow you on that, but I wonder if the goal is not to win but to perpetuate it, how does that work in the legislative context? Is the goal really, I guess maybe this sounds sort of naive, but is the goal simply to make good government and good legislation realizing this is going to go on well beyond yourself? Is that really what the goal is here?
CS: (03:33):
I think that's part of the goal, is understanding that you're just a player on the stage for however long of the tenure that you're going to be in the legislature. It could be term limited, it could be a long career. At some point you're not going to be doing it anymore. So, there's that part. But I think the idea if, OK, to go back to your comment about good government, yeah, let's call that the purpose of the legislature to have good government. But what good government means is always changing at a given time in history depending on who the players are or what the mood or the culture is in that time. And if we only see it as being in this finite universe of now, I think it leads us to look for, and this is maybe human nature, short-term victories, short-term solutions that are kind of distinct from the larger run of time.
(04:19):
When we make that separation, when we only look from victory to victory to victory in these small little moments, we're not seeing the long horizon, we're not seeing the arc of time. We're also kind of maybe getting too full of ourselves because winning a lot of these small battles or maybe we're losing all hope because we're losing lives battles. But one of the points I'll make tomorrow is that the scoreboard always changes. So, I give a couple different examples. One from the sporting world is the New England Patriots had a 20-year run in the early 2000s that was unparalleled, like they won six Super Bowls and they were in the playoffs 18 times in 20 years. And you can ride pretty high for a long time, but if you look at the Patriots of the last two years, they haven't made the playoffs at all and they've only won a quarter of their games.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
I show an example of a state legislature, and I won't name the state, but the control of both the Senate and the House by party for 25 years was all D. And I'm sure at some point, by the 20th year, the D thought, this is never going to change. We're always going to be in charge, we're always going to have the power, we're always going to be able to enact whatever world we want. And, of course, the plot twist of that is, OK, in 2015 it changed the Rs and now they've had a long run. How long before they start to think the same thing? If you're living in the finite short term, you're not seeing that things change over time. You're not seeing that the scoreboard can flip and you can go from a winner to a loser or from winning to losing or losing to winning. And when you don't see that arc, when you don't play out on that timeline, I think we go for the quick hitters, almost like a dopamine chase in a different context of life rather than seeing, so we do the dopamine chase at the expense of our long-term health. We might pass a piece of legislation at the expense of good government.
ES: (06:00):
Well, I think you're sort of making the point there that the life is the infinite game and that we all might learn a little bit from this to apply to our own lives. There are some key elements in this game theory. Maybe you can walk through those elements and talk to us about that. Starting with the just cause idea.
CS: (06:22):
Simon Sinek who popularized the ideas of just cause in his book. He talks about three requirements that a successful leader who has an infinite game mindset, who's going to be able to thrive and survive over time, who's going to be able to lead their team or their chamber or their caucus or whatever group you're talking about, their staff more successfully than not over time has to have three things. And the first is what he calls a just cause, which is kind of a broad idea. He defines it as an ideal that you would be willing to sacrifice things for. So, you maybe risk your time or your money or if it's a military context, maybe even your life, in order to advance toward that ideal. And he says once you have that ideal, it becomes this North Star that we constantly are driven toward trying to achieve.
(07:06):
Of course, the irony is that you never achieve it or else it would become finite, right? So, it asymptotic, to use a math expression, it's a curve that always approaches the axis but never actually reaches the axis. And the example I use in the talk is the preamble and declaration of independence, which is we want life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, but we're never going to get to a point in our society where everyone's alive, free and happy. So, we know it's asymptotic, we're never going to quite get there. So, the just cause is this thing that inspires us, it motivates us to make those sacrifices, it motivates us to do what is necessary to constantly advance toward that idea. So that's the first requirement. The second requirement, and this is very interesting I think for the legislative world, is to look at your competitors not as competitors but as what he calls a worthy rival.
(07:56):
And a worthy rival is someone who motivates you to sort of step up your game. And the reason there are rivals is usually because their strengths are our weaknesses and that's why our rivals in the first place. And so, when we can learn from our rivals areas that we can improve upon, we can then make ourselves more capable of staying in the game, more capable of thriving in the game, more capable of being kind of ahead on the scoreboard rather than behind on the scoreboard. Unfortunately, I think in the legislature we become so focused on beating the competition. We're in that finite game mindset. I have to win this election, I have to take this person out, I have to increase my majority or whatever that we don't ever take the time to learn from those rivals. And so, his idea is you're not going to beat them.
