Rule #1-Know the Puzzle You’re Putting Together

Guiding Princples

Rule #1-Know the Puzzle You’re Putting Together

For the past few years, I’ve been giving a talk titled “10 Rules for Leadership and Balance”. It has been a popular talk that I’ve been fortunate to give to a variety of audiences, in numerous locations. What I’ve never done is to write specifically about each rule. 

Over the course of the winter, I’m going to do just that; write a series of posts diving into each of my 10 rules.

You’ve probably done a puzzle at some point in your life. You may not be an aficionado, but you likely know the basics. Before you do anything, you look at the picture. In fact, the picture was probably the reason you chose the puzzle; you liked the way it looked and thought it would be fun to put it together. 

You know what the puzzle is going to look like and now you open the box. Regardless of the picture you probably do the same thing, find the flat pieces and put the edge together. No matter what project you’re putting together, there is always one obvious place to start. With a puzzle, you find the edge pieces and start putting them together. 

Next, I like to sort the piece by color, or common appearance. Organizing like this gets everything into piles of like pieces and ready to put together. If you don’t have the photo to organize by, you’re really flying blind and your task is going to be infinitely more difficult. 

Know the picture, organize your pieces and start to put things together. 

I also like to think of this rule as ‘Guiding Principles’ 

When it comes to managing the golf course, these guiding principles are like the picture on the box. From these four principles, I can organize the pieces and we can get to work achieving our goals. If something becomes a struggle, we go back to the picture and reorganize. Without these principles, it can be easy to lose our way.

When we held the Ryder Cup in 2016, I had a picture in my mind of what I wanted the course to look like. Everything we did was organized toward getting to this picture. When it rained 18” in the 6 weeks leading up to the event, we kept reorganizing the pieces so we could make them look like the picture on the box. Sometimes the pieces didn’t fit, so we tried another. Eventually we got one piece to fit, then two, four, eight and more. The more pieces we put together the easier the puzzle became. Pretty soon we could look at the pieces, grab the right one and put it exactly where it went. Pretty soon, the puzzle was finished. 

Rule #1-Know the Puzzle You’re Putting Together