Friday 28 December 2012

An (old) new idea

While flipping through a non chess book I came across a fairly simple acronym that describes a business planning process. The acronym is SWOT, and represents Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Of course such a term could have come directly from the world of chess, as I have read a number of chess planning books that describe this exact process.
Turns out I was not the first person to make this connection, as I discovered a couple of articles linking the business approach to the chess approach. Probably the best of these was an article titled "Using Business Processes for Chess" by William Stewart. The only difference between his ideas and mine is he looks at Strengths and Weaknesses in terms of personal abilities (eg weak at openings/strong at endings), while I looked at the whole thing as a positional analysis tool (eg Strong knight on d5, weak pawn on b2).
His article is worth a read as he explains the SWOT system better than I could, and provides a framework for asking the 'right' questions during the game.

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