Alberto Terol

In chess, everyone obsesses about two moments: the opening and the checkmate. The opening because it looks elegant and the endgame because it looks decisive.

But when is the real game happening? What is the part that decides almost everything? Yes, in that messy, uncomfortable and cognitively expensive stretch in between that they call “The Middlegame”.

The Middlegame is the liminal space where plans collide with reality and where pieces don’t move according to theory anymore and intention meets friction, uncertainty, trade-offs, fatigue, and surprises.

Change works exactly the same way. Having a bold vision matters a lot but vision without a middlegame is just a poster on a wall. Change Management lives precisely there, between “this is where we are” and “this is where we want to be”.

I was reminded of this listening to an interview between Dwarkesh Patel and Elon Musk. Musk is brilliant at pinpointing the end of the game as he sees the checkmate from miles away: multi-planetary species, autonomous driving and radical cost curves. But when pressed on how to get there, the answer is often some version of: “we’ll figure it out”, which, to be fair, has worked for him more than once.

Most organizations don’t have SpaceX margins or Musk’s tolerance for chaos. For the rest of us, “we’ll figure it out” is not a strategy but a debt. And that debt is paid in confusion, resistance, rework, and burnout.

Our societies are drifting toward the same trap. We’re becoming deeply impatient and we want to teleport from the current state to the end state. And by doing that, we erase the middlegame.

Which is tragic, because the middlegame is where discovery happens, assumptions break and where people learn. It is the magical spot where capabilities are built and culture actually changes.

I once had a truly visionary boss building a corporate innovation unit. He had incredible ideas, he was magnetic and always five steps ahead. Being around him felt like being invited to amazing parties. The only challenge? Someone had to prepare them. Someone had to organize the catering, pick the drinks, book the DJ, send the invites and clean up afterwards.

Vision sets the destination but someone still has to build the road. The issue is that “someone” is often invisible and chronically underestimated.

The middlegame is unglamorous, it doesn’t fit neatly into keynote slides and doesn’t go viral on LinkedIn. But it’s where change actually happens. And if you don’t design it, you don’t have a change initiative, you just have a dream…
and a very long hangover waiting the morning after the party.