{"id":944,"date":"2011-08-06T18:00:31","date_gmt":"2011-08-06T18:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saasoft.com\/blog\/?p=944"},"modified":"2011-08-06T18:00:31","modified_gmt":"2011-08-06T18:00:31","slug":"harried-to-the-rescue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/?p=944","title":{"rendered":"Harried to the Rescue!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We are social animals and we need social interaction with others of our kind\u00a0– it is the way our caveman wetware works.<\/p>\n

And we need it as much as we need air, water, food and sleep. Solitary confinement is an effective punishment – you don\u2019t need to physically beat someone to psychologically hurt them – just actively excluding them or omitting to notice them\u00a0is effective and has the advantage that it leaves no visible marks – and no trail of incriminating evidence.<\/p>\n

This is the Dark Art of the Game Player and the\u00a0act of social omission is called discounting – so\u00a0once we know what to look for the signature of the Game Player is obvious – and we can choose to play along or not.<\/p>\n

Some people have learned how to\u00a0protect themselves from gamey behaviour –\u00a0they have learned to maintain a healthy balance of confidence and humility. They ask for feedback, they know their\u00a0strengths and their weaknesses, and they\u00a0and strive to maintain and develop their capability through teaching and learning. Sticks and stones may break their bones but names can never hurt them<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Other people have not learned how to spot the signs and to avoid being sucked into games\u00a0–\u00a0they react to the discounting by trying harder, working harder, taking on more and more – all to gain morsels of recognition. Their strategy works\u00a0but it has an unfortunate\u00a0consequence – it becomes an unconscious\u00a0habit and they become players of the game called\u00a0“Harried”.\u00a0 The start is\u00a0signalled by a big sigh\u00a0as they are hooked into\u00a0their preferred\u00a0Rescuer role – always there to pick up the pieces – always offering\u00a0to talke on extra work – always on the look out for an opportunity to take on more burden. \u201cGood Ol’ Harried\u201d they hear \u201cS\/he works every hour God sends like a Trojan”. The unspoken ulterior motive of the instigator of the game is less admirable\u00a0“Delegate the\u00a0job to Harried – or better still –\u00a0just mess it up a bit\u00a0do nothing\u00a0– just wait –\u00a0Harried will parachute in and save the day – and save me having to do it myself.\u201d The conspirators in the game\u00a0are\u00a0adopting different roles –\u00a0Victim and Persecutor – and\u00a0it is in\u00a0their interest to have Rescuers around who will willingly join\u00a0the game.\u00a0The\u00a0Persecutors\u00a0are\u00a0not\u00a0easy to see because\u00a0their behaviour is passive – discounting is passive aggressive behaviour –\u00a0they discount others need for a work-life balance. The Victims are easier to spot – they claim\u00a0not be able to solve their own problems by\u00a0acting helpless and letting Harried take over. And the whole social construct is designed with one purpose\u00a0– to create a rich opportunity for social interaction – because even\u00a0though they are painful, games are better than solitary anonymity.<\/p>\n

According to Eric Berne, founder of the school of Transactional Analysis, games are learned behaviour – and they spring from an\u00a0injunction\u00a0that we are all taught as children: that each of us is reliant on others for recognition – and those others are our parents. Sure, recognition from\u00a0influential others is important BUT it is not our only source. We can give ourselves recognition. Each of us can learn to celebrate a job well done; a lesson learned; a challenge overcome – and through that route we can learn to recognise others genuinely, openly and without expectation of a return compliment. But to\u00a0learn this we have to grasp the nettle and to unlearn our\u00a0habit of playing the Persecutor-Rescuer-Victim games; and to do that we must first shine a light onto\u00a0our\u00a0blindspots.<\/p>\n

Gamey\u00a0behaviour is a potent yet invisible\u00a0barrier to improvement.\u00a0So if it is endemic in an organisation that wants to improve then it needs to be diagnosed and managed\u00a0as an integral part of the improvement process.\u00a0It is a critical human\u00a0factor and in Improvement Science the\u00a0human factors and the\u00a0\u00a0process factors\u00a0progress hand in hand.<\/p>\n

Here is an paragraph from\u00a0Games Nurses Play <\/em>by Pamela Levin:<\/p>\n

“Harried” is a game played when situations are complicated. The aim is to make the situation even more complicated so that a person feels justified in giving up. “Harried Midwife” is so named because I (P.L.) first observed the game on an obstetric floor, but it has its counterpart in other clinical settings. The game is aided by institutional needs, since it is a rare hospital unit that has the staff adequate in numbers these days. <\/em>In the situation I observed, the harried nurse sent her only nurse’s aide to lunch when three deliveries were pending. Instead of using a methodical approach, she went running about checking a pulse here, a chart there, a dilatation here, and an I.V. there, so she never was caught up with the work. She lost her pen and couldn’t “chart” until she found it. She answered the telephone and lost the message. She was so busy setting up the delivery room, she forgot to notify the doctor of the impending delivery. The baby, which arrived in the labor room, was considered contaminated, and could not be discharged to the newborn nursery. After the chaos had died down, the nurse felt justified in doing almost no work for the rest of the day.<\/em><\/p>\n

Click for the complete Games Nurses Play<\/em> article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are social animals and we need social interaction with others of our kind\u00a0– it is the way our caveman wetware works. And we need it as much as we need air, water, food and sleep. Solitary confinement is an effective punishment – you don\u2019t need to physically beat someone to psychologically hurt them – … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Harried to the Rescue!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,43,45,46,47,49],"tags":[294],"class_list":["post-944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","category-why","category-what","category-teach","category-transactional-analysis","category-victimosis","tag-transactional-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}