By João Pedro Pimenta, Project Director
Puzzles have always been one of the ways I train my mind. From jigsaw puzzles and sudoku, to logic problems on my smartphone, usually when I’m stuck waiting somewhere – because let’s face it, free time is a luxury these days. It’s not just a hobby but something I do because it also keeps my mind sharp. And the more I work on complex projects, the more I realize that puzzle-solving and engineering use the same mental tools.
Puzzles train specific skills. For starters, they teach you how to break down big problems. I don’t consider myself an avid chess player, but one thing I know for sure: you can’t solve a difficult chess position by staring at the whole board. You look at pieces, threats, and possible sequences. You break it into parts you can actually work with. Engineering is pretty much the same. A coastal project might have dozens of moving parts, but you can’t tackle all of them at once. You need to break it down, figure out what connects to what, and solve it step by step.
Pattern recognition is another essential skill. In puzzles, you start recognizing setups and mechanisms you’ve seen before. It’s just repetition and paying attention. Same thing happens on site. You look at how waves are hitting a structure, or how sediment is moving, and if you’ve been doing this long enough, you recognize the pattern. You’ve seen this behavior before and you know what it leads to.
The best part of puzzle-thinking is learning to think ahead. In chess, checkers, dominó, and so many other turn-based board games, you don’t just make the move that looks good right now. You think two, three, four moves out. What happens after this? How will your opponent react? And how could that affect the game’s development?
Engineering works the same way. You’re planning a construction phase, but you’re also thinking about what that means for the next phase, for the stakeholders who need to approve things, for how the structure performs in five years. If you only think about the immediate step, you end up fixing problems later that you could have avoided from the start. And fixing things always costs more. In time, in money, and in relationships with clients.
People think structure slows things down. I see the opposite. When everyone on a team understands the logic behind a decision, things move faster. You’re not explaining the same thing five times. You’re not backtracking because someone didn’t understand why we chose option A over option B. Clear thinking saves time. It cuts out confusion and gets people aligned so they can actually execute instead of debating.
One thing I focus on with teams is getting people to think openly and not in silos. Engineers specialize, which is fine, but specialization can make you lose sight of how everything fits together. I get excited when people ask: what happens after my part is done? Who depends on this being right? What breaks if I get this wrong? When a team thinks that way, you catch problems early. You build in contingencies. You don’t get blindsided.
What matters in coastal and marine engineering is clarity. I don’t care about sophisticated solutions if they don’t work in practice. Can you explain and justify why you made that decision? Have you thought about how it translates in the field? That’s the puzzle mindset. It’s not complicated. It only requires you to slow down enough to think through what you’re doing.
Successful projects are the ones where everyone planned for possible setbacks. Where all team members factored in an error margin and thought ahead. And when something unexpected did happen, they adjusted without panic because they’d already gamed out the possibilities. That’s what the puzzle mindset trains you for and what clients are paying for. Because, ultimately, it’s more about preparation than superficial perfection.