In Star Trek, the character Spock plays three-dimensional chess—a complex variant where multiple boards exist on different levels, and moves on one board can affect pieces on another. If you're a Big Bang Theory fan like me, you've seen Sheldon and Leonard obsessing over this same game, treating it like the ultimate intellectual challenge. While traditional chess requires you to think several moves ahead on a single plane, 3D chess demands awareness of how each move ripples across multiple dimensions simultaneously.
Picture this: You're finally hitting your stride. You've mastered reading the room, built solid relationships, and your organizational chess game is strong. You're making moves with confidence, seeing several steps ahead, and honestly feeling pretty good about your organizational intelligence. Then you get promoted—you're now responsible for hiring (maybe firing), you have to start steering the team culture instead of just enjoying it. You might be at the "big table," but the conversations seem to have a subtext that you're not entirely sure you're picking up on. The further up you go, the more you're entangled with stronger politics and competing agendas. You're more in tune, but paradoxically, the signals get harder to read. This might also include navigating vendor relationships, complex reporting structures (we all love a good matrixed organization), and dealing with financial constraints more directly.
Welcome to organizational 3D chess, where every move you make sends ripples across multiple boards you might not even know exist.
Here's what this looks like in practice. What seems like a single decision actually involves at least six different games happening simultaneously:
The "Technically Feasible" Team: Engineering could make it work, but wanted to discuss the three different approaches and why each would take longer than expected
The "We Need This Yesterday" Team: Sales needed this to hit quarterly numbers but worried about complexity
The "Please Don't Break Our Customers" Squad: Customer success team feared increased support load during their busiest season
The "Opportunity or Trap?" Thinkers: Marketing saw opportunity but also risk of competitor response
The "Show Me the ROI" Gatekeepers: Finance questioned the training investment during budget freeze discussions
The "Big Picture" Players: Leadership wanted this to demonstrate the platform vision to investors
Each group was playing their own version of chess, with their own pieces, their own definition of "winning," and their own timeline for success. And somehow, I was supposed to make a move that worked across all six boards seamlessly.
That's when I realized it wasn't about managing them all in tandem—it was about learning to think dimensionally.
From Chess Master to 3D Chess Novice
Here's what nobody tells you about advancing in your career: just when you think you've mastered the game, someone changes the rules. It's like finally becoming decent at regular chess only to discover you've been playing checkers while everyone else moved on to that Spock-level 3D version.
The skills that got you here—strategic thinking, stakeholder management, clear communication—are still essential. But now you need to apply them across multiple dimensions simultaneously. According to MIT research cited in Harvard Business Review, the average knowledge worker now interacts with 8.3 different functional areas and 4.7 hierarchical levels in a typical project. Translation: you're not managing one chess game anymore; you're moving into the 3D realm.
The most successful leaders I've observed don't just think strategically within their immediate sphere—they've developed what I call "dimensional awareness." They can see how their decisions cascade across multiple organizational levels, time horizons, and stakeholder groups simultaneously. It's like having chess vision that works across multiple boards at once.
And before you ask—no, this isn't about manipulation or playing dirty. It's about recognizing that in complex organizations, even well-intentioned decisions can create unintended consequences if you're only looking at one board.
The Three Boards You're Playing On
Think of organizational 3D chess as playing on three interconnected boards simultaneously:
Board 1: The Vertical Game (Up, Down, and All Around)
This is the hierarchy board—where traditional "managing up and managing down" happens. But in 3D chess, you're not just managing relationships; you're understanding how information, decisions, and influence flow through organizational layers.
I used to think this was simple: keep your boss happy, support your team, and you're golden. I think we can all envision a scenario like this: a colleague get blindsided when a decision they thought was fully supported at their level got killed three levels up by someone they'd never even met. That person had been playing excellent chess on the wrong board.
The vertical game means understanding that:
Executive level thinks in quarters and strategic positioning
Senior management balances strategic vision with operational reality
Middle management translates between strategy and execution
Individual contributors see the day-to-day customer and market reality
Your job isn't just to manage these relationships—it's to understand how decisions made at one level ripple through others, often getting transformed along the way.
Board 2: The Horizontal Game (Cross-Functional Chess)
This is where most smart people stumble. You've mastered your functional expertise, built credibility in your domain, and then suddenly you need to align with five other functions that might as well be speaking different languages.
Research consistently shows that cross-functional collaboration failures are one of the leading causes of project delays and budget overruns—often due not to a lack of capability, but to misaligned priorities, success metrics, and decision-making norms across functions.
