Chess is often considered an excellent way to develop strategic thinking: setting a goal, devising a plan to achieve it, anticipating your opponent’s moves and countermoves, assessing the resources available, and continuously adapting your strategy as the situation evolves.

All very well, except that it has relatively little to do with real life: chess is what we call a game of perfect information: the rules are clear and apply equally to everyone, the objective is perfectly defined, the enemy is easy to identify, nobody can cheat and, above all, at any given moment we can see the exact position of every piece on the board.

In real life, however, the rules are often unclear and, even when they aren’t, not everybody follows them; objectives keep changing, distinguishing friends from enemies isn’t always easy, information is incomplete or downright false, and an astonishing number of factors are entirely beyond our control. Not surprisingly, in warfare as well as in business, one of the greatest challenges is simply figuring out what the hell is going on.

Imagine playing on an enormous chessboard of which you can see only a tiny corner, with pieces you can’t even tell are black or white, while suddenly a rook appears out of nowhere and captures your queen by moving diagonally, and just when you’ve finally worked out a decent strategy, somebody comes along, slams a hand onto the board and scatters all the pieces.

That, I would say, is a fairly realistic representation of everyday life.

Nevertheless, I believe chess can teach us at least two extremely valuable lessons, although they aren’t necessarily the ones you’ll find in strategy textbooks.

Lesson One: You Have No Excuses

When things go wrong, whether in business, sports or our personal lives, we have an almost inexhaustible repertoire of excuses at our disposal: bad luck, unfavourable starting conditions, insufficient resources, unfair competition, allies who betrayed us, misleading information and, of course, that seemingly endless collection of idiots whose sole purpose in life appears to be making ours more complicated.
And, mind you, many of these excuses may be perfectly legitimate.

In chess, however, things are considerably simpler: under equal conditions, if your opponent consistently beats you, it means he’s better than you. Period. You can’t accuse your rook of betraying you or complain that your knight wasn’t particularly motivated that day; if you want better results, you have to become a better player, through studying, practicing and learning from your mistakes.

Lesson Two: The Winning Move May Already Be There

Most of us play chess at an amateur level, usually against opponents of roughly similar ability: sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, and quite often we find ourselves in situations that seem utterly hopeless, where we can no longer see any possible way out.

Yet, in many of these cases, a grandmaster taking our place would probably identify possibilities we hadn’t even considered, perhaps turning the entire game around.

Which brings us to a rather important conclusion: just because we can’t see a solution doesn’t mean that a solution doesn’t exist.

And this is where we return to real life.

How many times have we blamed our failures on external circumstances, when at least part of the problem was simply our own incompetence, laziness, lack of initiative or a series of bad decisions we preferred not to question?

And how often have we found ourselves facing an apparently unsolvable problem, without considering that somebody else, with exactly the same resources and under precisely the same conditions, might have found an approach that had never even crossed our minds?

What Would a Grandmaster Do in Your Place?

In my seminars, I often suggest a little experiment: take a specific situation you’re dealing with, define as precisely as possible the objective you want to achieve and the resources you have available, and then ask yourself: what would a grandmaster do in my place?

Of course, since we’re playing with our imagination, you’re free to choose whoever you like: Elon Musk, Lee Iacocca, Napoleon, Henry Ford, Jesus Christ, or perhaps somebody you know personally whose abilities you particularly admire. The important thing isn’t that your chosen character should be a model of virtue, but that they represent a way of thinking and acting different from your own.

The results are often surprising, because the simple act of trying to look at a problem through somebody else’s eyes allows us to identify possibilities we had previously overlooked entirely.

Naturally, there’s no guarantee you’ll find a solution, or that you’ll be able to do what your hypothetical grandmaster would do, since you probably don’t possess their skills, information or experience; but simply expanding the range of alternatives you can imagine may radically change the way you approach the situation.

After all, it’s something we do all the time when giving advice to other people: looking at a problem from the outside, without being trapped by the habits, emotions and convictions of the person experiencing it, we can often see solutions that seem completely inconceivable to them.

Coaching, Freedom of Choice, and the Limits of Our Perspective

Because, ultimately, however much we like to talk about free will and freedom of choice, we can only choose among the alternatives we’re capable of seeing.
(Incidentally, this is precisely one of the fundamental purposes of coaching: helping people discover possibilities they couldn’t see before.)

So, before declaring that a situation is hopeless, perhaps it’s worth asking ourselves whether we’ve really exhausted every possibility, or whether we’re simply playing a game that’s too difficult for our current level of competence.

Try this little experiment: perhaps the winning move has been sitting on the board all along, and you simply hadn’t noticed it.

by Bruno