Keeping Your Brain Sharp: What Project Managers Can Learn from Chess and Complex Games

 

Good project management isn’t just about processes, templates, and tools. At its core, it’s a mental discipline: the ability to plan ahead, manage uncertainty, adapt to change, and make sound decisions under pressure. A recent conversation got me thinking that many of the same cognitive skills that underpin effective project management can be strengthened through activities like chess, Go and complex trading card games. And in volatile and fast-moving project environments, keeping your brain sharp could be a professional advantage – with a bit of fun thrown into the mix.

 

Project Management as a Cognitive Skillset

Most project management frameworks, whether APM, PRINCE2, Agile, or PMI, share a common foundation:

• Defining objectives and scope
• Planning work and sequencing tasks
• Managing limited resources
• Identifying and mitigating risk
• Monitoring progress and adapting plans

While these are often described procedurally, they are actually thinking skills. Strong project managers continuously hold a mental model of where the project is now, where it needs to go, and what could derail it along the way.

This kind of thinking closely mirrors the mental demands found in strategy-based games.

 

Chess: Strategic Planning and Risk Management

Chess is a textbook example of long-term planning under uncertainty, a skill every project manager needs.

In chess:

• You set an overall strategy (much like defining project objectives)
• You plan several moves ahead while knowing conditions will change
• You assess trade-offs between aggression, defence, and resource use
• You constantly re-evaluate risks as new information appears

Similarly, in project management:

• Early project plans are hypotheses, not guarantees
• Stakeholder decisions, dependencies, and external factors force continual replanning
• Risk registers must be revisited, not filed away

Regularly engaging in chess trains your brain to think in contingencies - “If this happens, then I respond like that”, which is precisely how experienced project managers stay ahead of issues rather than reacting too late.

 

Trading Card Games: Managing Complexity and Change

Complex trading card games such as Magic: The Gathering introduce a different, but equally valuable, mental challenge with their dynamic complexity.

According to trading card games experts (my thanks to the fine folk at Axion Now for their input) these games require players to:

• Build a deck within defined constraints (rules, formats, resources)
• Understand synergies between components
• Make decisions with incomplete information
• Adapt strategy mid-game as new cards and interactions emerge

This maps neatly onto modern project environments, particularly Agile and hybrid delivery models.

Projects today rarely follow a straight line. Requirements evolve, priorities shift, and new constraints appear. Like a game state that changes every turn, project managers must constantly re-prioritise, re-balance resources, and decide which actions create the most value right now regardless of what was planned at the outset.

Playing complex games sharpens your ability to hold multiple variables in mind, spot patterns and decide quickly when you don’t have all the information.

These are exactly the skills needed when managing interdependent workstreams or responding to emerging risks.

 

Focus, Cognitive Load and Decision Fatigue

Another often-overlooked aspect of project management is mental endurance. Long projects place sustained demands on attention, memory, and decision-making. Poor decisions are often the result of cognitive overload rather than lack of knowledge.

Games like chess and strategic card games help by training you in sustained concentration, improving working memory and building up tolerance for complex decisions under pressure.

They also provide a safe environment to practise failure, reflection, and learning, which, let’s face it, you can’t do so easily on live projects.

 

Final Thoughts

I’ve written about this not because I want to turn project management into some sort of game, but so that anyone managing a project can recognise that keeping your brain sharp could be part of your professional development. And whether you have the title of project manager or not, many of us, in reality, are managing projects of some form in our day-to-day working lives.

Activities like chess and complex games won’t replace professional training, but they can complement it by strengthening our cognitive muscles.

It’s as much about how you think as what you know and complex strategy games sharpen the mental skills that underpin planning, risk management, and adaptability.