My daughter and wife do jigsaw puzzles together. The dining room table is often covered with a 5,000 piece puzzle in varying stages of completion.
I simply do not have the patience, but the process they use to piece together the puzzle is instructive.
First, they make sure the box is in a prominent place so they can see it easily. Ever tried doing a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the end result should look like?
Then they assemble the pieces into groups that seem to reflect some part or other of the puzzle. In the course of that process they separate out all the pieces with a flat side, being one of the perimeters of the puzzle. They are particularly focussed on finding the 4 corner pieces. Finding them, 4 pieces amongst 5,000 scattered around the table, enables the puzzle to start to take some sort of shape.
Over time, often a wet weekend, the picture evolves.
Pieces are fitted together, usually after several failures to get that exact fit. Often, pieces look like they go together, but are somehow, not quite right, so they try again, and again. Slowly, groups of pieces emerge, and together these groups make up the final picture.
Strategy is similar.
In the absence of a picture of the end result, the process is just about impossible in a complex environment.
Similarly, the role played by the corner pieces is far more important than just one of many pieces, they are the linchpin around which the construction of the strategy puzzle evolves.
Even a simple puzzle is hard to complete in the absence of the 4 corner pieces as reference points.
What are the corner pieces of your strategy?
What does the end result look like?
