4.3 Experiencing complexity as mess or difficulty

In this section, I want to take the ideas of mess and difficulty and explore them in the context of complexity. I want to determine how these ideas are connected, how significant the connections are and what the differences illuminate. I shall draw on the ideas of three writers: Schön, whose central theme is practice (e.g. Schön, 1983; 1987); Ackoff, who explores the characteristics of mess; and Rosenhead, who shows how different approaches to practice may be contrasted in terms that illuminate the distinction between difficulty and mess.

When reflecting on his own professional experience of engaging with complex situations, Donald Schön, author of Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987) had this to say:

The metaphor of the swamp provides some useful images for this section, which is concerned with the problems and opportunities of the swamp. Schön argues that:

In my view the argument Schön presents is simple: there are many domains of human activity where professionals fail to take action in situations of uncertainty, complexity, uniqueness and conflict or where past actions have had unintended, sometimes surprising and catastrophic, consequences. It seems to be a common human experience, for example, that a well-meaning attempt to improve a complex and problematic situation has the effect of making the situation worse in quite unexpected ways. Such situations also arise when experience is at odds with intuition about how things should behave or should be. This class of experiences is described as counter-intuitive understanding. The idea is explored further in the following box, ‘Counter-intuitive understanding – an example’.

Given that in many situations, unexpected and potentially disastrous events may occur, it makes sense to think about doing some things differently. Doing things differently requires changes in thinking and in the actions that result from thinking. Being prepared for, minimising, or even avoiding unintended potentially disastrous consequences means engaging with complexity. The effect of not engaging with Schön's swamp is to run the risk of unintended consequences of unknown seriousness, even if the intervention seems the right thing to do. We risk doing the wrong things with greater and greater efficiency rather than establishing what is the right thing to be doing. Russell Ackoff (1995) claims that it is better to do the right thing imperfectly than to keep doing the wrong thing better and better.

The experiences that have led to claims that different ways of thinking and acting are required for managing complexity have been derived in many domains. Examples include:

These quotations are used in relation to at least four different domains. These are situations associated with:

• (a) the use of information and communication technology to develop information systems;

• (b) organisational arrangements and associated policies and programmes;

• (c) approaches to learning in technology education and in education for sustainable development;

• (d) practice – whether in conducting an analysis or being professional.

There are a number of responses available to Schön's invitation to descend into the swamp of messy, confusing problems. Russell Ackoff uses the term messes to refer to the swamp, and difficulties to refer to the high ground. You may already have encountered Ackoff's terms in your earlier study of Systems.

Activity 41 should take about 15 minutes.

Russell Ackoff first coined the term ‘mess’ in 1974. He did so in response to the insights of two eminent American philosophers, William James and John Dewey. These philosophers recognised that problems are taken up by, not given to, decision-makers and that problems are extracted from unstructured states of confusion. Ackoff (1974a; b) argued, in proposing his notion of mess that:

From this definition of mess, Ackoff recognised a number of features of messes and difficulties (Box 3 above) that, if one is aware of them, affect the way a practitioner engages with a ‘real world’ situation (see Figure 20 again).

When you have refreshed your understanding of messes and difficulties and re-read Box 3, spend about 15 minutes on the next activity.

I find it interesting that Schön and Ackoff both have a professional background in planning. It is not surprising therefore that they have made similar distinctions when describing, or accounting for, their experiences in the messy business of planning. For me, they exemplify the aware practitioner juggling all the balls I described in Figure 21. What these planners have in common is they recognise that if the situation is engaged with as a difficulty there will be an outcome that will be different than if the situation is engaged with as a mess. They also agree that the traditional problem solving methods, which are often associated with fields such as operations (or in the UK, operational) research (OR), or ‘scientific management,’ become useable only after the most important decisions have already been made. In other words, a difficulty is first abstracted from the mess and then the difficulty is treated using a traditional problem-solving approach.

I have summarised some of the characteristics associated with traditional OR in Table 5. Characteristics of an alternative, ideal, approach to OR, envisaged by Rosenhead (1989b, pp. 1–20) in the early 1980s, are included in the table. Surveys had shown a low level of satisfaction on the part of managers with OR and management science projects at the time Rosenhead suggested his alternatives.

