The Art of Making the Complex Simple

I've always been fascinated by puzzles of all kinds, and I credit my mom for her tradition of having a jigsaw puzzle out during holiday breaks and vacations for sparking this passion in me. Those moments, filled with quiet concentration or lively discussions, taught me more than just the patience and strategy required to put together a 5000-piece puzzle; they laid the foundation for a problem-solving approach I use every day in my professional life.

From Puzzles to Problem-Solving

As a high school and college student, I was not great in subjects like physics, economics, and calculus. I struggled to memorize formulas and follow the logical sequences presented by my teachers. I was discouraged and thought I must be missing parts of my brain, and I doubted my career potential. It wasn't until years later that I realized the key to untangling complex issues lay in the simple strategies I learned while puzzling with my mom.

Mom’s Jigsaw Wisdom

Set the Table: Start by laying out all the pieces. Searching through the box is inefficient and you won't get very far rooting around in the box handling one piece at a time. We had a family rule that you must hide the box so nobody can refer to the cover photo while doing the puzzle. It is more fun to see it as a mystery and see unexpected elements emerge than to fill in a paint-by-numbers pattern.

Sort the Edge Pieces: Identifying and assembling the edge pieces first offers quick wins with easier-to-find pieces and simplifies the process by reducing the overwhelming sea of options with a well-defined subset.

Seek Patterns: Stand up and zoom out to look for patterns in color or shape that catch your attention. We often invented terms to describe the shapes in our heads like "tongue in cheek combo" or "knee bend protrusion" etc. This personal "short-hand" helps you notice fine details in the shapes and colors and is not meant to translate to other people; it illuminates your thinking and brings clarity to your actions.

Experiment with Fit: Trying to fit pieces, even when you're unsure, refines your problem-solving approach through literal “hands-on” experience and highlights subtle differences that increase the speed of finding real matches. This is rapid prototyping at its finest. Fail quickly and fail often to succeed sooner.

Feed Your Obsession: If you get stuck on ONE DAMN PIECE, step away from the table and give your brain a rest. Also, look under the couch even though you are totally sure it couldn't be there! It was not uncommon for someone in our house to call dibs on a particular missing piece. This type of personal ownership ups the ante on emotional commitment and increases the investment of discretionary effort (e.g. staying up way too late to find it).

Collaborate (a Little). Puzzles are more fun when you work on them as a family, but including too many people makes it hard to see and confusing to sort. Some people prefer to go it alone, but you risk being ignored and isolated from everything else that's going on around you. ?Also, never touch the small patch of interesting pieces someone assembles at their place! This little "fit incubator" represents ideas in formation that are fragile and tenuous. If you disrupt someone else's ideation process they will lose their train of thought and progress gets stalled.

Time is Warped: Patience is a virtue because the pace of individual piece matching follows some kind of power curve of time x quantity where you get about 1 piece in the first hour and 100 in the last 10 minutes. If multiple people are working on the puzzle you must wait until everyone is there to finish it or you are an indulgent puzzle hog. Claiming "I finished it!" when many people contributed is always a no-no.

From Family Puzzles to Professional Problems

Puzzles are good practice for problem-solving because they are complex but there is a clear, obvious outcome and there is a finite number of pieces involved. It wouldn’t be fun if you never got one completed. That said, my mom's jigsaw puzzle tips translate easily to real-world complexity challenges.

Two overarching themes in successful puzzle completion are sorting and testing. To help me sort the components of a professional problem, I often create an equation to identify and sort variables. This equation becomes the container for me to test the set for completeness and experiment with how they fit together. For example, I deal with lots of complex problems in Talent Management and I've created a reusable Talent Equation to help me sort the issues:

Talent = Skills + Attributes + Experience + Interests + Availability

Just like a jigsaw puzzle, laying out all the pieces—skills, attributes, experience, interests, and availability—allows me to start identifying patterns and testing fit. This methodical approach helps ensure that we're not just filling roles but strategically aligning all aspects of talent management to create sustainable, high-performance.

I imagine the big picture of talent management as helping the organization get the right people, in the right place, at the right time so they can achieve their business goals. Unlike a puzzle in a box, there is no actual photo I can reference to see if I organize all of the pieces correctly. Without a theory (my equation) to test against business goals, it's nearly impossible to fit all of the pieces together to get the whole picture right. When dealing with complexity along with other VUCA aspects of volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, just as I felt working with derivatives in Calculus class.

TL;DR

To make the complex simple, clarify your outcome and then use an equation to identify and sort the noise and chaos of a typical workplace into a few sub-components. Test each one with the others until you have a working model that makes sense of the problem.

Simple, right?