Finite and Infinite Games
Two kinds of games
Work out which one you are in
Finite and Infinite Games, section one
The first sentence of the book is the whole conclusion. What the two categories save you from getting wrong.
What actually happened?
Carse opens with the entire thesis: there are at least two kinds of games, and a finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. A finite game has a start, a finish and a winner — a match, an election, a lawsuit. An infinite game has no end, its rules can change, and the only object is to keep it going — a culture, a marriage, a craft, a company that means to last. Confusing them produces two symmetrical mistakes.
First ask whether there is a final whistle
Sorting comes before anything else. Does this have a defined end and a winner? A negotiation, a tender, a quarter are finite and deserve everything you have. A client relationship, a team, your own reputation are not scored that way at all.
Squeezing a supplier dry wins the meeting. If you want them for another ten years, you have just booked a loss in the other game.
Finite tactics inside an infinite game spend the game
Beating people inside something unending consumes the players: suppliers crushed, staff drained, peers turned into enemies. Win every round and eventually nobody sits down with you, and in an infinite game no opponent means no game.
Every supplier negotiated down to no margin. Three years on, the only firms still willing to bid are the worst ones.
Dragging out a finite game is the other way to lose
Treating something built to end as endless costs just as much: a lawsuit past its stopping point, a project that should close, a partnership renewed forever under the heading of giving it more time. Accepting the whistle is what frees your hands.
The doomed project stayed funded because of what had already gone into it. What it was holding was not budget, it was people.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you are fighting something very hard, or you have been dragging something out for a long time.
Ask first: does this have a final whistle, or is it meant to keep going? Does the way I am playing match its type?
Where it goes wrong: using the infinite game as cover for not competing, or fitting a whistle to everything and settling accounts in every direction.
Lines to keep
There are at least two kinds of games.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning.
Every round you win ends. The game itself does not have to.
Same situation, other people are asking
I won, and now I don't know when to stop.It's going well and I can't shake the feeling it won't last.Three in a row and everyone wants me to press harder.They're scattered. Do I finish them off or let them turn on each other?After the win · all 9 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.