One way of interpreting Table 5, is that Rosenhead regarded the traditional OR approach of staying on the high ground, of treating the ‘real world’ situations with which many practitioners engage, as made up of difficulties to be solved rather than messes to be improved. I find many similarities with the ideas in Rosenhead's table with the following observation attributed to Richard Dawkins (Plsek, 2001):

Which of these metaphors (the rock or the bird) do you think best describes the process of launching change in the Child Support Agency case study?

There are differences as well as similarities in the explanations the two planners (Schön and Ackoff) provide when they reflect on their experiences. Schön in particular, chose to focus on the characteristics of the practitioner. I referred to some of these characteristics in the section above on being a systems practitioner. Schön's ideas, among others, have already informed the approach taken in Parts 1 and 2 of this block.

Plsek, a change consultant based in the USA, used the ‘rock-bird’ story in an address to a UK National Health Service (NHS) Conference entitled: ‘Why Won't the NHS Do As It Is Told?’ The UK NHS is the world's third biggest employer after the Chinese Red Army and Indian Railways. Understandably many people involved in the NHS experience it as complex. In his presentation Plsek evokes different metaphors as means for the audience to make new distinctions. He contrasts the machine metaphor (as characterised by traditional OR in Table 5 and scientific management) with an alternative metaphor of complex adaptive systems (CAS) as exemplified by the bird in the rock-bird story (CAS is explained in Section 4.5).

Ackoff, in his definition of a mess as a system of problems and opportunities chose systems thinking as his strategy to make sense of the mess of the swamp. His strategy was to look for system within a mess as a means to do something about it. Please note I am not referring here to ‘discovering’ the system or a system but the process of distinguishing one or many systems of interest in a context. The end product of the process of finding system within a mess is called formulating a system of interest. This is the task you were engaged in when you were drawing diagrams, and finding ways of drawing diagrams, in Part 2.

Let me consider now what I think Ackoff was doing in terms of a practitioner juggling the E ball. In my terms, Ackoff was a systems practitioner (P_s) engaging with a ‘real world’ situation that he could choose to recognise as either a mess or a difficulty using a systems approach (A_s). This leads me to ask a fundamental question: are the characteristics of a mess part of the situation or a function of the choice the practitioner makes? I will answer this question by grounding it in my responses to the case study.

If I use everyday speech to describe my initial experience of the child-support issue I say ‘it is a mess’, or ‘it is really complex’, or ‘I find it hard to understand it all’. You will notice I have used the word ‘it’ each time, which suggests the existence of something, an entity, a ‘real world’ situation with which I have engaged. The structures of the language I use tie me into a linguistic trap – the naming of an ‘it’ that is independent of my act of distinction. Getting out of this trap means finding a language that avoids the implication there is a pre-existing ‘it’ waiting to be noticed by me. As someone once said every noun obscures a verb!

The same could be said of thinking that there is a NHS which is a machine or a complex adaptive system. I can get out of this trap by claiming a mess or a difficulty arises in the distinctions that a practitioner makes in a particular situation. If this is the case, a mess or a difficulty is not a property of the situation but arises as a distinction made by a systems practitioner – someone aware of the conceptual distinctions between seeing a mess and experiencing a difficulty – engaging with a particular ‘real world’ situation (see Figure 33).

If, on the other hand, my experience of the child-support issue had led me to say, ‘Oh, I know what the problem is – we just have to do X and that will fix things’, then I would be implicitly seeing the issue as comprising a difficulty. This was the approach asked for by the government minister in Activity 42.

If I were charitable, I could imagine the minister was unaware of the distinctions between mess and difficulty (as many decision-makers seem to be in my experience). If I were cynical, I could suggest that the system of interest the minister was forming in his head, which led to the search for quick-fixes, had nothing to do with improving child support but was related instead to political expediency.

Of the two positions, the first seems to make more sense in terms of my experience of the case study. It works better because it suggests ways of avoiding some of the pitfalls of distinguishing individual problems to be solved.