The term ‘VUCA world‘ has become very common in management as well as general environments. The VUCA world influences how you make decisions and plans and deal with risks and changes. How do you deal with ambiguity and yet find a meaning? How you make a complex situation into a simpler one.
(VUCA world demands better set skills to deal in life)
What words come to your mind which are associated with Chess? Intelligence, focus, patience, memory, problem solving, calculations, strategy and so on. Ok, let’s observe these words carefully in isolation without thinking about chess.
I guess, we can say with good confidence that any individual with these qualities would be fairly leading a successful and a happy life both at personal and professional level, especially in the current VUCA world!Let’s look at this from various perspectives. Warning (on a lighter note) – this is not a regular blog with 5-6 headers viz. intelligence, creativity, problem solving and so on. How do we start playing chess? Very first step by learning the rules of the game. Understanding and adhering to rules is always relevant across so many spheres of life.
Here rules are not very simple. Understanding how each piece moves and coordinating them so that they support and make each other stronger needs skills. Thinking ability, special intelligence and so on.
While you play chess, you need to make decisions which are time bound. One of the major factors to do well in life is ability to make correct decisions and timely. A delayed correct decision possibly does not carry significance. In chess, every move is a decision and accuracy matters for the fate of the game. Also, these decisions are to be taken within time limits.
Depending on format, game duration varies, so a chess player is always trained to make decisions which are well thought and ranging from hours to minutes to seconds! Many of the top CEOs do comment that habit of playing chess has always helped them to take the right and timely decisions!
(Correct decisions are important!)
(Timely decisions are key!)
Don’t we say that a person who has better control on emotions is likely to handle all phases of life better? Now, in the game of chess, your opponent’s move can cause a reaction, you can get short on time, you might make a blunder etc. Now, all these things do have an impact on our emotions, our mindset, our body language!
A very important quality that we need to have. There is a saying – ‘we are humans & not chemicals, so we can think before reacting‘. With chess, you start controlling them and get better hold of your emotions for good reasons.
