About 4 years ago is when I first heard the term "win-win" in the context of, "... and then everyone can have a win-win situation" from my management coach. This concept was foreign to me and I asked for an explanation. Her reply was, "It's the opposite of a win-lose situation." So ... people win, and people lose. And you're telling me there is a way where people win, and people win again. I thought it was silly that if you'd already won once, that you'd want to win again. It was last year when I finally figured out she was referring to the issue of the winning side versus the losing side.
I think in the highly competitive world of business, we tend to think of this idea of winning versus losing. Although in grade school there may be winners, everyone nowadays gets a "participation prize" for just showing up. We know that in the real world, this is not always the case. You're either a winner or a loser. And in some cases, like mentioned above, somehow everyone's a winner—although I think that is something of a rarity.
There can only be a winner or a loser if there are specific metrics by which someone or something can be judged as greater-than or less-than the other. Sometimes that metric is a literal yardstick, and at other times that can be a single person that holds the equation of measurement in his or her head.
The wonderful "problem" of creativity, however, is that we don't have entirely good metrics for judging such a quality. "She's creative." What does that mean? Does that mean everyone else is less creative? How do we prove that? And, do we want a way to prove that?
Perhaps the fundamental dilemma I faced when trying to understand "win-win" captures my point. The power of creativity, is the ability to wholeheartedly accept a defeat. This is different from "learning from your mistakes" but more in the milieu of listening to your mistakes. For instance, I was talking to a curator yesterday on the topic of creating art and how everything good I ever make is a complete accident. Oh, I go into it all with clear intentions, but once everything starts to fall apart, it gets terribly exciting. It is like a sculptor with his stone. Oops, the place where the nose is supposed to go just fell off! Instead of giving up, a true artist realizes that the stone is telling the artist something important.
[In the voice of a stone] Hey, look at what I broke off for you! Now you can do something better than that ridiculous nose you were going to sculpt in the wrong place. Yo! I know you heard me. Look over here! Don't walk awaaaaay ...
So I have revealed that I am something of a Modernist (I'm not sure if that's been a secret). Understanding and "listening" to one's materials is a critical factor to finding the most natural form of expression for a set of given constraints. Which brings us to the fifth law,
Thus when something isn't working out, it isn't your fault really. And it's not the material's fault either. The only problem is that both of you (you the designer and it the material) aren't really communicating. Tuning into the messages versus tuning into the problems is a critical factor in designing for simplicity. I plan to listen to the ocean as heard in my conch shell today ...
Chris Yu from Japan writes about an experience he had with Win-Win in a negotiations class, "It was pointed out that Win-Win is more often being more creative to get to Win-Win-Lose instead of Win-Lose. In other words, let's say that there's only $2 between us and we each want an identical $2 sandwich. Since there's only $2 it appears that one side would win (get the sandwich) and the other would walk away hungry. But if we're 'creative,' one of us might go to the shop, order the $2 sandwich and upon receiving it the other one would run into the store acting like a madman, steal the sandwich and run away. The storekeeper would be dismayed and probably make the person standing there another sandwich. Hence Win (sandwich buyer), Win (sandwich stealer), Lose (sandwich shop). Anyway, I think the whole point was to encourage people to think more about how having more creative possibilities could result in a more optimal agreement but it also illustrates how Win-Win conveniently omits the other parties." So in essence, creativity always wins.
Posted by maeda at April 8, 2005 08:51 AM