Leading through the messy middle
I played chess with my dad growing up. He instilled in me a love for the game and a sharp competitive instinct — my heart would hammer and my blood race each time we sat down to play. And of course he usually beat me! I’d grin through gritted teeth and seethe inside, while doing my best to appear to shrug off defeat… One of the big things I finally learned was the role of the middle game in chess, where everything is unpredictable. The trick with the middle game is this: you don’t try to win. You aim to improve your position and options, until a way forward emerges.
Right now we’re in the messy middle of a pandemic, past the opening gambit of shelter-in-place restrictions, but with no clear endgame in sight. The range of experiences is hard to grasp — from personal grief to public displays of solidarity, from no work to over-work. Leaders have to navigate all of this with grace, while also keeping an eye on the long term. Given we are beyond the frantic first few weeks of the unknown, it’s time for leaders to adopt a middle game mindset.
That means “seeing the whole board” and avoiding what seem like quick wins that lessen your long term options and contradict what you stand for. For example, how do you treat customers and employees if you’re looking to improve your long-term position? Many companies have made drastic moves to preserve cash, including cutting off credit to customers or laying off employees.
Those may be the right survival moves. But they might really limit your options in the long run.
If you adopt a middle game mindset, you might cut off some customers’ credit, but then call them directly to apologize, and explain why (they will be upset, but they will remember you treated them with respect and dignity and might just return in the future). You might reduce employees’ salaries instead of laying them off en masse, because you genuinely want to keep them whole. And so on… It’s critical to keep your options open and focus on what Richard Rumelt calls “proximate objectives” — immediate objectives to create long term possibility.
Consider one move that Amex made recently, sending laptops to its customer service reps, so they can work from home. Not only does that improve its position in the short run, because Amex needs reps to be online. It also improves the company for the long run, because it will now be possible to have more reps working remotely in the future.
The key mindset shift in the messy middle is from “winning” to “improving”. True to TJA’s philosophy of love vs fear, it’s about embracing a learning orientation.
Here are some practical questions to ask your team:
Ask every day:
What can we do for now to improve our position?
What move, if we made it, will increase our long term options?
Ask, when you are ready to:
Where do we want to be when we emerge from the worst of the crisis?
What opportunities do we see in this moment to improve our organization overall?
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
— Eric Hoffer
Lead bravely,