Small enough to learn from

A man in Manama has an idea for jigsaw puzzles printed with old photographs of the island: the souq before the towers, the causeway when it was new, fishing boats at dawn.

The sensible first step is small. Print twenty. Show them to people who might care. Learn whether anyone wants one enough to pay.

That step is simple. What makes it hard is fear, and the fear tends to arrive in three disguises.

The first is polish. He wants the box to be perfect, the pieces cut by the best supplier, a website, a logo. Every refinement feels like protection against being misunderstood. But the point of the first batch is not to be understood. It is to find out whether he understands the people he hopes will buy.

The second is the opposite. He makes the test so rough, a blurry print in a plain bag, that it cannot succeed. If nobody buys, he can tell himself the idea was never really tried.

The third is the audience. He wants to offer it to everyone: tourists, expatriates, families, collectors, schools. A wide audience feels safe, because every refusal can be explained away by someone else in the crowd. A narrow one, say families who have lived on the island for generations, gives a clear answer. Either they light up or they do not.

A small, honest test is frightening by design. It removes the places to hide.

The alternative is months of careful preparation that feel productive and teach nothing. Twenty puzzles, shown to the right forty people, will tell him more by the weekend.