The jigsaw factory has decided to cease its present business model and move to an altogether more progressive way of doing things. To reinvent the jigsaw puzzle. Their main customer asked them to provide the most upto date jigsaw puzzles in the world; to be world leaders in their field like they used to be, when Britain ruled the waves. The CEO left it to the people leaders to come up with some ideas; the printers, the cutters, the sales team, the artists and various other departments; transport and HR, Procurement and IT were all asked to come up with some ideas of how to affect this change to produce a world beating reinvention of the Wheel, or in this case the jigsaw. Months of separate think tanks, tens of blue sky thinking sessions and walk and talk meetings, anonymous suggestions and a monthly work satisfaction survey produced bagfuls of results; none of them satisfactory and so the company directors (those below the CEO) decided to ignore the various embedded experts who pretty much all said it couldn’t be done came up with a solution. Never mind 3D jigsaws, never mind jigsaws which masqueraded as directional charts or “jigmaps” never mind jigsaws which showed a multitude of subjects, interacting with each other. NO the directors chose an altogether different path, a path of incompletion and glass half fullness, a path of frustration but one which invited the user to fill in the gaps, metaphorically and literally. The idea was and is to provide a shrink wrapped box of jigsaw pieces, but pieces which didn’t match the image on the box, the image promised to the buyer by the manufacturer.

The Jigsaw wasn’t to be completed, pieces were missing, pieces weren’t cut to fit and many pieces were not even relevant to the puzzle, they couldn’t and wouldn’t match-ever. This was to be the Brave New World of the Jigsaw Puzzle, and never mind the smaller more traditional puzzle makers who were still producing vast Puzzles of baked beans or forests, coastlines or seascapes. Surviving and delighting Jiggers the world over.

 The launch happened on the first day of the new year, when everyone was still suffering from the parties of the evening before, the shops were full of fuzzy headed revellers looking for something to occupy them in the few days before they returned to work which didn’t involve visiting the pub and drinking themselves into a last weekend of self loathing before they drove to work the following Monday. The Jigsaws flew off the shelves, such was the reputation of this manufacturer, business was booming, but the day after came the crash. Email upon email, letters, social media postings and complaints tumbled in, swamping the press department, “Why had they created a product which was no use to anyone apart from insane people?”

At first glance this Jigsaw company seemed to be a world leader in what it produced, but this curved ball of a decision to completely reinterpret the jigsaw was like rewriting the rules of the game, a game which everyone loved to play and respected the rules of, who in their right mind would produce a jigsaw which no one wanted, charity shops and toy cupboards are fill of jigsaws with missing pieces; these missing pieces buried under detritus in landfill, never to be reunited with the original boxes. 

This is what is happening at the company that I work, and, to a certain degree it makes me sad. The question is, will the public realise that incomplete jigsaws are a path they chose to navigate down?