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 5,000-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, thought I must be missing parts of my brain, and 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 handling one piece at a time. We had a family rule that you hide the box so nobody can refer to the cover photo. It is more fun to see it as a mystery and watch unexpected elements emerge than to fill in a paint-by-numbers pattern.

Sort the edge pieces. Assembling the edge first offers quick wins with easier-to-find pieces and reduces the overwhelming sea of options to a well-defined subset.

Seek patterns. Stand up and zoom out to look for patterns in color or shape. We invented terms for the shapes in our heads, like "tongue in cheek combo" or "knee bend protrusion." This personal shorthand helps you notice fine details and isn't meant to translate to other people; it illuminates your thinking and brings clarity to your actions.

Experiment with fit. Trying pieces, even when you're unsure, refines your approach through literal hands-on experience and highlights subtle differences that speed up 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. That kind of personal ownership ups the emotional commitment and the discretionary effort (staying up way too late to find it).

Collaborate (a little). Puzzles are more fun as a family, but too many people make it hard to see and confusing to sort. Some people prefer to go it alone, but you risk being isolated from everything else going on around you. And never touch the small patch of interesting pieces someone has assembled at their place! That little "fit incubator" holds ideas in formation that are fragile. Disrupt someone else's ideation and they lose their train of thought.

Time is warped. The pace of matching follows some kind of power curve: about one piece in the first hour and a hundred in the last ten minutes. If several people worked on the puzzle, 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 because they are complex, but the outcome is clear and the number of pieces is finite. It wouldn't be fun if you never finished one. Even so, my mom's tips translate easily to real-world complexity.

The two overarching themes are sorting and testing. To sort the components of a professional problem, I often write an equation that identifies the variables. The equation becomes a container to test the set for completeness and experiment with how the pieces fit together. In talent management, for example, I use a reusable Talent Equation:

Talent = Skills + Attributes + Experience + Interests + Availability

Laying out all the pieces lets me spot patterns and test fit, so we're not just filling roles but aligning every aspect of talent management toward sustainable high performance.

The big picture of talent management is helping the organization get the right people in the right place at the right time to achieve its goals. Unlike a puzzle in a box, there's no photo to check against. Without a theory (my equation) to test against business goals, it's nearly impossible to get the whole picture right. With volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in the mix, 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, then use an equation to sort the noise and chaos of a typical workplace into a few components. Test each one against the others until you have a working model that makes sense of the problem.

Simple, right?

First published on LinkedIn.