(08:40):
The game goes on forever. And if you can't win, so your only competition is yourself, how do you get better? How do you improve so that you and your team, you and your caucus, you and your staff can thrive over time. So, it's a mindset shift from beating the competition to learning from the competition so that I or my team or whoever I'm leading can also thrive in that environment. So that's the second requirement. And then the third requirement is a term he uses called the capacity for what he calls existential flexibility, which is kind of a fancy way of saying being capable of making profound shifts and changes of course or direction. In order to continue to advance toward that, just cause that we talked about earlier. He says most leaders are generally flexible, they can make small course corrections, they can adapt a little bit.
(09:26):
For the most part they're unwilling to make the profound and obviously risky changes necessary to keep advancing for that just cause. And he gives an example of Apple computer and their just cause at the time was kind of this empowerment of the masses, that's why they were in the personal computer business was to at that time computers were really the domain of governments and large institutions. They wanted to give that to the common man so that person could use those powers for themselves. At some point Apple is faced with this fork in the road, are we going to change our entire business strategy based on this new technology we've become aware of and pursue that instead? Or are we just going to keep on driving with what we've been doing? We've been reasonably successful with it, so why should we stop winning In some ways, and the example is that Steve Jobs, their former chairman, the late Steve Jobs did make this profound change and it was incredibly risky and he faced pushback from all of his senior leaders in the corporation on his leadership team. But they did make this giant change, thus was born the Macintosh. We all know how Apple turned out, they're pretty successful computer company and I assume they're going to stay in the technology game for a very long time. Eventually everybody will be out of the game, but they're probably going to be around for a while.
ES: (10:37):
That reminds me of a comment attributed to Stewart Brand. I'm not sure if it was when he talked about, he was asked, well whatever happened to the revolution, and he said, it's the PC, it's on your desk. And I think that was very much what Steve Jobs had in mind, it seems to me. I think this existential flexibility was the most fascinating thing in this presentation because I think it's the most difficult thing. The Steve Jobs example, and I'm sure there's many others, you're putting everything on the line and I think the comment Jobs was that we're not going to wait for somebody else to blow us up. We're going to blow ourselves up. I don't think that's exactly what he said, but something along those lines. What do you think, I mean how capable do you think people are of that kind of existential flexibility? It just seems awfully challenging.
CS: (11:28):
I think it is quite challenging to do that. Of course, it's risky and if you're a leader, probably even proposing that change of course is going to get the same reaction that he got from his staff, which is like, we can't do that. Anytime you propose a big change to the leader, it's usually unpopular with the troops, right? So, you're dealing with pushback, not a lot of buy-in. You're taking this enormous risk. And of course, and Steve Jobs can do it. He is the chairman and CEO of the company, he can just order them to do it. A legislative leader is a little different. You're elected by your caucus. If the caucus is not interested in this change you want to make, then you might not be the leader anymore. If you're a staff director and you do this, you might upset the members. And so, I think there are a lot of forces in legislature that would try to stifle existential flexibility.
(12:15):
I think the key is to ask yourself, would you do the same thing that jobs did? And the answer to that comes in a second question, which is how important is your just cause if your just cause is truly noble, it's something that you really are invested in and believe in and you know that the only way to advance it, not achieve it but move towards it, is to have a profound shift in strategy or course of action. Then you have to do that, right? And if the just cause doesn't mean that much to you, then it's probably not your just cause A and B. Even if it is and you're not willing to make those changes, well then you are not going to be a person leading an advancement in that direction.
ES: (12:54):
I think that what you're saying also points out the difference between business and legislatures, which I think is sometimes people don't grasp, which is there's a huge amount of persuasion that leaders have to do. You're right, Steve Jobs didn't have to persuade anybody, he just said do this or leave, and you don't get to do that when you're in the legislative context. So that brings me to the question, what do you think is the most difficult thing for leaders to shift their mindset from finite to infinite?
CS: (13:25):
Take it back again to this idea of a just cause. I think if the things you're trying to leave behind enduring, lasting achievements of good governance or improvement in the lives of your constituents or the members of the people in your state, I think if that is a really searing passionate idea for you, then none of this should be, it's all difficult, but none of it should be hard to try. I think if you're not certain, if you're going with the political wins, you're just sort of going the way the polls poll driven world or whatever, and you're not really firmly tied to any particular set of outcomes or any particular conditions that you want to bring about, then I think it's very difficult to do this because one, you're be very focused on winning against your rivals, so you're not going to see where the rivals of someone to grow from and learn from and improve from.
