Chess as a teaching tool for strategic thinking?
4Recently @dave posted a question about whether folks here would be interested in chess puzzles.
Some of the commenters opined that though they had once played, they had given it up.
Like @Cerridwyn and others who commented on @Dave’s thread, I used to play every day in high school. That was 65 years ago.
In fact, I was president of the Chess Club for two years, but that didn’t mean that I was the best player. A classmate named J.D. would beat me more often than not.
All in all, I think chess is a wonderful mind game to develop strategic and tactical thinking, as well as pattern recognition.
Unfortunately, I don’t think most people are able to translate those skills to life very well. Most folks are tactical thinkers, if they think at all. Thinking strategically is something that I have found to be a rare skill set.
Part of the rub is that in chess, there are limited degrees of freedom. By that I mean there are rules by which each piece can be moved and turns are taken between moves. Life has no such rules, and certainly no one is coordinating “turns.”
A company, where I worked, sent various executives and rising stars to $$$$ courses at business schools or to training companies that specialize in such things.
The idea was to get legacy middle managers and key executives and the like to grow from reactionary and tactical thinking to a higher level of performance.
So like all such offerings, instruction and training oversimplifies a lot to boil things down to a method that can be clearly presented and understood.
One such thing I just found on the Internet uses something called the “6 P’s”
Purpose
The first P of strategic thinking is Purpose. Purpose refers to the long-term vision or goal that an organization is striving to achieve…
Perspective
The second P of strategic thinking is Perspective. Perspective refers to the ability to view a problem or opportunity from multiple angles…
Plan
The third P of strategic thinking is Plan. Plan refers to the process of developing a strategic plan that outlines the actions necessary to achieve the purpose.
Prioritize
The fourth P of strategic thinking is Prioritize. Prioritize refers to the process of identifying the most critical activities necessary to achieve the objectives.
Pace
The fifth P of strategic thinking is Pace. Pace refers to the ability to adjust the pace of activities to achieve the objectives.
Performance
The sixth and final P of strategic thinking is Performance. Performance refers to the process of measuring and evaluating progress towards the objectives.
Another (Mintzberg) uses "5-P’s: "Plan, Ploy, Pattern, Position and Perspective…"
Well you get the idea.
So can playing chess help develop mental skills along those lines?
I dunno.
Most beginning chess players play in a reactionary mode. If one stays with it, perhaps, they move into tactical mode. But to excel at the game, one must be reactionary, and tactical, to be sure, but overall, one must be strategy driven.
What do you think?
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My experience in workplaces has been that the MBA-driven obsession for focusing on the current quarter blunts or even actively discourages strategic thinking. I will also note that it’s difficult to get enthusiastic about the long term in an environment where there is no certainlty of still being on the job in six months, as is the case in too many companies.
@werehatrack Good points. However, that is exactly one reason why more strategic thinking is needed, at least in the U.S. business community.
I remember once hearing an explanation of how difficult it is to compete with some Asian businesses. Some of them play the long game, a strategic game, where businesses are managed on a cash flow basis as opposed to short term profits.
So if they decided to “develop” or “take a position” in a business area, they will lose or forgo short term profit to gain the advantage.
It happened in many, many areas. One that readily comes to mind is pork production. Pork was a commodity type of business, and there wasn’t much excitement in the pork industry until a Chinese company bought Smithfield at a 30% premium in 2013. Also, Chinese companies have bought Volvo, Motorola, and AMC. Chinese companies are a front for the Chinese government and their government strategy. Make no mistake about that.
Now with U.S. lead pressure in chip manufacture, China is currently investing heavily to bring their memory and CPU chip technology up to competing on a world-class level, as I understand it.
@Jackinga @werehatrack The catch with MBA training in the USA (I taught those folks) is the focus on finance, quarterly performances and having top executive pay linked to quarterly performance. Not all good ideas pan out in just one quarter and may take an initial loss until really profitable. It’s the “folly of rewarding for A while expecting B”, in this case rewarding for short term performance while wanting a focus on long term performance.
@Jackinga @werehatrack That’s an excellent perspective – one that I’m seeing in the battery sector since I do see myself driving an EV in the future. Playing the long game with lots of R&D going into “low energy density” lithium iron phosphate and sodium ion technology, Chinese companies now hold a globally commanding position for both and can manufacture them for a lot less since they don’t rely on rare metals.
