Although everyone expresses the differences between difficulties and messes in their own terms, the distinguishing features
that people come up with can usually be grouped under one of two headings.
The first of these concerns the scale of the situation and covers all the ways in which messes tend to be ‘larger’ than difficulties
with more serious implications. More people are likely to be involved. Messes usually have a longer time-scale, are more difficult
to tackle, and more complicated.
The second group of key features come under the general heading of uncertainty: with messes there is much more about which
one is simply unsure. In fact, this uncertainty starts with the situation itself: a difficulty is fairly clear cut; it’s quite
easy to put a label on it, or to explain to someone else what the problem is. But a mess is hard to pin down; it’s difficult
even to say what the problem actually is, and yet things are not right. With a difficulty I know roughly what a solution will
look like; with a mess, I’m not at all sure about solutions. Indeed, with a mess it usually doesn’t make much sense to talk
about ‘an answer’. It’s more a matter of coping with the circumstances as best one can.
With a difficulty I can take for granted the overall context and purpose of the activity; it’s simply a matter of how it can
best be done. But a mess calls into question my priorities and assumptions; I am not sure how much weight to give to different
considerations, whether particular goals are realistic or should be abandoned. Moreover, with a mess more aspects are beyond
my direct control. With a difficulty I know what factors are part of the situation or relevant to it, and what aren’t: I can
disentangle it from the broader context of my work and address it as a more or less discrete matter. But a mess is fuzzy;
it’s hard to say who and what is involved in the problem and who and what isn’t because the different elements in it are closely
tied to other areas of activity. Finally, with a difficulty I either know enough to tackle it or I know what I need to know.
With a mess I don’t know enough and I’m uncertain even what I need to know.
The single idea that best captures the difference between difficulties and messes has associations of both scale and uncertainty:
it is the idea that difficulties are bounded while messes are unbounded. In saying that a situation is bounded, one implies
not just that it is fairly limited, but that one knows roughly where those limits are. By contrast an unbounded situation
is more extensive, but quite how extensive one can’t say. Most of the qualities of difficulties and messes referred to earlier
clearly relate to this bounded/unbounded distinction.