People who have to make difficult decisions every day often do so under great pressure and with little time, such as chess players, whose way of thinking and acting is very applicable to everyday life. The Munich Chess Academy (Germany) has developed a method for this purpose, the King’s Plan. Following his success with executives at major companies, he has now created a version for children, using chess as an educational tool for the past fifteen years.
Grandmaster Stefan Kindermann, 63, co-founder of the academy, summarizes the different ways of making a decision as follows: “In the face of a situation with great stress and very little time, many managers immediately pick up the phone to relieve themselves. A chess player knows that if he doesn’t act, he is wasting time, but also that making decisions without thinking can be fatal; Even if he only has a minute, he will spend the first 10 seconds looking at the position on the board globally to determine the factors that need to be considered in making a decision.
In the King’s Plan, which is offered in German and English, great value is placed on intuition, which in chess could be defined as the memory of the unconscious: the player is often unaware that the decision he has just made is based on a game he has seen many years before; he doesn’t consciously remember her, but what he learned from her was embedded somewhere in his brain. Kindermann finds this “very important” and adds: “If we make decisions intuitively or based on gut instinct, we use everything we have learned throughout our lives. The more experienced and wiser a person is in a certain area, the more reliable their intuition is.
To understand how important good intuition is to play chess well, it is enough to know that after just the first few moves (one white and one black) 400 different positions can be generated, and that the number of different Lots that it can be played is one followed by 123 zeros, larger than the number of atoms in the known universe. “In a way,” adds Kindermann, “even the latest chess software, which is based on neural networks, uses something that comes close to human intuition, because no computer is yet powerful enough to play chess perfectly.”
And he cites an example from Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, who is considered the greatest German expert on decision-making processes: “A man who was in love with two women at the same time didn’t know who to propose to. They suggested that he write down the merits of each and which aspects he felt would bother him the most in ten years’ time. He did and concluded that Ms. A was ranked much higher than Ms. B. But he chose to marry Ms. B and was very happy with her for a long time.” His conclusion: “Emotions and intuition, well balanced with reasoning, help us make the best decision.”
Stefan Kindermann, during one of his workshops on the “Königsplan” method, Munich Chess Academy
Learning about defeats, which in chess “can cause pain for days” because you can’t blame the arbiter or that it’s raining, must not be missing from the principles of the king’s plan. “A good chess player is very self-critical, not only when he analyzes his losses, but also his victories, because there are certainly aspects that could be improved. It is common for an entrepreneur to fail in his second project using the same method that led him to success in the first, because he did not analyze it self-critically,” explains Kindermann, who together with Robert created Weizsäcker’s royal plan and is an economics professor at the Technical University of Munich, with important contributions from Dijana Dengler, a great expert on educational chess. The version they recently developed for children is based on 15 years of experience in using chess as a teaching tool for more than 10,000 children in 25 Munich schools, as well as disadvantaged children in different settings. All this under the auspices of a foundation chaired by Roman Krulich, a chess player and real estate agent who also has an office and shop in Gran Canaria.
Being prepared for the black swan, the unexpected, is another essential aspect of making good decisions. Kindermann connects this situation with extreme creativity, with lateral thinking, with the conventional: “You have a very well structured plan, but suddenly your rival does something that destroys everything for you. It doesn’t make sense to continue as before, you have to quickly adapt to the new.” This time he uses an example from tennis: “Roland Garros, 1989. Chang was the scapegoat against Lendl, and he was already tired. Suddenly he started serving from below, with the ball at knee level. This seemingly childish reaction confused Lendl, who ended up losing.
His final piece of advice for chess, and for life, is to combine forward and backward thinking: “The normal thing for a chess player is to think in lines based on the position he has on the board. But sometimes it can be very convenient and effective to think about what you want to achieve, let go of your imagination, and then see what you would need to do to achieve that goal. It is well known that this is how some of the most brilliant combinations in chess history came about.
Napoleon’s urge to act
LG
Zugzwang is a German word describing a diabolical situation in chess (and in life): the obligation to make a move (you can’t pass the round without playing, as in mus) leads to defeat because they are all bad are. The King’s plan also contains this concept, and Kindermann cites as an example the catastrophe suffered by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812 when he invaded Russia with 600,000 soldiers and complete military equipment. The chess-loving French Emperor said before winning the Battle of Borodino, albeit with terrible losses: “The chess pieces are ready. The game starts tomorrow.”
However, the Russian general Mikhail Kutuzov proved to be a much deeper chess player: he ordered a retreat and even allowed the Gauls to take Moscow, knowing that his great ally would be the freezing Russian winter. Suddenly Napoleon found himself in a situation where all moves were bad: to advance further or to stand still was tantamount to suicide; relapse, to failure. After some of the most resounding failures in military history, he finally returned to Paris with only 10,000 men.
Kindermann’s lesson: “In this example we see the amazing effect of planning with great calm and considering all the factors that can influence our opponent.”
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