Simon Sinek explains James Kars's distinction between finite games, which have fixed rules and an end point, and infinite games, which aim to keep playing indefinitely. He shows how this applies to business: Circuit City played to win against Best Buy, but Best Buy played to stay in the game.
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So in the mid-1980s, a philosopher and theologian by the name of Dr. James Kars articulated these two types of games. Finite games and infinite games. A finite game is defined as known players, fixed rules, and an agreed upon objective. Football, baseball. If there's a winner, necessarily, there have to be losers. And there's always a beginning, middle and an end. Then you have infinite games. Infinite games are defined as known and unknown players, which means you don't necessarily know who all the players are. And new players can join whenever they want.
The rules are changeable, which means every player can play however they want. And the objective is to perpetuate the game, to stay in the game as long as possible. Turns out we're players in infinite games every day of our lives. Right? There's no such thing as winning global politics. There's no such thing as winning marriage. You can't be number one in your marriage. You can be number two, but you can't be number one. Right?
There's no such thing as winning education. Nobody wins learning. You can come in first for the finite amount of time you're at school, where we agree upon the time frame and the metrics, grades. But nobody wins education and nobody wins business. Like when Circuit City went bankrupt, Best Buy didn't win anything, right? But if you listen to the language of so many leaders, half the room doesn't know what Circuit City is. I know it's sort of. I realize that it used to be a company that competed with Best Buy. Same thing. Big box store went in, bought a vcr. You don't know what a VCR is.
What I love about these definitions is that when we listen to the language of so many leaders, it becomes abundantly clear that they don't know the game they're playing in. The number of leaders who talk about being number one, being the best, or beating their competition. Based on what? Based upon what agreed upon metrics, time frames or objectives. And this is a problem because when we play with a finite mindset in an infinite game, when we play to win in a game that has no finish line, there's some consistent and predictable outcomes. The big ones are the decline of trust, the decline of cooperation, and the decline of innovation. So now let's translate that to a policing organization, right? An infinite game is not the absence of finite games. It is the context within which finite games exist. Clearly, you are engaged in finite things every day of your career. You have a project that you need to complete. There's a beginning, middle and end. If someone has committed a crime you want to try and catch that person, There is a known objective. There's a beginning, middle and end. There's going to be a winner, there's going to be a loser. Right. If somebody. You're chasing somebody down for a moving violation, for example. These things are finite. But policing and the organization of the Orange County Sheriff is an infinite organization. We hope that this organization outlasts everybody here and thrives beyond everybody here. So the decisions we make and the way we conduct ourselves have to be considerate of. Of the fact that we want this organization to thrive for the long term.