14:18):
Two, you're probably not going to make big changes. Those changes are too risky. That might lead to the loss of the majority. You might lose your seat because of it and it might get primary. So, I think the big challenge for a leader always will come back to what are the things that they're trying to bring about with their leadership and having a clear vision of what that North Star is to guide each decision. And once you have that, the decision's pretty clear. If I know my North Star is in that direction, I have to head in that direction. Even though the road might be treacherous or difficult or challenging or even I might perish along that road. At least I know that's direction I have to go. I think when you don't have, I mean it's Seneca, the stoic philosopher says, if one does not know to which port one is sailing, then no wind is favorable. And so, if you don't know what the port is that you're trying to go to, it doesn't matter how much wind, money, resources, charisma, support, it doesn't matter because you're not taking the ship to any particular place. I think once you know where the port is, then you will sail through difficult storms. You will sail through the loss of crew members, you will sail through all the adversity that might be on the journey because you know where it is that you want to land.
ES: (15:33):
I wonder to what degree it's American culture as opposed to maybe a culture that is more communal. We have a very individualistic culture. We have a culture that's very much oriented toward you win or you lose, you get this job, you don't get this job, you get into this school, you don't get into this school. Do you think a particularly difficult thing because it's so ingrained in us for people to overcome?
CS: (15:58):
I do think that there is a cultural element here. America likes to win. We like that sports teams that win. We like business leaders who are successful. We get very invested in presidential elections and things that have clear winners and losers. In our culture, at least losing is perceived as a bad thing. Whereas Henry Ford said, failure is an opportunity to begin again more intelligently. I don't think that we really embody that very much. I think when we lose, we feel bad. We feel shame, we feel that we've let people down. And I think that that's a pressure the legislative leaders feel as well, right? I mean if they lead their team into what would be a short-term failure that's not going to be perceived as growth, it's not going to be perceived as an opportunity to be begin in more intelligently probably is going to lead to that leader not being the leader anymore.
(16:45):
And so yes, I think our larger American culture and then also legislative culture is built on winners and losers and we talk and obsess about people in each of those categories. And this theory is asking you to set that aside a little bit and not see winning as a real thing and not see losing as a real thing, but seeing this infinite game that goes on and on where you're sometimes up and you're sometimes down, but you're always trying to improve yourself so that you are constantly moving closer and closer back to that just cause
ES: (17:17):
As we wrap up here, I want to tap into your rather extensive experience talking with leaders, thinking about leadership and ask you today, what do you think the biggest challenge is for legislative leaders? That's a rather overarching question, but I'll throw it out there anyhow. I wonder what your thoughts are on that.
CS: (17:38):
Well, as it relates to this, I would say that the biggest problem is that they lead in a world where everybody, I shouldn't say everybody, but a vast majority people think in terms of finite games, they want to win elections, they want to pass legislation, they want to improve the number of seats in the caucus. They want to win games. Whether it's the new members that are coming in, they want to win, that's why they ran for office, that's why they want to pass the things they want to pass. Whether it's the lobbyists and the hallways who are saying, we want to get this bill to the finish line, or we want to kill this bill because it's bad for our industry. Whether it's your constituents who want maybe sometimes some short-term victories just to make their lives a little bit better. I think leading in that environment's very, very challenging.
(18:20):
I mean, forget about all the stuff that you hear about all the time, like the social media or the polarization or partisanship. Just trying to be a long-term player in a short-term environment is an enormous challenge because, or maybe as a leader, you know what the long-term good outcome is and that some of these short-term victories are actually not in alignment with that. We are picking up little dopamine hits here and there, little victories here and there that feel good in the moment, that make people happy, in the moment, that increase support, that do all these kind of wonderful things that give you more power to do things. But you're constantly moving further and further away from what is a long-term outcome that you want to get. And it's very hard to lead other people who want the short-term victories and are not interested in the long-term.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
That's just not what they're there to do. And so how do you rectify that? How do you inspire them? How do you get them to see the port that you're sailing to? How do you get them to understand that this storm is important for us to go through to get to that port? How do you get them to say, let's not stop at this island just because there's pineapple and fresh water or whatever, because that's just a short-term victory that's off course. And the more of those islands we stop at the further away we are from the things that really matter. And I think that's an enormous challenge for a leader in legislature.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Well, here's to staying on course. And Curt, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. Take care.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Absolutely. My pleasure, Ed. Thank you so much.
I’ve been talking with Curt Stedron, director of NCSL’s Legislative Training Institute, about what legislative leaders can learn from game theory. Thanks for listening.
Search for NCSL Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast, “Our American States,” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. Our occasional series, “Across the Aisle,” features stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series, “Building Democracy,” on the history of legislatures.