A concept · How People Actually Work · Strategy
Status Games
Much of behaviour is a quiet contest for rank.
The meeting has an org chart and it has a real order, and everyone in the room knows both. Who gets interrupted, whose idea gets repeated back as someone else's, who is in the group chat that the meeting is really decided in. We say we are arguing about the plan. We are also, quietly, arguing about rank. If nobody in the room would admit to playing, why does everyone know the score?
What Status Games means
Status games are the constant, mostly unconscious contest for standing in the eyes of whichever group we care about, played with signals of what we deserve rather than what we own. Much of behaviour is a quiet contest for rank. That is the definition. Owning it changes what we can see in a room, including the one we are in. We start to notice which currency each tribe pays in: money here, citations there, restraint somewhere else. We stop reading a taste or a moral stance as pure conviction without also asking who it impresses. Before, the colleague's dismissal of the popular option was just an opinion. After, we can see it as a move, and, less comfortably, we can catch our own.
Status Games examples: where it shows up
- At work: the title on the door is the stated game; the real one is who can interrupt whom and whose message gets answered first.
- With money: the same purchase is a flex in one crowd and an embarrassment in another, which is why price alone never explains what we buy.
- In the news: the online pile-on runs on a leaderboard nobody printed, and every share is a bid for standing in a tribe.
Where it sits
Concept 2 of 5 in How People Actually Work, a journey in the course How the World Works.
See where Status Games sits on the sky →
Nearest on the sky
A filled dot marks a star that is already open to walk.
Knowing it isn't owning it.
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