Zugzwang: The Art of Being Stuck, Expensively

Imagine you’re a company. Sales are tanking, your competitors are flourishing, and your shareholders are circling like buzzards.

Welcome to zugzwang—where every decision you make makes things worse, but doing nothing guarantees it.

What Is Zugzwang?

Zugzwang is a chess term meaning “compulsion to move.” It’s when any move you make worsens your position

Imagine you’re playing chess, and your opponent has set a trap: if you move your knight, you’ll lose your queen. If you move your rook, you’ll be checkmated in two turns.

Every option is terrible, but the rules say you can’t skip your turn.

Welcome to Zugzwang.

The term is often used beyond chess—in business, life, and marketing—to describe situations where companies or leaders are forced into action, knowing any decision will backfire, but doing nothing is worse. It’s the ultimate lose-lose scenario.

Every CEO, CMO, CFO, and desperate startup founder has felt Zugzwang's pain at some point.

Zugzwang in Business:

Ok, let’s take a look at some examples of Zugzwang in business:

The Budget Tug-of-War

• Cut Marketing Spend: You save money, but your brand vanishes from public memory faster than a TikTok trend.

• Keep Spending: You risk pouring cash into a leaky bucket while the CFO hovers nearby, calculator in hand, muttering darkly about ROI.

It’s a lose-lose—but with a behavioral twist:

CFOs often prefer visible failure (cutting the budget and watching sales tank) to ambiguous success (keeping the budget and wondering what could have happened).

Humans hate uncertainty more than loss. Losses can be justified.

Behavioral Insight: Why We Fear Zugzwang

We meat bags of humans hate being in zugzwang. This is because it removes agency. We like to believe we’re in control, but zugzwang forces us to:

• Act under pressure.

• Make bad choices, knowingly.

• Feel powerless, trapped in a no-win situation.

Businesses in zugzwang often choose short-term fixes—launching desperate campaigns, overhauling products, or announcing flashy rebrands (looking at you, Jaguar)—to avoid immediate failure, only to dig deeper holes

Turn Zugzwang into an Opportunity

This might all sound like doom and gloom, but there is a silver lining

One way to escape from Zugzwang is reframing the game entirely. 

The key lies in:

• Psychological Innovation: If you can’t win, change the metric of success. Make the chessboard irrelevant.

• Brand Storytelling: If your product’s in trouble, double down on meaning rather than features. Sell the why, not the what.

• Illogical Brilliance: In a world of rational misery, an irrational, creative play can be the most logical move. After all, nobody wins chess by playing predictably.

Final Thought: The Folly of Zugzwang

Zugzwang is only a problem if you believe the game is fair.

When the only moves left are bad, the most unexpected move might be your best.