The puzzle is very recognizable now. Instead of a big jumble of pieces, there’s a discernable pattern. In fact, when I look at it now, I can pretty much picture the finished product instantly. It’s been 35 days since we dumped 2000 pieces onto our new table, and the progress has picked up.

It used to be that we’d sit down at the puzzle and struggle to find a piece that fit somewhere, now we’re tackling whole sections of the puzzle in a matter of minutes. Just like any idea in the office, the pace seems to accelerate as we flesh things out more (and as we get closer to the deadline). I’ll sit down at the puzzle at the end of the day to find that someone else has pieced together a whole chunk that wasn’t there when I came in that morning. Inevitably, I’ll site there for 15 minutes before going home and everyone else comes back in the next morning saying “wow, you connected that to that”. Each connection spurs further action. I suspect that by the next entry, the puzzle will be nearly completed.

Here at R-Design, we enjoy a good challenge. Sure, sometimes we’ll all sit around the conference room looking at each other thinking, “we gotta do what?”, but it’s the challenge or more correctly the process of successfully overcoming a challenge that drives us all. We may be initially shocked by some of the challenges we’re presented with, but we always chip away at them one idea at a time until we’ve found the solution.

So, when we dumped the 2000 piece puzzle out on the new table, we all kinda of thought “We’re gonna do what?” There was something that possessed us to buy the 2000 piece puzzle instead of the 150 piece puzzle, though (okay, that was all me). What was it? It was the challenge. After all, we’d have finished that 150 piece puzzle during a single brainstorming session. We needed the challenge.

So, here we are on day 20 in puzzle time. Pieces are coming together. Initially, you think the outline of the puzzle is the easiest part. You just look for the pieces with the smooth edge. While that’s true to some extent, you’re working in a very linear fashion. You find the corners, and then each sequential piece in the line after that until you hit the next corner. Now, we’re attacking this puzzle from all sides. We’re putting little blobs together here and there, then ultimately connecting those blobs together to form something bigger.

In the beginning, I thought my metaphor relating the puzzle to ideas was a little cheesy, but I like it a little bit more each day. Each person has kind of adopted a different portion of the puzzle. Adam might by putting together a black rectangle on one side, and Nicole might be putting together a statue. I like finding the elusive pieces that connect what Adam’s doing with what Nicole’s doing. At the end of the day, I guess that’s basically what I do here anyway…