Volleyball, Dodgeball, and the Space Between

April 22, 2025

You can tell a lot about a person by how they enter a conversation. Some come in like it’s a game they plan to win. They aim fast, speak louder, take the ball and run with it, whether it was theirs or not. You can see it in the tilt of the body, in how little they ask.

Others move differently. They watch. They wait. They want to know what you're trying to do before they say what they think should happen next. These aren’t just communication styles. They speak to how a person understands the world around them.

Someone once told me it’s the difference between dodgeball and volleyball. I’ve thought about that a lot. What we build depends on how we play.

What we build depends on how we play.

Earlier this month, Michele Gelfand wrote a piece on the dodgeball posture, though she didn’t call it that. She was writing about win-lose negotiation styles. She called it a strategy that backfires, that unravels relationships, that weakens trust. She was talking about geopolitics, but anyone who’s sat through a meeting with a dodgeball player knew exactly what she meant. You don’t build alliances with someone trying to knock you over. You build defenses.

That’s the thing about dodgeball: you don’t share the ball, you don’t build anything. You throw. They fall. Next round.

Volleyball is different. There’s a net, yes, but it’s not about domination. You win by rallying, by keeping things in the air just long enough for something to happen between you. It’s cooperative, even when competitive. At its best, it’s rhythmic. Mutual. A kind of balance.

Paradoxes of Cooperation

Still, there’s a problem. If you’re playing volleyball and they’re playing dodgeball, you don’t stand a chance.

I used to think collaboration was always the higher ground. I don’t think that anymore. Now I think it’s a choice you make, knowing the risks. Because collaboration can be misread. It can look like indecision. It can look like weakness. And people who are looking to win – really win – know how to exploit that.

Philosophers and game theorists have written about this. They call it the problem of cooperation. The iterated prisoner’s dilemma. In the short run, betrayal works. In the long run, cooperation wins – but only if both parties play the long game. Only if they believe they’ll see each other again.

Most of us do. We work in teams. We live in cities. We build families, companies, communities. We see the same faces in the morning and again in the evening. These aren’t one-off games. These are marathons.

So maybe the answer isn’t to play just one way. Maybe the answer is to watch the other player, to see what they’re signaling, to keep your eye on the ball – and their posture.

You don’t have to abandon volleyball. You just need to know when you’re the only one playing it – and what game the others are playing instead. And when they’re ready to rally, you’ll know. You’ll see it in the pass. You’ll feel it in the rhythm. You’ll remember why you showed up in the first place.

Not to win. To build something worth returning to.