Interesting piece here from John Kay on how winning at chess is both like and unlike winning in business.
You can succeed in chess through "brute force and ignorance", if you can process possible moves as fast as IBM's Big Blue. That may be why chess responded so well to a 5 year planning approach under the former Soviet Union.
Nonetheless, as Kay points out, a game of chess is best won through innovation and experimentation. The same skills you need in business. And the same skills that the former Soviet Union seemed incapable of displaying.
I wonder if chess responds both to an "innovation" approach and to an "algorithmic" approach because it sits on the boundary between "wicked" and "tame" problems?
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2 comments:
Hi Nick, I was really interested here with the idea that wicked problems are socially messy ones (as described on the link you gave): 'socially messy' being defined as a set of socially interrelated problems. I would have to read the original material to understand the author's own linkage between 'wicked' and 'socially messy' - but to me it is clear that impurity (or loss of intergrity) in heart, thought and action gives rise to many of the social complexities that arise in organisations. Perhaps sometimes chess games are not about strategy and power battles between people but about actions that lead to convictions of the heart, improved integrity and new bases for action - demonstrated so aptly yesterday by our Prime Minister in Sorry day.
Hi Cath. Your comment has sparked me thinking about wicked problems. I think the naming is unfortunate - and I hope in a later post I will be able to say why. I suspect that the "wickedness" does not come from a lack of integrity - but rather from the nature of the human condition. More precisely, from groups of finite human beings, with differing (but nonetheless all "legitimate") value sets - all struggling to transform societies and organisations together. No doubt a lack of integrity makes this process more messy and difficult. But I suspect that even if all we had was a "redeemed" humanity operating in a "new creation" (both these terms in the loaded theological sense), we would still have wicked problems. Wicked problems speak to something about the way human beings design in the world.
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