Tetris

Anyone who’s ever played the popular Russian video game understands the principle: shapes fall out of the sky at a predetermined speed within a confined space. They need to be identified, matched and forced to create a straight horizontal line that duly vanishes. The lines that vanish maintain the distance between the appearance of the shapes and the bottom of the space they fall into which means that the available time to recognize a shape, match it to what is already there and make it fit remains near optimal.

But no player is perfect. Inattention and plain momentary stupidity create unforced errors. Fatigue, stress and anxiety force mistakes which then create imperfect straight lines that do not vanish but raise the floor and reduce the time available to recognize a shape, map it to available options and react appropriately for an optimal outcome. As reaction time shortens mistakes proliferate. The end then is inevitable.

If used as an analogy does this sound familiar? Allow me to expand it a little. Our identity is a construct. It is made up of our personal abilities and capabilities, beliefs and aspirations, environment and situation. In the words of topologists it is a shape that has to fit within the greater morphology of the workspace. And that morphology requires us not so much to change who we are but to somehow twist it a little this way or that way to make sure it fits smoothly with what’s already there.

It is not an autonomous process that gives us a sense of control of our destiny. Managers, supervisors and coworkers will also manipulate it a little trying to make sure the fit is as best as it can be under the circumstances.

Inevitably unforced errors happen and then forced errors occur. The more accumulated errors there are the less available reaction time everyone has. Things break. Sometimes irreparably.

The analogy can also be applied to the business as a whole. A company has an identity. That identity is also a construct. The ‘game area’ now is the marketplace. The customers are the shapes falling in, that have to be successfully arrayed into a perfect, horizontal straight line. You get the picture.

I’ve simplified some things in both cases. The available reaction time has been kept the same. No speeding up of falling shapes due to, let’s say, a crisis within or without the company. No other variables that impact directly on the decision-making process. Yet, the ‘crash-and-burn’ stage is always; never that far away.

Can it be that simple? I hear you ask. Is success in business (or in life) merely a process by which we fit in perfectly in an imperfect world, twist and turn until the shape we are makes sense with the shapes that are so we can all maintain the perfect world of stability and optimal reaction time?

Well, yeah. And no. Yeah in that is truly all there is. No, in that it is not an easy thing to achieve, hence the difficulty associated with actually playing Tetris. Think about it though. Reduce the unforced errors and minimize (or fix) the forced ones and you get a prolonged, smooth, easy-sailing existence. Fail to do that and you have zero wiggle room to fix anything or even pretend to run things. Circumstances make all the key choices and decide the key outcomes for you.?