It’s possible to set up a competition to make the task of picking someone to champion feel easier. Whether you call it a contest or an audition, you can manufacture scarcity and let the process filter out those who are too fragile, too introverted, or too time-consuming. You hope that the ones who survive and make it to the top are the best, most deserving ones.
Frequently, of course, the ones who make it to the top aren’t really the best or most real-world viable; they’re just the ones who were fittest for surviving your particular construction of contest.
But setting aside the imperfections of the results of competition, consider the missed opportunities. What if one of the fragile, introverted, not-ready-for-prime-time entrants could have been helped? Helped to become resilient. Helped to become effective and generative. Helped to become game-changing.
Instead of winner-take-all, which can leave so many behind with only token rewards, is it conceivable to turn the idea of contest inside out? What if the question you asked were, “How can we incentivize people to help each other”?