Humans are messy. We like to think of ourselves as reasonable creatures who weigh evidence and decide with clean logic. Much of the time, we are driven by fear, pride, status, resentment, loyalty, and love.
This is what makes strategy difficult. From a distance, it looks tidy: frameworks, models, beautifully formatted decks. But life does not happen inside a template. It happens among people, and people have their own incentives, blind spots, and private calculations.
Most important decisions are not made in isolation. Should I trust this person? Share what I know? Help this colleague or compete with them? Tell the truth or protect myself? We are all strategists, constantly working out how to act in a world full of other people doing the same.
Strategy has been called the art of outdoing an adversary while knowing the adversary is trying to do the same to you. But another question may matter more: how do we cooperate when selfishness seems safer? Civilisation depends on cooperation. So do families, workplaces, and markets. The hard problem is getting people to cooperate when they have a clear incentive to look after themselves. Robert Axelrod asked that question using tools developed to understand conflict.
The prisoner’s dilemma
Game theory was pioneered by John von Neumann during the Second World War. Its early version focused on two-player, zero-sum games, where one person’s gain is another’s loss. Chess is zero-sum. Poker is zero-sum. But much of life is not.
Consider the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two members of a gang are arrested. The prosecutors lack evidence for the serious charge but can convict each on a lesser one. Held separately, each can stay silent (cooperate) or inform (defect).
If both stay silent, each serves one year. If both inform, each serves two. If one informs while the other stays silent, the informer walks free and the silent prisoner serves three. Loyalty produces the best collective outcome. Betrayal produces the best individual outcome, if the other stays loyal. But if both betray, both end up worse off than if they had cooperated.
Played once, the coldly rational move is to defect. So the logic says: betray. Not exactly a glowing account of human nature.
The same logic holds if the game is played a known number of times. On the final round, there is no future to protect. Both players should defect on the second-last round too, and so on back. But something changes when the number of rounds is unknown. The future enters the room.
The Tournament
In 1980, Axelrod, then at the University of Michigan, invited people to submit strategies for an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament. Each strategy was a computer program. Programs played each other over many rounds, with no announced endpoint.
Entries came from game theorists, psychologists, and mathematicians. Some were highly complicated. The winning strategy, submitted by mathematician Anatol Rapoport, was the simplest. It was called Tit For Tat.
It worked like this: cooperate on the first move, then do whatever the other player did on the previous move. If the other defected, Tit For Tat defected next round. When the other returned to cooperation, so did Tit For Tat. It could be provoked, but it did not hold a grudge.
It had four qualities. It was nice, because it never defected first. Retaliatory, because it punished defection. Forgiving, because it returned to cooperation when the other did. And clear, because the other player could easily read it.
That last quality matters more than it appears. In chess, you benefit from being unpredictable. In a non-zero-sum world, where you need the other person’s cooperation to do well, clarity is a virtue. You want them to know that cooperation will be met with cooperation, betrayal with consequences, and changed behaviour with recognition. Tit For Tat won not by crushing its opponents but by creating conditions where both sides could do well.
Live and let live
The same pattern had appeared decades earlier in the trenches of the First World War. British, French, and German soldiers faced each other across hundreds of miles of fortified line, often for months, with the same small units in the same sectors. In a one-off battle, restraint can be fatal. But facing the same enemy every day for months, your actions echo. Make life unbearable for the other side today, and they can make life unbearable for you tomorrow.
In some sectors, soldiers developed what became known as the “live and let live” system. They still fired shots and shelled positions, keeping up appearances for their commanders, but they often did so in predictable ways that avoided harm. They fired at set times. They aimed at harmless targets. The performance communicated aggression upward and restraint sideways.
This was not peace or friendship. It was cooperation under horrifying conditions. Axelrod called it the echo principle: to create discomfort for the other side was usually a roundabout way of creating discomfort for yourself. Revenge evoked revenge. Restraint invited restraint.
The system collapsed when senior officers forced raids and rotations that broke the local patterns. Cooperation does not depend only on goodness. It depends on conditions: meeting again, visible behaviour, possible retaliation, available forgiveness, and no external force resetting the game.
The workplace dilemma
Most of us do not live in trenches, but many spend our working lives inside repeated games. Every organisation is full of Prisoner’s Dilemmas. Do I share information with another team, or keep it because information is power? Do I help a colleague who may later compete with me for promotion? Do I tell the truth about a failing project, or wait for someone else to name it?
The answer depends on the culture. In a low-trust organisation, defection becomes sensible. If honesty is punished, people learn to hide. If teams are rewarded only for their own numbers, they stop caring about shared outcomes. If leaders create internal competitions and call it excellence, colleagues become threats. This is how silos form. Not because people are stupid, but because the incentives teach them to defect. Then leaders wonder why the organisation is slow, political, and full of “alignment issues.” It is not an alignment issue. It is a trust issue.
