Co-opetition: a new approach to optimize learning?

There are obvious reasons why people love to be competitive. First of all, people love the taste of winning! Competition stimulates people to be more active and makes them enthusiastic about what they are doing. Moreover, it gives them motivation to pursue their goals! However, despite these undeniable plus points, there are also some drawbacks of ‘focusing too much on competition’. 

Particularly in Asian countries, young people are suffering from the pressures of a hyper-competitive education system, with parents and/or teachers pushing them to try so hard to get ‘first’ in the class, ‘first’ in the sports activities, or ‘top’ in the school and so on. However, focusing only on ‘winning’ as an individual is the antithesis of a collaboration culture and can lead to an inability to work well with others (not to mention the performance anxiety it can cause). Competing solely as an individual deprives you of the benefit of other people’s strengths. When there is no synergy, you fail to learn the key skills of cooperation and teamwork, and you miss out on what you might have learned from other people. Both you and whatever organisation you belong to will lose out in a big way. 

On  the other hand, when a group of people or those who make up an organisation are working together in a co-opetitive environment, the end product or learning outcome is superior to what individuals could have achieved by themselves. Team diversity can be a source of strength: all of you will have different experiences, different perspectives and different strengths and weaknesses. You can learn a lot from each other by sharing valuable know-how and skills, thereby balancing competition and cooperation. Of course, you are going to struggle and face challenges (this is natural when you do two things at the same time: collaborate and compete), but I assure you  that the benefits will outweigh the downsides.