Board Expectations
Every manager wants strong pieces. The reality is that you work with what the board gives you, and even when you do have strong pieces, the question is whether you are using them in positions that match their actual value.
A queen played as a pawn is not a waste you notice immediately. The board might look balanced. The piece is technically in a safe position. But you are getting pawn output from a queen, and somewhere else on the board there is a gap that a queen could have filled.
The gap between what you have and how you are using it is where most team performance problems live.
Matching
Matching is the act of placing a piece where its actual strengths are in play, not just where there is an open square.
A high Power, low Versatility engineer should not be the one owning cross-team coordination. A high Foresight, high Insight person should not be buried in ticket execution with no influence over direction. These are not failures of the person. They are failures of placement.
Good matching requires knowing your pieces well enough to do more than read their title. Two engineers with the same seniority level and the same tech stack can have completely different dimension profiles. One is a specialist who goes deep and needs stability. The other is a generalist who moves fast and needs variety. Treating them as interchangeable produces worse outcomes than treating them as different pieces with different best positions.
The other side of matching is covering. A junior piece placed next to a strong senior can take on work that would otherwise be beyond their current level, because the senior can backstop the decisions that require more experience. The junior develops. The senior multiplies. This is not charity, it is a deliberate configuration of the board.
Short Term Solutions
Short term solutions are about buying time without making the long-term situation worse.
Reassigning a strong piece from one area to stabilize another works once. If you do it repeatedly, you create two problems instead of one: the original gap and a new dependency on the strong piece to keep moving between fires.
Temporary coverage, pairing, and scope reduction are valid tools. The trap is treating them as permanent without acknowledging what they are costing. Every time a piece plays outside its intended position, something in the original position is either uncovered or underperforming.
Short term decisions accumulate into the board state you are managing six months from now.
Long Term Solutions
Long term solutions involve changing the board, not just repositioning pieces on it.
That means investing in the dimensions that are consistently weak across your team rather than compensating around them every time. If Range is always the gap that creates blockers, the answer is not finding one person with high Range and routing every cross-cutting problem to them. That person becomes a bottleneck and eventually a flight risk. The answer is developing Range as a distributed capability.
It also means accepting that some positions cannot be filled from the inside on a useful timeline. Knowing when to hire specifically for a dimension gap, rather than hiring the strongest available generalist and hoping they cover it, is one of the harder calls to make.
Long term thinking on a team is mostly about not creating dependencies you cannot explain or afford to lose.
Invest in Potential
A piece with high potential but uneven dimensions is often more valuable than a piece with moderate development across all dimensions, given the right conditions.
The right conditions are: time, investment, and a senior piece willing to cover while the development happens. Without those three, potential is just an optimistic description of current gaps.
What makes investment worth the risk is identifying which dimensions are blocking the piece from contributing at the next level, and whether those dimensions can realistically be developed in the current project context. Not every project type develops every dimension. A Reactive project develops Speed and some Versatility. It does not develop Foresight or Insight. A sustained Improvement project develops Insight and Range. Putting a person you want to grow in the wrong type of project for what they need to develop is an investment that does not compound.
How Innovation Looks
Innovation on a team rarely looks like a breakthrough. It looks like a piece that has developed enough Foresight to see a problem before it becomes urgent, and enough Range to propose a solution that works across more than one context.
The conditions that produce it are the opposite of constant Reactive mode. A team in permanent firefighting does not innovate. It does not have the Foresight to anticipate because all attention is on the present. It does not develop Range because every solution is optimized for the immediate problem. Speed and Power dominate, and the other dimensions atrophy.
Innovation is a signal that the board is in a healthy enough state for pieces to see further than the next move.