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Jig saw puzzles and working with emergence

January 11, 2005 By Uncategorized

There is a famous quote attributed to Albert Einstein that goes something like this:

If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.�

AS a facilitator it�s sometimes hard to be in that place � what Sam Kaner calls �the groan zone� � where confusion, frustration and divergence live. The process of assembling patterns of meaning in a group is labourious but it is worth every moment when you see intricate and elegant decisions emerge from the chaos.

The other day in a meeting, one of the participants came up with a metaphor to describe this process. She likened it to solving a jig saw puzzle with out knowing the picture. As you empty the puzzle out on the table, you shift around the pieces, turning them over, noticing their size and the various types of connections. Then you start to build patterns: pieces of border, the all-important corners, big patches of red or blue with the same tone. Soon you have clusters emerging. As if by magic, these clusters meet up with one another. You can stare at a cluster for days wondering how it connects to its neighbours and then suddenly, on your way out the door to go to work, you see it.

And then, most interesting of all, you are finally left with two or three pieces. If for some reason you don�t have those pieces � if they are lost, or if someone has hidden them � you will do almost anything to get them. You will turn the house upside down, interrogate the children, write away to the puzzle company, ANYTHING to get those pieces! What began as 500 small pieces of cardboard with no cohesion has emerged into a quest for wholeness.

So this is how it is solving difficult problems with groups, where all the pieces live in the hearts and brains of the participants. In the beginning, we don�t know which of the hundreds of pieces will ultimately be the one that brings the whole pattern together. As we work through the sorting and meaning making, certain pieces take on greater or lesser importance until finally we see the whole pattern and that taste of the nearly completed puzzle drives our adrenaline as we respond to the natural human attraction towards wholeness.

So it is with difficult problems; so it is working with emergence.

(PS…other jigsaw puzzle metaphors here!)