Guess like a Grandmaster
I’ve been having an ongoing debate recently with @tav about productivity. It stemmed from my sending him the Rework book for his birthday, in yet another quixotic attempt to steer him away from his self-imposed perfectionism.
In this debate, I found myself rehashing the received wisdom about productivity. You know the terminology. Release early release often (ooh err missus), lean, agile, iterate.
The discussion was in a chat channel (#). This always leads, I think, towards a more reflective dialogue, as you can see yourself in the third person. In this case, seeing my own words led me to question whether the received wisdom I was parroting was true. I believe it but what am I basing my assertions on?
It’s interesting that the immediate answer (that experience shows iterating tends to be more productive) only reinforces the question. Why does the Rework approach work?
As I pondered the topic, my thoughts drifted onto Alexander Kotov. Kotov was a Russian chess grandmaster, who was a candidate for the world championship back in the 1950s. He wrote a famous book, Think like a Grandmaster, in which he describes (you’ve guessed it) how a chess grandmaster thinks.
My dad was a keen chess player (still is) and taught me to play when I grew up. I can remember having it drummed into me that “you have to have a plan”. Despite playing competitively for a few years at school, it wasn’t actually until I read Think like a Grandmaster in my twenties that I really understood what having a plan meant.
Kotov explains it, with some glee, through an apparent contradiction, which I’ll paraphrase as:
- you have to have a long term plan: a strategy to win the game that directs your thinking and your play
- you have to change your plan every move
I remember first reading this and thinking, “I don’t get it - how can you have a plan for the whole game that you change every move? Surely then it’s a different plan?” I think that the answer is deeply instructive and derives from an understanding of what you might call the Pascalian Imperative™.
Pascal, in his argument for his famous wager, would toss a coin high into the air and say, as it hung suspended at the top of its arc, “now, you have to make a decision! The coin is either going to land heads or tails. Which is it?!”
Now, the prudential logic is easy to dispute but the force of his argument lies in the fact that the coin will come down. We are alive and as such we have to make a decision. Indecision is a decision. We can’t avoid the choice.
The same is unequivocal true in chess. When you play competitively, you play the opponent and the clock. When it’s your move the clock is ticking and you have something like an hour and a half to make 35 moves. This is the context against which Kotov’s planning theory is set.
Because grandmasters study opening theory in enormous depth, they may know upto 20 moves of a mainline of a common opening. However, once into the meat of the game, they see perhaps five or six moves ahead. A normal player might see maybe three or four.
So we see that each time they move (and move they must) they never see the full picture. They may see further than us but still at the edge of their vision, they look into the same mist we do. The information is incomplete.
What this means is that they must form a plan based on what they can see. They make the best plan that they can. Then they move. Then their opponent moves and, voilà, the information has changed. They look afresh at the board and re-evaluate, based on what they can now see. Each move that was 2, 3, 4, 5 moves into the future is now one move nearer and thus clearer.
Now, if we apply chess to productivity, we can model each move as an iteration and each change of plan as a pivot. If we come back to our question, why does agile work, we see it’s because the available information changes.
As we progress, iteration by iteration, the mental overhead of thinking “ok, now, if we do this, then …” is replaced by “ok, we can all see where we are, now what about …”. The future moves one step closer and it’s just conceptually easier to think it through. What was in the mist comes into focus.
So, actually, planning isn’t guessing. It’s the art of seeing as far as it makes sense to try and see. There are two sides to this judgement.
Firstly, there’s a diminishing return on looking into the future. There is no point in sitting at the start of a game of chess and trying to analyse all possible moves. Not only do you waste time theorising through possibilities that may never happen. At some point, you reach the mist and no matter how hard you stare at it, you simply can’t see through it.
Secondly, innovation comes from looking at the same position and seeing the outcome differently. The genius of the grandmaster is the genius of Van Gogh. They look at the landscape we all look at in a way that only they see.
Now, perhaps seeing the market differently is the key (alongside luck) to being a successful entrepreneur. To look at the world, your business and discover a line of play in an apparently saturated market.
The thing is, though, that there’s no point having the vision if you don’t have the viewpoint. Make a move. The clock is ticking.
