Jazzing up boardroom chats: Lessons from The Queen’s Gambit

Summary: Clear stakes, a human story, and a running clock are the ingredients to captivate audiences.

Five years ago, critics and fans were raving about Netflix’s blockbuster, The Queen’s Gambit. It was about a precocious teenager, Beth Harmon, who figured out the game by peeping and observing her janitors duking it out on the chessboard. In record time, she wipes the smiles off the smug faces of the sceptical, mansplaining gatekeepers at tournaments, crashes a train-length queue of hapless male adversaries who lie in her wake, and shatters all ceilings. Eventually, she bests the World’s top player. As though her implausible foray and ascent to the summit of the noble game weren’t gripping enough, along with her mesmerising ability to stare at the ceiling and visualize killer move sequences, the series dishes a harrowing subplot around her addiction to painkillers.

What could top that? Well, meeting the real queen. A few weeks ago, Netflix released a documentary about the Queen of Chess, the Hungarian Judit Polgar, who in the 1990s became the youngest-ever grandmaster and broke the immortal Bobby Fischer’s record, and who ascended to being a Top 10 rated player, man or woman. And she was the strongest woman for over a quarter century. Other than the ‘lab rat’ feel to her story of origin, where Judit and her sisters are the byproduct of their Father’s dream to shove a mighty punch into the noses of the nomenklatura, it was amazing how the rallying goal of downing the World Chess Champion made for compelling viewing.

What am I getting at, and what did I learn? What may be dry subject matter, including whether to retreat or advance a piece on the chessboard during a hard-to-decipher stage of the game, or a conversation in the boardroom on whether to issue a convertible debt instead of issuing ownership shares, can be made enthralling. What helps? Clear stakes, a compelling human story, and a running clock. Similar to chess, these elements are abundant in business settings, and for business fiction, it’s a matter of drawing them out.