An excellent post from Jeff Jonas on how we bring order in chaos.
He uses the metaphor of solving a jigsaw puzzle.
The first pieces are irrelevant. Just take one or two. The most important thing is to take action. Starting from the border or the extremes may be helpfull though.
For the next pieces, we look for simularities, links, relations. Our initial choices will now influence how fast we can proceed.
We will cluster similar pieces, without knowing if they really belong together or not.
By adding more pieces to the puzzle, we start seeing the picture, it starts making sense.
The last piece is the easy one.
This is a similar approach of moving from the chaotic domain to the simple domain in the Cynefin framework.
Picture : romanlily