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For all those businesses that talk about the need to become learning organizations, author Tim Gallwey has a message: Organizations don’t learn; people do. That’s a crucial distinction. Many businesses view learning as something that proceeds from the top down—senior people pouring knowledge into the heads of junior people. Gallwey argues that learning happens at all levels and that it happens best when it grows out of a natural, individual desire to know, not because of some prescription from on high. When it comes to learning, Gallwey has exceptional credentials. In the 1970s, his book The Inner Game of Tennis revolutionized the way people view teaching and learning in sports. That book and its successors, such as The Inner Game of Golf, have sold more than a million copies and become the best-selling sports instruction series of all time. Having consulted to major companies over the past 20 years on how to coach their employees to learn, Gallwey has now written The Inner Game of Work. In it, Gallwey says he realized that learning is more important than teaching when a tennis student instinctively corrected an error before Gallwey had a chance to point it out. Gallwey initially thought, I missed my chance. But then he decided he was on to something. He moved away from teaching and toward coaching, which he saw as a way to remove obstacles so learning could happen naturally. Gallwey decided that each of us carries around two internal "selves." "Self 1"—the voice inside our heads that keeps up a running, critical commentary as we do things—is vitally concerned with not looking bad. "Self 2" is the uninhibited, curious self that "we all enjoyed as young children." Gallwey developed ways to distract Self 1 by having it focus on, say, the flight of a ball rather than the accuracy or inaccuracy of a shot. Freed of the hounding voice of Self 1, Self 2 took care of learning at an astonishing clip. Gallwey says it is also important for each person to figure out what game he is playing. Golfers talk about all the pressure of the game, but the rules simply prescribe that players accurately count the number of strokes they take. Where is the stress? Gallwey says the simple act of deciding whether you’re playing to win, to socialize, or to have a pleasant walk on a Sunday afternoon will help put Self 1 in its place and accelerate learning. In the excerpt that follows, we meet the college-age Gallwey as he makes an initial attempt to figure out what game he wants to play in his life.
I had chosen the class out of an interest in learning more about myself and how human beings "worked." On the first day of class, after scanning the audience for some time, Skinner said, "I am a little alarmed that there are not more Radcliffe students in the audience...." As he paused, I wondered what he could possibly have meant. He then said: "This course is going to give you Harvard guys an unfair advantage" over the women at Radcliffe. According to Skinner, this "unfair advantage" was not merely an educational one, but an advantage in getting our way in the age-old "battle of the sexes." He certainly had my attention as he went on to explain that the class was about learning how to understand and control human behavior. Skinner seemed to be saying this not just to motivate his students, but to express his utter belief in his methods and his serious concern about giving undue advantage to the men. There were only two texts to read for the class, both written by Skinner: The Science of Human Behavior and Walden Two. The first presented the theory that human behavior could be controlled by positive reinforcement of desired behaviors. The course description in the Harvard catalog read, "Emphasis upon the practical prediction and control of behavior and upon the implications of a science of behavior in human affairs." The second was a novel based on a utopian society established on Skinner’s principles of "human engineering." Skinner’s theory was quite simple. Behavior of all animals, human animals included, is the result of responses to various negative and positive stimuli in the environment. Those behaviors that result in positive reinforcement tend to be repeated while those that result in negative reinforcement tend to be avoided. You can’t really know scientifically what happened inside the subject’s mind because you can’t observe it, but you don’t need to. All you need to do is to control the reinforcers and you can thereby control the resulting behaviors. Skinner demonstrated his methods in the laboratory with his famous Skinner Box, a cage wrapped in gauze with a pigeon in it. He asked, "What do you want me to have the pigeon do?" Someone called out, "Have it jump in counterclockwise circles on its left foot." I thought it was an unfair request and would be impossible, but Skinner didn’t flinch. He just got to work on controlling the pigeon’s behavior—in the same way, as he would later explain, that the more complicated human being’s behavior could be controlled. The Skinner Box was fitted with a food trough that would make the food available to the pigeon whenever Skinner clicked the appropriate button on his remote control. His remote also controlled the light in the cage and the ringing of a bell. The pigeon, which I gathered was quite hungry, was strutting around the cage exhibiting normal pigeon behaviors. Skinner was watching intently. The moment he saw the pigeon make a distinctly leftward movement, he would click the buttons on his remote, the light would go on, the bell would sound, and the food trough would open. The pigeon would peck at a little food before the trough was closed again. The bird then resumed random pigeon behavior until Skinner noticed another element of the desired end behavior. The process went on: light, bell, food, and an increasingly greater number of counterclockwise movements on the part of the pigeon. After about half an hour, the pigeon was definitely favoring its left foot and turning more to the left than to the right. Still, I was thinking, at this rate of learning, there was no way the pigeon was going to be jumping in counterclockwise circles on its left foot by the end of the lab. It also occurred to me that there was a fair exchange going on between Skinner and the pigeon. "Is Skinner training the pigeon to jump, or is the pigeon training Skinner to feed it?" I wondered. But soon, Skinner made a small but significant change in his methodology that accelerated the process considerably. He pushed the buttons that triggered the light and the bell, but not the food! Now Skinner didn’t