The aim of the game
An exciting thing happened a couple of weeks ago - I learned how to play poker. Apparently Texas Hold ‘Em (the version that we were playing) is not just a fabulous song by Beyoncé but an incredibly compelling card game.
For the uninitiated: the basics of the game are that you’re dealt two cards (which no one but you can see) and then three cards are dealt face up on the table, followed by a fourth card, followed by a fifth card. Once all of the five cards on the table have been dealt, you discover who has the best hand, using both the cards on the table and the two that you were dealt at the start of the game. (There’s a complicated ranking system of what hand is considered the best which I won’t bore you with.)
Described like this it sounds like a fairly simple game of luck. But the thing that makes poker fun (or dangerous, depending on how you view it) is the betting. At each point that you gain some new cards (and therefore some new information), you have to bet some of your money (or, in the case of my first game, scrabble tiles) to stay in. If someone ‘raises’ (i.e. puts in more money than the player before them) then everyone needs to put in the same amount if they want to keep playing - otherwise you ‘fold’, accept that you’ve lost the money you’ve already gambled, and sit the rest of the game out. After all the rounds of betting are complete, if there’s more than one player still in the game, those left show their cards and whoever has the best hand wins the money.
I can see why poker is a big deal - because, ultimately, it mirrors life. We’re constantly ‘betting’ on decisions using incomplete information, having to adjust course as we learn new things. Whilst we’re in control of how we react and respond to things, there’s a huge amount of luck involved in determining our circumstances - the cards that are dealt are the cards that are dealt. And I’m sure we’ve all come across bluffers - someone that bets high to make you think they’ve got a great hand (which might encourage you to bow out of the game) but in reality doesn’t have the goods to back it up. Just like in life, sometimes the bluffers win - but when they get called out, it’s brilliantly satisfying.
Initially, excited by learning a new game, I just wanted to keep playing as long as possible. I’d be dealt two fairly bad cards but would cling on for a couple of rounds of betting ‘just in case’ the cards on the table happened to fall my way. But I discovered something interesting as the evening went on and my pile of scrabble tiles rapidly decreased. I’d mistaken what the game actually was. The game wasn’t to win one specific round of this card game by getting lucky. The game was to clean out your opponents and win the cash. Admittedly this is less obvious when you’re not playing with real money and when your fellow players are quite happy to lend you some of their tiles if you’re running short, but it stuck with me because I think there are one or two leadership truths that lie within it.
The reason I found myself so low on assets was that I was betting on everything - even when my hand was bad and I’d need to rely purely on luck to stand a chance of winning. In my mind this was OK because I was only putting in small amounts of money (tiles) and would bow out if someone raised the bet significantly. But the reality is, each of those small amounts gradually ate into my pot, until suddenly I found myself with very few resources to play with - meaning that even if I got a great hand, I wouldn’t be able to bet high on it and potentially reap the rewards.
This element of the game demonstrates a literal opportunity cost - everytime you choose to stay in the game, it costs you. Over the course of my leadership career, I’ve become more and more convinced that really interrogating the opportunity cost of doing any given project or pursuing a particular opportunity is one of a leader’s most important jobs. In each of the leadership jobs I’ve had, there have always been exciting offers that come up - perhaps a one-off event that we’ve been invited to participate in, or a new initiative that we’re asked to join. Often, all of these opportunities sound interesting and exciting and worthwhile, and it’s tempting to dive straight in, to say yes and get on board. But saying yes to anything is a no to something else - there’s an opportunity cost, because time and resource is finite.
However, if you as the leader have a clear sense of your overarching strategy (or endgame), then making these choices becomes simpler. The words ‘business plan’ might strike fear into our hearts - there’s a whole other post to be written about these documents and how to avoid months sweating over a 100-page epic that is then never looked at again - but the point of doing this kind of planning is to give you a really clear decision making framework when opportunities come up. Does it seem likely that these cards are strong enough to help me win this round and achieve my goal of taking home all the money? Or, in our case, is the energy we’re going to have to put into this opportunity going to bring us closer to achieving our long term mission? If not, then perhaps it’s better to sit this one out, preserving your resources for when a better suited opportunity will (inevitably) come up.
And this brings us to another parallel - understanding what success looks like. Even with poker, where it’s relatively clear what the end goal is, it took me a minute to work out that my aim shouldn’t be to win every single hand, it was to win as much money as possible - preferably all of it. I think it’s easy to make this mistake when you’re leading a non-profit organisation (it’s not entirely straightforward with for profit companies either, but at the very least, you know that one of your goals is to produce a surplus at the end of every year). It’s tempting to feel like you’ve had a great year if your balance sheet is really healthy at the end of it, or you’ve had terrific audience numbers, or if you’ve worked with a whole new group of people. But if the balance sheet’s healthy but the artistic work has been poor, or the audience numbers are great but they’re mostly the same people that always come and your goal is attract people who don’t usually attend, or the new group you’ve worked with doesn’t actually help you fulfil your mission - then this isn’t success. These things may be helpful - for example, a strong balance sheet can give you a solid grounding with which to take a risk and try something new - but they aren’t the goal in and of itself.
I apologise to any experienced poker players who are reading this post and hanging their heads at the many nuances of poker that I have missed and/or haven’t understood yet - it’s slightly brazen of me to write something about the parallels between leadership and poker when I’ve played literally two games of the latter. I started reading a few articles about poker to give myself some more knowledge to draw on but quickly came to the conclusion that, like leadership, you learn much more quickly by doing it than by reading about it. And, when you’re a newbie in either sphere, it helps to have some kind fellow players around you who explain what the idiosyncratic rules are, give you some quiet advice when you play your first hand, commiserate when you lose and cheer you on enthusiastically when you win.