Improvement is selfish behaviour because if I improve (win) it must be at the detriment (lose) of someone else, surely? Ergo – improvement is not an attractive behaviour because we don’t like to be regarded as selfish by others. What assumptions are driving this conclusion? The obvious one is the zero-sum-game assumption – that if I improve (win) then everyone else must deteriorate (lose). The Laws of Conservation give us this idea – energy is conserved, momentum is conserved, money is conserved (that’s what accountants are for – to balance the accounts). But do the Laws of Conservation also apply to qualitative measures such as happiness, fun, curiosity, sadness, anger, fear? If I am having fun does that imply that someone else must be angry? Our intuition suggests “no” – if we can both be having fun and we can both be angry then the Laws of Conservation does not apply to qualitative measures siuch as feelings. Therefore, if we focus attention on qualitative improvement then we can be selfish so long as we conciously abandon the Win-Lose constraint and consciously adopt the Win-Win goal. Selfishness is OK if your goal is qualitative improvement for everyone. Win-Win-Win.
Sounds great! The trouble is when we look around us we don’t seem to see the Win-Win-Win principle in action very often. What’s missing? Our quantitative measures obey the Conservation Laws, our qualitative measures do not so maybe we are confusing the two somewhere? What measure can be viewed as both qualitative and quantitative? Time maybe? Time is a definitely a quantitative metric and “Time is Money” is a familiar phrase that equates these two quantities. When it is MY time we are referring to it feels different and “Quality of Life” is a phrase that springs to mind. So is that where I am confusing quality and quantity? When I am talking about my time and my life – my lifetime. Is it OK for me to be selfish with my life-time so long as the goal is a Win-Win-Win one?