Join us for an Advanced Coaching Retreat: Games Worth Playing
- By Rob McD
share this:
You Got Good Game? Create a Great Context!
How Game Theory Can Decisively Enhance Your Transformation
In any game we ever play, Context is Key.
It frames the field and sets the rules. It runs the clock and determines the scoreboard. It dictates how conflict and cooperation happen. It stages who cheers for whom and how passionately. It calls the shots of how we recall the experience. It makes the taste left in our mouths.
Context is an ever-present, all-pervasive factor in all life activities we do. It informs us of how well we performed and strikes the chords of our outcomes – desirable or otherwise. Context governs all of our relationships.
In the realm of mediated thought, our Context houses our Concepts and hosts our Content. This holds true in any arena, whether family dynamics or website design,
philosophical exploration or business development.
In life there is no such thing as “no context”. We all, without exception, are born in them and live in them. We transform from moment to moment in our contexts.
Fortunately we all possess the inherent power to identify and re-decide upon the contexts which so decisively impact our lives and determine life quality.
Clouded Context = Chaos.
Clarity of Context = Choice.
A context of Scarcity and Excess tends to lead to pain.
A context of Sustainable Abundance (“Sustabu”) tends to lead to pleasure. Which direction would you choose?
Once we are fully conscious of such context distinctions,
life-empowering decisions become no-brainer choices.
Enter Game Theory:
Your Claim of Thrones.
Strategically interdependent decision making is the essence of what Game Theory studies. The juice of this super-cool discipline is in the light it sheds on how and why individuals and groups make essential life choices.
Game Theory recognizes that our decisions in life never exist in a vacuum. Every strategic choice of each player affects the actions and outcomes of every other player.
In Leadership Training and Personal Development, exercises arising from this perspective are invaluable.
With the help of Game Theory, we can predict the likely payoffs of how we communicate with ourselves and with others – and how others communicate with us.
Resourcefully contextualizing our outcomes, we can rewrite history: namely, the strategy patterns of our personal, inter-personal, and extra-personal histories.
An alternate name for Game Theory (one that some say is way more accurate) is “Interactive Decision Theory”.
Games, not unlike life, are interwoven tapestries of multi-player decision threads which co-create patterns of most likeliness leading toward highly prized results.
What makes the games we play Games Worth Playing?
In theory and in all life practice, the Context is Decisive.
Are you now feeling game for juicier outcomes in life?
If you are an Advanced Coach (and Advancing Leader) who’s interested in using Game Theory to create an empowering new context for your life and your work, please actively consider experiencing the Seven Stones Leadership retreat “Deepening: Games Worth Playing!”
For more information or to register for this course, click here.
In case Gina & Jen don’t want to take the blame for this blog:
Rob McD, Wordbreeder, is a Verbal Design Consultant
for Seven Stones Leadership and its Sustabu initiative.
