Introduction
Game theory can be a useful lens to apply to various aspects of decision making in our daily lives. In this post, I'd like to explore when we should help other teams at work by looking through this lens. I'll argue that being *selectively* altruistic is the optimal strategy for maximising selfish reward. This means that it is in your interest to help colleagues with some aspects of their work, given the right conditions. The determining criteria for whether you should help them is by playing through what happens if you help them, vs what happens if you don’t, and assessing the impact on your own perceived output in each end-state.
When to Help: Example
You have created a new system for your team that allows them to automatically communicate their work to stakeholders,
to automatically keep stakeholders informed. Your system gives you an advantage over your immediate peers,
as it allows you to work more efficiently than they do, which will make you stand out from your peers at promotion time.
Should you help your peers implement your system so that they can also work more efficiently?
At the most immediate step, you would believe that you shouldn’t help your peers, so that you can maintain advantage.
However, part of your success will be in showing off your new system to show what great work you’re doing.
At this point, your manager will ask you to share this with your colleagues so that they can also have more efficiencies.
Given your manager’s request in a few steps’ time,
it is better to be proactive and share the system before your manager requests it to demonstrate initiative & leadership.
In this way, you will be seen to have been altruistic in helping your peers, even though your hand would have been forced
later on, anyway.
Anti-Pattern: When not to help
Being asked to help a team that can deny your involvement in the project to embellish their own contribution to the work. When there is not clear way of showing that you’ve helped, or the work is not aligned with your year’s book of work, then you shouldn’t help.