Politics, Cooking, and PVP

I read the following paragraph in a G+ comment from a fellow writer who's also an experienced chef and restaurant manager. The subject was an article at ScienceDaily about how people avoid bumping into each other. Here's what the writer/chef said.

"One of the most rewarding feelings one gets from working in a restaurant kitchen is the sense of accomplishment one feels when when the crew works together with a sort of 'unspoken' grace: as if we were each parts of a well oiled machine: running perfectly smoothly."

Do you know that feeling? I know that feeling. I've had that feeling of coordinated team grace a few times. Working in a kitchen, working on a school bus assembly line, working on a roof.

I've also seen it in gaming, especially in player-vs-player (PVP) matches. What used to amaze me is that you can achieve a high-level of coordination with little or no communication. A couple of examples before my explanation, and why I think this is a subject of national importance.

I used to play a game called "Red Baron", a single-player World War I combat flight simulator. The publisher (Sierra, iirc) added multiplayer capability eventually, but it was primitive. You got only two-vs-two matches, you got random partners and opponents, and there was no effective way to communicate with your partner.

The fights were dismal. Just four random people trying to shoot other people in a random fashion.

But that changed for one fight. I don't know who the other pilot was on my team. We didn't communicate at all. Nevertheless, we fell into a coordinated attack that left the other team entirely helpless.

It's hard to explain how powerful the sense of teamwork was. It was like I was the other pilot, or like we were reading each other's mind. No matter what my partner did, I understood and moved in to to help. No matter what I did, my partner backed me up.

We led the opposing team into our attacks. We set up cross-fire ambushes. Every time they thought they had an attack ready, one of us was there to stop it. Every time one of them got on one of our tails, we'd scrape them off. We dominated them at high altitude, so they took the fight close to the ground. Didn't help. They fought like two separate people. We fought like one. We totally dominated the fight, and eventually the other team left before the timer ran out.

I've had the same experience in PVP in World of Warcraft, the experience of being on a team that fought like a single mind was controlling our actions. That wasn't the usual situation, but it was glorious when it happened, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it happened.

What I figured out is that sometimes your team shares the same model, the same mental picture of the situation. Everyone knows at every step of the fight what has to be done and who must do it. No matter how the situation changes, everyone on the team understands the action that must be taken, because they share a model of the battlefield or the kitchen or the roof. That's the essence of successful teamwork, having a shared model. Without that common understanding, you'll fight, or cook or roof, like separate people instead of acting as a unit.

It was a random event when it happened during that Red Baron fight. Usually you achieve that level of coordination, that shared model, only through training, fierce practice, and perhaps most importantly of all, shared goals.

And that's what's wrong with American politics. We don't share the same model of the world, so we can't achieve things together. If you've ever done PVP in a computer game, you know exactly what the problem is. No matter what the team is trying to do, there's always someone going off on their own, or worse, yelling at other people to take worthless action that doesn't serve the shared goal of winning.

How do we get that teamwork back? Well, we probably aren't going to share the same tactical model, but we can start by understanding that most of us share the same goal. We want America to work. No matter what political team we choose or what labels we use, we mostly want a country that works. We want a safe, prosperous, and fun place to live our lives the way we choose.

The good news is that we already have a working model for such a country. Representative government, a capitalist economic engine, and some socialistic buffers to take the edge off and raise the general tone. This model works. That's why America doesn't need any revolutionary talk or action these days, and why we shouldn't listen to the revolutionaries. We've solved the basic problem of managing a modern technological society. All we need to do is tweak the model, tune it up so that it works the way we know it can.

Understand that we share the same goal, and we've taken the first step toward making America a graceful team again.