BOOK OF THE WEEK: "The Infinite Game" by Simon Sinek - HIGHER EDUCATION: A THEORY

My second Simon Sinek book this year, what can I say I like the guy. It was actually one of Simon's Ted Talks on "Leaders Eat Last" which began my whole fascination with leadership and growth development.

According to Simon, there are two types of games: finite games and infinite games. Baseball, football, basketball are all examples of finite games here are rules that each team agrees to follow and a definitive winner and loser. However, infinite games are more abstract. There is no end, the game keeps going and teams drop out when they exhaust all the resources needed to compete.

Going deep in to the archives, into my public policy days, infinite games are very much like the goal-oriented incremental model of policy making. There is an idealistic goal - and often unattainable - at the far end, but along the way there are minor incremental goals to achieve. And those small goals are the victories.

With this being said, higher education follows the infinite game track. In the last three years, we have already seen a handful of college and universities shut their doors for good, and others in similar financial positions. We all get it. College is expensive seeing more and more high school students opting for public colleges and universities to lessen the financial burden with no guarantee of landing a job upon graduation. It is one of the factors colleges and universities are seeing a dip in their enrollments.

There still is a need for higher education. It is proven that those who have gone on to study at university, get better jobs and make more money. But the meaning of college has been lost today. Today, a majority of high school students  college is "as the next thing you do after graduating high school," but that's far from the case. The objective of college and university is not to teach you the technical skills to survive as an adult, it is to teach other, soft skills, liking working with others and to think critically.

Without critical thinking we fall into the mindless cycle of doing rout activities like we did in the industrial age. But we don't live in the industrial age anymore. Times have changed and are constantly evolving and with that our higher education system needs to evolve.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Instead of asking our admissions teams to hit arbitrary numbers for enrollment each year, we need to look deeper into the cause of these declining numbers and think of making some innovative and collaborative changes.

Higher education is an infinite game. It will continue well after the current leaders are gone so we need start behaving in a manor that it is one.


Stay tuned there will be a second post on this book. There's too much to say for just one post.