Jack Welch popularised stack ranking at General Electric, where employees were ranked against one another and the bottom performers regularly cut. For a time this was celebrated as hard-headed management. But internal competition has a cost. If your colleague’s success threatens your survival, why would you help them? The same plays out between departments. Sales overpromises. Delivery absorbs the pain. Product blames marketing. Everyone is the responsible adult; everyone else is the problem.
In 2014, General Motors recalled hundreds of thousands of vehicles because of a faulty ignition switch that could shut off the engine mid-drive and prevent airbags from deploying. Different parts of the company held different pieces of the knowledge, but the organisation did not bring it together in time. A workplace becomes dysfunctional through thousands of small defections that gradually become normal.
What trust requires
The lesson of Tit For Tat is not “be nice.” That is too thin. Nor is it “trust everyone,” which is too naive. It is closer to this: begin with cooperation, make your behaviour clear, respond when trust is broken, and return to cooperation when the other person does.
Some people default to suspicion, defecting first because they believe everyone else will. They call this realism. Often it is fear dressed up as sophistication. Others default to endless accommodation. They call this kindness. Often it is conflict avoidance.
Trust is not built through slogans. No one becomes more trusting because a value on the wall says “collaboration.” It is built when people learn, through repeated experience, what behaviour will be met with. If you say you want honesty but punish bad news, people stop telling you the truth. If you say you want trust but never respond to bad behaviour, the trustworthy people leave or harden.
Trust requires memory, consequences, and repair. Many organisations confuse it with permanent niceness. But trust is not the absence of conflict. It is the belief that conflict can be handled without humiliation.
Default to trust
Tit For Tat won because it understood something profound about repeated life. You do not have to beat the other person to do well. In a non-zero-sum world, the other person’s success is often part of the condition for your own. If every interaction becomes a contest for advantage, the relationship becomes too expensive to maintain.
There are moments to walk away. Some people defect repeatedly. Some games are rigged. But most of life is not a single-round game. We meet people again. We build reputations. Our behaviour teaches others what to expect from us, and theirs teaches us. When cooperation reaches a threshold, it becomes the norm. When defection becomes normal, people protect themselves and learn that the safest move is the self-protective one.
So the practical wisdom is this. Make the first move in good faith. Be clear enough that others know how to cooperate with you. Respond when trust is broken. Do not hold a grudge longer than necessary. And whenever possible, build the kind of game where the other person does not have to lose for you to win. Then you are not just being nice, you are being a ‘strategist’
References:
DBN in Action
NEW PODCAST ALERT
In this episode, of the Finding Meaning in Work Podcast, I speak with Suji Sanjeevan, the co founder of BrandScent and Light and Glow
We talked about…
The “safe path” and the moment it stopped being safe
Suji grew up with a very clear script: prestige, security, medicine. When she failed second year, the floor fell out. That experience forced a deeper question: whose life am I living, and what happens when the approved path becomes a cage?Reinvention as a life skill
Her story is not one pivot. It’s repeated reinvention: shy immigrant kid trying to be invisible, to medical student, to researcher, to mother, to founder, then a second business shift from product to agency. The thread running through it all is learning to quiet the inner voice, tolerate uncertainty, and keep becoming.Work as homecoming: culture, memory, identity
One of the most beautiful threads was scent as a bridge back to Sri Lanka: temples, jasmine, marigolds, spice, and the feeling of being grounded. She spoke about resisting her culture when she was younger, then later realising that what she tried to hide is part of her edge, and now part of what she is building.Meaningful work as platform and legacy
For Suji, meaning is not only “doing what you love.” It’s what the work makes possible: mentoring, employing people who need a first chance, being a visible example for others who feel boxed in, and building something her children can be proud of. Business became the platform that gave her a voice she never had before.
About Suji
Suji Sanjeevan is a fragrance innovator, entrepreneur and co founder of Light and Glo and BrandScent, where science, psychology and storytelling collide to create brands people genuinely remember. With a clinical background and an instinct for consumer behaviour, she has built businesses that challenge the traditional idea of fragrance, transforming scent from a product into a strategic brand tool.
What began at a dining table evolved into national retail, global conversations and partnerships spanning retail, sport, hospitality and corporate. From boardrooms to stadiums, Suji’s work sits at the intersection of emotion, memory and experience, proving that the most powerful brands are not always the loudest, they are the ones people feel.
Alongside entrepreneurship, Suji serves as Chair of the Victorian Small Business Ministerial Council, advocating for founders and the realities of modern business. She is passionate about helping early stage businesses think bigger, refine faster and build brands with real cut through