have to wait for the pigeon to go to the trough and eat. He explained, "At the beginning of the period, the light and bell were ‘neutral’ stimuli for the pigeon. They were neither negatively nor positively charged as reinforcers of behavior." This was the moment of truth about who was training whom. The pigeon received no actual nourishment for its efforts, making it clear to the observers who was really in control. To me, the implications of the Skinner demonstration were chilling. To what extent were my behavior and my choices the result of conditioning from my environment? Who or what had its hand on the remote? What agenda was I living? And if human behavior was conditioned by reinforcers that were merely associated with real needs, then what were the lights and bells that had me jumping in counterclockwise circles at Harvard? Could my general sense of dissatisfaction at that age have come from the fact that I wasn’t getting enough real food? I thought about applause at the end of a victorious tennis match in a grandstand court. The applause was merely a sound, just like a bell, yet what would I do for that sound? Of course, the sound was associated with recognition and approval, but was this real food or another association? I thought of all the jumping I did in class to get an A. A little mark on a piece of paper—a mere symbol. Did it really mean anything? How important was it to me? What were others making of it and why? I was getting close to issues that I felt I shouldn’t be questioning. If earning A’s and winning tennis matches no longer seemed worthy of pursuit, my entire system of motivation and meaning would be vulnerable to breaking down. If society’s definition of success wasn’t any more than social conditioning to reinforce culturally desired behaviors, then what was real? For a moment, I glimpsed the conformity that was surrounding me. But I wasn’t confident enough in myself at the time to put the conditioning aside. I could see no alternative to success as the system defined it. After all, I had gone to Harvard because I was told it was the best. "If I go to the best school and succeed there, I will be the best" was the logic of this pigeon. So I continued jumping and jumping until exhaustion took me to the verge of failure. And it was the prospect of utter failure that gave me the opportunity to glimpse an exit from my Ivy League Skinner Box. Fatigue and procrastination had put me behind in my course work during my junior year. Faced with the impossibility of catching up, I felt so much stress that I had a hard time concentrating when I sat down to study. My eyes would pass over the page, but there was little or no focus. An exam was coming up in a political science course for which I had done almost none of the reading. I didn’t think it was possible to get enough reading done to pass the exam, even if I had been functioning well. However, true to form, I decided to pull myself up by the bootstraps and give it an all-out effort. Three days before the exam, I took a full book bag of unread volumes to the library, saying that I would study the books for six hours straight whether or not I could concentrate well enough to understand their content. The course was called Government 180: Principles of International Politics, taught by a professor named Henry Kissinger. I started reading very slowly, word by word, and, at the end of the first page, asked myself if I had understood anything. The answer was no. I could not recall anything I had read. Trying to read faster was no better. The stress I was feeling made it impossible to focus, and the more I realized that I wasn’t comprehending, the more stress I felt. The more stress, the less concentration. A vicious cycle was happening. Regardless, I honored my decision and persisted for the full six hours. By the end of it, my eyes had passed over many pages, but, as far as I could tell, nothing had sunk in. I collected my books, put them in my book bag, and walked down the stairs of the library toward the street. As I descended the stairs, a voice in my head said convincingly, "There’s no way you can pass this exam." As I stepped out onto Massachusetts Avenue, I had fully accepted that I had flunked out of Harvard. Though such a thought had never been imaginable to me, it was now an accepted fact. What happened next is difficult to relate. I was walking down Massachusetts Avenue as a failed student with nowhere to go. I could not think of going home and facing my family and friends, and I could not stay at college. I was at the end of one world without being able to see the next. Yet from somewhere deep within came the ability to accept this unimaginable fate. The only question that came to mind was simply, "Now what?" It was dusk, and on the street I saw a beggar whose legs had both been amputated at the thighs. He was sitting on a blanket on the sidewalk selling pencils. I had passed by him before, and each time I would feel uncomfortable, caught in conflict about whether or not to buy a pencil. Now all such thoughts were gone. I looked at him and saw a fellow human being, no different than myself. I felt connected, equal in dignity, as one human being to another. I remember thinking, "I’m not looking up or down at this person—I’m looking straight across." It felt good to feel I belonged to the human race. Perhaps I had been looking for this feeling of connectedness for a long time—but had been neglecting it in my headlong pursuit of grades. I had associated A’s with self-worth. Ironically, this taste of the real food I needed came when the external worthiness had disappeared. I walked down the street, a new person. I looked at people differently. Instead of wanting to compare myself to them, I wanted to get to know them. With the door to "success" closed, stress was gone, and I was simply glad to be alive, without any idea of what this life was about. For a few hours, I lived life differently; I was out of my Skinner Box, a free pigeon. A failed pigeon, but a greatly relieved one. Editor’s note: With his stress level down, the young Gallwey could again concentrate. Continuing classes seemed to be his only option, so he absorbed enough of Kissinger’s prose to get a C on the dreaded test. Gallwey says he now recognizes in himself and others “an inherent desire to be free.” And he asks, if each of us “could break out of the box of conditioned thinking, what would be left? What would be our true ambitions?” The answer, he goes on to write, combines both a destination and a journey. It is a change from conformity to self-directed mobility.
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