Know when to play heavily and when to play lightly

A very close friend who is a C-level executive just learned that they are unexpectedly losing their job, after a short tenure. They didn't do anything wrong. It was shifting political sands in their company. They asked my advice on how to conduct themselves in their last couple of months. When someone asks my advice, especially someone I love, I try hard to be as useful as possible to them. Including being radically honest – even if that is painful. Also, I try not to sit on the fence. I tell them what I think is true, and why I think so, accepting that I might be wrong. I assume that they will take the final responsibility of factoring in my advice, the advice of others and their own thoughts to come up with their solution/ plan of action. As part of that, I try to think about ideas/ advice I can bring from my personal toolkit/ knowledge base/ perspective that others perhaps can’t. In this case, I shared with my friend a strategic concept from the game of Go/ Weichi. In Go, the goal is to place your stones in order to surround more territory than your opponent does. A lot of the time you are involved in very serious territory-building activity. Every stone has weight. You must understand and follow your strategic direction and understand your opponent’s direction of play. But sometimes, on the big Go board, there are places where some of your stones end up in quite a difficult, challenging position, far from your home territory. In such situations, Go masters entreat us to ‘play lightly’. The Japanese term for this mode of play is sabaki (捌き). We are not playing to stake our claim, to maximize our footprint. We are playing just to survive. We may sacrifice some of our stones to save the rest, for example. A good metaphor here is lizards that allow their tails to detach so that predators get just the tail, not the whole lizard. The scientific term for this is autotomy – meaning self-amputation. Another good metaphor is the Japanese Ninja, who is agile, travels lightly and is prepared to break rules to achieve their outcome. In my friend’s case, they were going from trying to position themselves in the C-suite and maximize their actual and potential positions, to negotiating a beneficial exit. Not only did they need to switch from strategic to tactical, and from mixed time frames to the immediate future. I also wanted to make sure they felt differently about their role in their last couple of months. Not expecting too much from colleagues. Just acting with integrity, and above that negotiate a good deal. As Bob Dylan says in the song "It Ain't Me Babe": "Go lightly from the ledge, babe// Go lightly on the ground." In the past, I have made the mistake of playing heavily where I should have played lightly, and possibly vice versa? Have you? #unask #unthink #unlearn #strategy #go #sabaki