Harvard Business Review's research on cross-functional teams shows that success comes not from forcing alignment, but from bridging functional perspectives—developing shared understanding across silos to optimize decisions beyond a single domain. What I call "functional translation" is the ability to interpret how a decision lands in marketing vs. finance vs. engineering—and craft strategies that align across, not just within.
The most successful leaders develop fluency in multiple "functional languages," allowing them to communicate the same strategy in engineering terms (technical architecture), marketing terms (customer impact), sales terms (revenue potential), finance terms (ROI), and legal terms (risk mitigation).
Board 3: The Temporal Game (Time as a Dimension)
This might be the trickiest board because it's invisible. Every stakeholder operates on a different time horizon, and what looks brilliant for quarterly results might undermine long-term capability building.
Studies suggest that up to 70% of strategic initiatives fail—often because they prioritize one time horizon while neglecting others. While many organizations plan across quarters or years, effective leadership requires managing across multiple overlapping temporal frameworks. As McKinsey has noted in their work on transformation and strategy, executives often juggle:
Near-term execution (0–3 months),
Short-term planning (3–12 months),
Medium-term positioning (1–3 years), and
Long-term evolution (3+ years)—each with distinct priorities and risks.
Clayton Christensen, in his work on The Innovator’s Dilemma, showed why companies often struggle to balance short-term success with long-term adaptability. He demonstrated that the very decisions that strengthen a company’s current market position—such as optimizing for performance or customer satisfaction—can limit its ability to respond to disruptive change. This trade-off between improving today’s operations and preparing for tomorrow’s transformation remains at the heart of strategic leadership.
Behavioral economist Richard Thaler’s work on intertemporal choice explains why humans struggle with long-term planning: we naturally discount future rewards in favor of immediate ones—a cognitive bias known as hyperbolic discounting. In organizations, this manifests as a tendency to favor short-term wins, even when leaders have long-term intentions, making sustained value creation a behavioral as well as strategic challenge.
Consider a typical hiring decision. From a short-term perspective (filling an immediate capacity gap), it might be perfect. From a six-month perspective (team dynamics), it could be good. From a two-year perspective (skill development needs), it might be questionable. From a five-year perspective (organizational learning and adaptability), it could be counterproductive.
The temporal board forces you to think like you're playing speed chess and correspondence chess simultaneously—some moves need immediate execution while others are part of strategies that unfold over years. The most successful leaders develop what Thaler calls "temporal arbitrage"—the ability to identify opportunities where short-term actions align with long-term value creation rather than competing with it.
Your 3D Chess Development Plan
Learning to play organizational 3D chess isn't about becoming overwhelmingly complex—it's about developing the pattern recognition to know when dimensional thinking matters and the skills to apply it effectively.
Start with Vertical Vision Before making any significant decision, map out how it will affect different hierarchical levels:
What will your team think/feel/need to do?
How will your peers in other teams be impacted?
What will your boss need to communicate upward?
How might this look to senior leadership?
Add Horizontal Awareness For the same decision, consider the cross-functional implications:
Which other departments have a stake in this outcome?
What success metrics drive their decision-making?
How might they interpret your move differently than you intend?
Incorporate Temporal Thinking Layer in the time dimension:
What are the 6-month, 1-year, and 3-year implications?
How do short-term pressures conflict with long-term goals?
What optionality does this decision create or eliminate?
Develop Your Integration Checklist Make dimensional analysis your default approach for significant decisions. Create a simple mental framework:
Scope: How many levels/functions will this affect?
Stakes: What does each stakeholder care most about?
Timeline: How do different time horizons change the equation?
Ripples: What could go wrong in ways I haven't considered?
Practice with Real Decisions Start applying this framework to actual choices you're facing. The goal isn't perfection—it's building the muscle memory to naturally think across dimensions when the stakes are high.
Your Next Move
As you continue your journey from pawn to player, remember that the most powerful organizational moves aren't necessarily the most obvious ones. They're the moves that simultaneously advance your position on multiple boards, creating value that compounds across dimensions.
The question isn't whether your organization is complex—it is. The question is whether you'll develop the dimensional thinking capabilities to thrive within that complexity or continue playing single-board chess in a multi-dimensional world.
Challenge for this week: Pick a current decision or project you're involved in. Map it across the vertical, horizontal, and temporal dimensions. What insights emerge that weren't visible from a single-dimensional perspective? What adjustments might improve outcomes across multiple stakeholder groups and timeframes?
Remember, in 3D chess, the goal isn't to calculate every possible move—it's to develop the intuition for which moves deserve deeper dimensional analysis and the confidence to make decisions that create value across multiple boards simultaneously.
The game just got more interesting. Time to level up your play.
