Checkers vs Chess

You know those times where someone just out smarts you.

Where they made a decision, and almost like they had a crystal ball knew the exact decision you were going to make.

I call that an example of someone playing chess, while you were playing checkers. They were thinking in ways that you did not even think were possible.

The more time I've spent in the startup and "business" world the more I've found that there are even more layers to the "game" than I initially thought. So, it is not in fact just checkers vs. chess. It is checkers vs chess vs multi-dimensional chess.

But, how can you start thinking in checkers vs chess?

In order to be aware of the game you are not playing, you first have to be made aware of the game that you are playing. No one truly wants to admit that they are just playing checkers, but there are in-fact many people who just play checkers.

The thing about this whole checkers vs chess concept is that it is entirely a mindset thing. Once our team started thinking in terms of how can we add another layer to an idea, or how we could transform an idea from checkers into chess, we started to bring a different level of innovation. The beauty of 'Chess' ideas is the simplicity in which they work, where they tend to have only one simple added "plane" to an idea that transforms it and compounds it's effectiveness.

Chess ideas tend to be simple, intuitive and logical, but not always obvious.

For our team, we can usually find these non-obvious strokes of poetic genius by a simple brain-storming where we think on our own for 5-10 minutes then come together with the ideas and follow the vein that seems the most promising. It is not rocket science.

In terms of results, we have seen that with our chess ideas, some have failed and not panned out how we envisioned, but we have also had some that have performed extremely well.

Checkers is a great game, but start playing chess.