Puzzles Promote Project Proficiency

My feeble attempts at solving a tangram puzzle taught me about project management.

It’s Christmas Day 1996 and we’re having our traditional Christmas celebration with my Uncle and Aunt. Their house is a happy place for me: a grand living room with a roaring fireplace, cosy deep sofas, and a dozing black cat.

“Simon, why don’t you come try one of these puzzles?”, asks my uncle in his characteristically joyful tone. He hands a tangram puzzle to me and each of my two cousins.

As I look at the puzzle, I see it comprises a flat wooden frame containing several pieces of assorted shapes. I empty the pieces onto the carpet, shuffle them with my hand, and begin trying to fit them back together into the frame.

As I lay with the cat and attempt to solve the puzzle, I sweat profusely - both from the heat of the fire, and the mental strain. Meanwhile my two cousins seem unphased: snack in one hand, puzzle in the other.

Many years later something in my head clicked.

As a fledgling project manager kicking off a project, I’d alone try to understand the problem to be solved, draft a solution in my mind, and then divide that solution into requests that I’d then channel to each of the requisite engineering teams.

This approach - of jumping to a solution, and dividing responsibility for implementing each part across many teams - may work fine for problems that we’d tackled before, where the solution is already known. This is similar to manufacturing, where uncertainty is low: we’re simply creating more units of something we’ve already created before.

However, the problems I often encountered weren’t known, but new and unexplored. By jumping to a solution - and giving the parts of the solution to different engineering teams - I did a good job of preventing each engineering team from understanding the problem, and from understanding the whole solution.

Much like my attempts to solve a tangram puzzle, this led to two outcomes: either parts of a solution that didn’t fit together, or parts of a solution that did fit together but didn’t fit the problem.

The takeaway? Create conditions for teams who do the work to understand the whole problem, and collaborate towards a solution. Hopefully then you won’t end up like young Simon, with pieces that don’t fit together, or fit the problem.