Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
By Jeannette Cooperman
Ted Wohlfarth’s no wuss. He played football, worked in industrial real estate, taught economics. Then he started coaching his kids’ sports teams and realized he was only teaching them to win—and at someone else’s expense.
Wohlfarth used economists’ game-theory insights into behavior to create a series of win-win games. By 1995 he’d founded a nonprofit he called EnTeam and quit his day job to run it. The goal? To develop a new sort of scoreboard, new ways for kids to “compete” at cooperating. Sometimes it’s black and white kids collaborating, sometimes rich and poor, sometimes Christian, Jewish and Muslim.
Gentleness can be tough to teach. So is the nonprofit succeeding? Depends on how you define victory.
You can’t be much of a sports fan, to have developed these un-American ideas. Oh yeah, I love games. I grew up playing team sports and running track, and senior year I went out for swimming.
What happened? I was coaching soccer, basketball and baseball, and I started wondering, “When are they going to learn to win the way we do in business?” When a real-estate deal’s successful, both buyer and seller walk away feeling like winners.
Why is sports different? Most sports come out of military training. Football was developed by Roman generals to prepare soldiers. Look at Olympic games—shot put, wrestling, javelin, footrace. All of the original events were military preparations.
Bobsled wasn’t. No, but we set it up on the same model. And that model makes sense, because if you can’t win a war, you can’t survive. We compete to survive—but we collaborate to thrive. EnTeam is about bringing the power of competition to cooperation.
That makes a catchy slogan. How do you do it? You see who’s best at bringing out the best in others. There’s a big hole in what our society gives children. Getting two teams to work together to get over the mountain—that’s not part of sports.
Isn’t competition inevitable? I certainly don’t want to be married to someone who believes that marriage is a win-lose contest! This thing of “I’m better than you, so I get to stay on the island”—it goes back to the law of the jungle. We’re asking, “What else can we do to create the drama, the adrenaline rush, that comes from an excellent performance?”
What have you learned? That the scoreboard matters a lot to kids. Win-win is not on their radar screen; they want to measure progress and see that they are good at what they do.
What was one of your first win-win games? EnTeam volleyball. Half of each team is on each side of the net, and the objective is to work together to get the ball to cross the net as many times as possible in two minutes. How well we work together will determine our initial score. And the second game, we either win or lose based on our ability to improve our performance.
Why not just stick with gentle creative pursuits, like dried-pasta sculptures spray-painted gold? Oddly, art doesn’t feel win-win either. How you do depends on the teacher’s opinion and on what’s being measured. We need an objective standard of excellence so kids can see progress without having to win subjective approval.
So what’s the key that breaks the win-lose cycle? It’s how the rules and the rewards are set up. You need some kind of learning objective, and you need a cooperative opportunity—a way to accomplish more by working together than by working independently. Then, you need an impersonal opponent, a way to objectively measure your goal, and rules that are no more complex than they have to be to keep people engaged.
So tell me again how I get my husband to collaborate on cleaning out the basement. I worked at a summer camp. Everybody hated the garbage, so we’d take a clock and a pickup truck and say, “How quickly can we get down to the dump and get rid of all that stuff?” When you “EnTeam,” you put people together against problems, just as “encouraging” people puts them into courage.
How much effect does your model have on your personal life? Oh, it’s huge. To try to live according to a win-win relationship requires a completely different kind of communication. If I’m trying to beat you in something, whether it’s Ping-Pong or poker, it’s normal and expected that we will communicate in certain ways, withhold information from each other. Deception is an essential element of healthy competition—in one-on-one basketball, it’s the head fake. But we don’t make that clear; we draw any distinctions for kids between competition and collaboration. We tell children to tell the truth and coach them to tell a lie.
Will cooperating ever be as exciting a challenge as competing? We play 162 baseball games a season, and we think cooperation is a one-time event. Is it any wonder that our competitive skills are much more finely developed than our cooperative skills?