@Jackinga @narfcake @werehatrack China also anticipated the drop in employees (one child rule, preference for boys, need to marry another chinese, I think 25% of men not married or something like this, so they used their budget surplus to build factories in other third world countries and least developed nations. Also got around export limits that way too. The most profit is made turning raw materials into the goods. Every other part of the chain makes less. The USA screwed up in this respect.
The prevalence of chess masters from countries that have absolutely embarrassed themselves on battlefields and, as “W” would say, “strategery” tells me that whatever skills you learn with your head over a board thinking of chess is pretty incompatible with real life.
Don’t grandmasters pretty much play to stale mate, or know within like 3 moves the exact strategy the other is employing? That never sounded like fun to me. Basically like going to a library and the person who read the most books will always win, or just draw.
I imagine some chess master in real life just losing their autistic mind because someone moved a rook like a bishop and like with real life, they say “deal with it” and they can’t. Because if you have been paying attention lately, no one is playing by any rules anymore, not certainly chess pieces for inspiration on gamesmanship or strategy.
@KNmeh7 I acknowledged the fact that life has unlimited degrees of freedom as opposed to the hard and fast, exact rule of chess.
And AFAIK there is a paucity of data as to the value of chess in developing the mind and skills of the best strategic thinkers and leaders.
I was just making the argument that in terms of the mental muscles required for strategic abilities, chess might have some value.
I think that with chess one can improve concentration, thinking ahead, abstract reasoning, seeing things from another’s perspective, patience, weighing pluses and minuses of an action, and recognizing patterns, in a situation where you get immediate feedback.
I can recall in my chess playing days, that I began to “see” the world a bit differently, often in chess terms. After high school, my situation changed in that I no longer had the same access to chess playing and my days and nights were full with college studies.
I suppose I could have sought it out, but there was too much to do, and too little time to do it.
@Jackinga My counter argument is it is a game that, admittedly, got beat by a computer before any newspaper knew what “AI” headline was. It is a game that is so formuliac and rote that it is so easy to computerize. You basically are playing someone who is playing what they told some idiot savant to learn versus, some shit like helping the world. So yea, someone can play 8 games in their head blindfolded because it is just an algorithm. That mentality is completely laughable in a team sport, or an individual sport where you can notice your opponent isn’t great at (whatever advantage).
It is literally like sitting down, making 4 moves, then going through the motions that a grand master would do. Stale mate. Ha. Fun all around. We are all so smart!
That is not a game to me.
@Jackinga I don’t want to belabor the point, but if you can be accused of having an asshole nugget that buzzes to give you an advantage, which SEE ABOVE a computer knows because it is a stupid game.
There is a reason it is played by geriatrics in the park. There is also a reason it isn’t played in educational roles of strategy. A fucking algorithm knows instantly how to stop you. What kind of game is that? Furthermore, you should invent 4d chess, since that is all the rage with idiots.
@Jackinga @KNmeh7 I think chess would be useful to help people learn to think/plan ahead if they don’t have that skill (and memorize or know by rote, common series of moves and how to block them) but I am not sure that the context is generalizable enough to be all that useful in the mid and upper levels of management where the focus is on future strategic thinking rather than day to day operations within the context of the strategic plan the executive branch put together.
@Jackinga @Kidsandliz
Oh shit! I missed that part. Yea, they are irremediable. Best advice is be born in or marry one of the people who are in the executive branch. They don’t really want qualified people.
There are no amount of keywords or resume builders that can supplant the CEO saying it is his son.
Yes and no. Like most have already said.
Most cases, playing a game doesn’t translate to applications beyond the limited scope of the game. Playing crosswords won’t improve my cognition, but they will make me good at deciphering crossword clues (written by this one person).
For kids, I like to teach card games. One with rules and no checks (go fish), one with rules and checks (old maid), and one with “no” rules and no checks (Texas Hold’em Poker). Chess would fly under Old Maid: you have a sandbox and rules and can pressure someone to react and adapt within the grid. Something like Hearts (go fish) requires some card counting you catch a liar. Poker (or Bull***) emphasizes lying and baiting pattern recognizers; trolling before the internet. Kids will relay new experiences (classwork, first jobs) with stuff they did earlier in their lives (card games).
I posted a chess puzzle here a while ago, and people really liked it! So fire away, I’d say. I even made a video about it: