So much is changing in the way we do business, the capacity to adapt and to shift our thinking is critical to success. The challenge is how to transform institutions that have been hardwired for consistency, control, and predictability into cultures where learning, surprise, and discovery are truly valued.

TheInner Game of Work helps us define the landscape of what has become known as a "learning organization." In this book, any manager or employee who has the courage and commitment to really learn about learning will find concepts and practices that can turn the intention of a learning organization into a day-to-day, lived experience.

Most of the traditional strategies for creating a learning organization have involved extracurricular activities. We conduct training events, special programs, and meetings about creating a learning culture. One side effect of these special efforts is that they reinforce the limiting belief that learning and doing are separate and competing activities. We struggle with the tension between how much learning we can afford before it starts interfering with producing. We worry about the "transfer" of learning: how to take the learning and bring it "back" into the workplace. The Inner Game resolves the tension between learning and doing by showing us that they are both part of a bigger whole.

Tim Gallwey's ideas about learning have, from the beginning, been uniquely insightful and radically practical. In 1976, Tim Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis profoundly changed the way I thought about many things, not just tennis, and twenty-three years later, its influence is still strong. It showed me, for the first time, that our efforts to improve ourselves and our performance actually interfere with what we hope to achieve. Tim challenged much of what we believe about teaching and learning by revealing that much of the teaching we do is actually hostile to learning. The Inner Game of Work brings these insights directly into the workplace.

The idea that our standard methods of teaching and coaching reduce performance is radical. Most educational institutions and workplaces rely heavily on instruction and direction, so if all these efforts at improvement are not useful, we had better pay attention. Plus, if instruction doesn't work, what does? Many writers describe what is wrong with the world, but they become theoretical or abstract when it comes time for real workable alternatives.

What is special about Tim's work is that he not only defines the nature of our interference, he offers beautifully concrete ways to increase learning and performing that minimize instruction and direction. This is his genius. He understands how we learn and has spent his life creating ways we can un-manage ourselves toward higher achievement. The Inner Game has changed the way many people relate to their work, and perhaps even more important, it offers institutions a way to simultaneously create learning, improve performance, and foster a more satisfying workplace.

Becoming a learning culture is very demanding. It requires more than most of us realize and asks managers to have a deep enough commitment to learning and performance to give up some control. The challenge of the Inner Game is that it requires faith and a great deal of unlearning of bad habits. The Inner Game demands that we value awareness, consciousness, and paying attention to what is happening within and around us. No easy assignment. In our Western culture, as soon as you say the words awareness and attention, it is labeled New Age and the theory is dismissed as a form of California dreaming. It's not.

The fundamental question is, What is possible in the workplace? Can we have good performance, high enjoyment, and high learning all at the same time? This raises the deeper question of what is the purpose of work. Is the purpose of work to deliver institutional outcomes -- greater profit, higher service levels, market domination? The economists, the financial community, and the business press have a simple answer to this question: show me the money.

For most people, though, the question of purpose is more complex. They accept the need for economic success, but there is more to work than meets the wallet. People care about the workplace culture, its relationships, the opportunity to fulfill their potential, and the chance to learn and improve their skills. We often treat this as a tension between management and employees, but that is not the real issue. It is an individual, internal struggle. We are constantly torn between getting results and living a process that is humanly satisfying.

It is in this arena that the Inner Game offers hope. Tim constantly raises the question of what game we are playing. Can we play a satisfying Inner Game and at the same time meet the requirements of the outer game?

Finding some cohesion between inner and outer, however, demands some radical experimentation. We need to try new structures, new practices, and new ways to honor the complexity of the question.

Many years ago, Tim and I attended a national sales conference for a large American corporation. It goes without saying that salespeople like to compete. They not only like to compete, they believe in it. Competition is the point of it all; to be a winner in the marketplace is both the goal and the reward. That is true for both the business and the person. This whole sales conference was, in fact, an assembly of winners, an affirmation that they were the best in the company and probably the best in the industry, perhaps in the world.

Following a presentation on Inner Game coaching, Tim agreed to manage the annual tennis tournament, a tradition at every sales conference. After all, winners love a tournament, and here they had a well-known author/tennis coach available to be maître d' of the event. Tim, though, was not satisfied in simply presiding. He thought that the tennis tournament could provide a unique learning experience for each participant by asking the question, What game are you really playing?

Tim suggested that the winners of each match would be out of the tournament, and the player who lost would advance to the next round. Think of this: the loser was rewarded for losing, and the winner was sent to the sidelines. If this is the structure, what is the point of playing if "winning" got you nowhere? Well, this was the point. Each player had to confront the question of why he was playing the game. The conventional answer, especially among salespeople, is that they play to win. Tim's answer was that there is a better game to play, and that is to play to learn, to play to fulfill your own potential. And ironically, if you do this, you will actually get better performance.

The intent of a tournament where losers advanced and winners went home was that it would be unclear to the players whether it was in their interest to win or lose. If they beat their opponent, they would, in effect, be a loser. If they lost to their opponent, they would be treated as a winner. In the face of this, they were free to shift their focus from winning or losing to simply playing for the experience itself, playing to see how good a player they could become. Philosophically, they were asked to stop dancing to the tune defined by the external world around them and encouraged to play according to their own internal message center. The tennis tournament offers a metaphor for what is possible in the workplace. No matter what structure we are given, there is always the possibility of transforming the dominant cultural habit into an unpredictable event where learning is more likely to happen.

Now, I am not suggesting that all tournaments reward those who lose, but this kind of thoughtful and selective experimentation is what separates organizations that simply survive from those that excel. This willingness to question the conventional wisdom makes the difference. And, in fact, many management practices that would have seemed radical fifteen years ago are now accepted in countless corporations. For example,

* Teams are now self-organizing and do most of the tasks that bosses used to do.

* Workers inspect their own work, where previously it had always been thought that third-party inspection was essential to good quality.

* Bosses are now evaluated by their subordinates.

* Suppliers are now treated as part of the producing organization and included in planning and decisions.

* Salespeople can make customer-service decisions that used to be centralized and required two levels of approval.

Each of these, and many more, questions what was once held sacred as the prerogative of management and essential to maintaining adequate controls. The tennis tournament still stands out vividly in my mind as an early indicator of the kind of experimentation that a real learning environment will require. It questioned its own deeper purpose, it varied enough from tradition that it left all involved a little uncomfortable, and it ultimately became a source of energy and play that brought some life to the whole sales event.

The role of coaches and the constant re-forming of our understanding of purpose and structures seem essential to the thinking about the role management can play in creating an environment where learning is valued. What is required is the belief that learning and performing are one and the same. High performers are people who simply learn faster. We learn faster when we pay attention and see the world for what it truly is, not for what it should have been. Learning then becomes a function of awareness more than instruction; it is seeing clearly what is happening around you, seeing it without much judgment and without an instinct to control and shape all that you touch.

Learning is retarded in conditions of high anxiety and low acceptance. For most tasks, people have the intellectual knowledge to perform well; they just have a hard time acting on what they know. And this is one profound insight of the Inner Game. We do not need to learn more from a boss or expert: we need to change the way we apply what already exists within us. Increasing pressure for results is more paralyzing than liberating, even though this idea goes against the conventional wisdom of the culture.

These ideas have widespread implications for the next generation of workplace changes. If we really want best performance, we would redesign common practices that try to improve performance through instruction and traditional management intervention. For example, we would stop rank ordering individuals and units as a motivational/reward device. We would change the rhetoric from being about winning and make it about learning. Performance appraisals would stop being evolutions of an employee's strengths and weaknesses and become a dialogue between a manager and an employee about what each is experiencing and what that means. We would treat employees as autonomous, self-developing agents. It means our educational efforts would shift from a focus on training to a focus on learning, and these would be designed around the learner's experience rather than the teacher's expertise. We would question the value of modeling tapes, training with predefined, predictable behaviors as an outcome.

In every workplace we need to win. The workplace is not a social event, and our survival is always on the line. This doesn't answer the fundamental questions of purpose and meaning, both for the institution and the individual. In a quiet and concrete way, the Inner Game argues for creating institutions that can offer people deeper meaning than just profitability, while at the same time achieving economic success. How can we play a game where the human spirit is validated and still get good work done? Most organizations have this desire, but they are still wedded to a way of thinking that treats the person as a means to an economic end. The business has to prosper, but the person needs to find purpose beyond that and needs to do so in a way that nurtures rather than burns. Placing a higher value on learning, and the awareness that learning demands, offers us hope that this is possible.

The Inner Game of Work is a product of Tim's twenty-plus years in the field, of his bringing Inner Game ideas into the business world. It requires the reader to suspend judgment and be open to the possibility that there are fundamentally new ways to realize our intentions and desires.

Enjoy this book. Take it seriously. Put it to work, and over time, what was stressful will become merely interesting, what you avoided will become attractive, and what seemed futile will become a source of possibility.

-- Peter Block