Situations we face vary enormously in their complexity and seriousness. They range from minor upsets through to near-catastrophes, from temporary hitches to persistent, gnawing ‘tangles’, ‘puzzles’ or ‘problems’ through to interesting ‘challenges’ and exciting ‘opportunities’. Just listing all these different words also highlights that the language we use or the metaphors we employ in conversation can colour our thinking about a situation.
Although there are these many different words that we use to describe situations, you may find it helpful to be introduced to a particular distinction: the course shall refer to simpler, more limited sorts of situations as difficulties, and the nastier more taxing ones as messes, a term first coined by Russell Ackoff (1974), who recognised that problems are taken up by, not given to, decision makers and that problems are extracted from unstructured states of confusion or complex situations (you will learn more about Russell Ackoff in Week 6). The reasons for making this distinction will become clear as you work on through the course, but in essence the reason is that messes aren’t just ‘bigger’ than difficulties; they have a number of features that make them qualitatively different. As a result the sort of activity needed to tackle them is very different.
Allow approximately 15 minutes for this activity.
The purpose of this activity is to help you think critically about the material that follows in relation to your own experience. But ‘your own experience’ is too vast and vague; so you should do some preliminary work selecting and reflecting on parts of it likely to be relevant to the discussion. If you tackle the questions posed below before you read on, it will help you to identify those aspects of your life that ‘cause you problems’; and it will provide you with material to help your studies. You should spend ten minutes on this first stage of the activity; you will need to return to your notes in other activities later in the week.
When you have finished writing out your lists watch the following video to compare your notes with my views on difficulties and messes discussed there.
Video content is not available in this format.
The suggestion that messy situations are in some significant respects unbounded is helpful, but it is also ambiguous on an important point. What has not been made explicit is whether this quality of being unbounded is a characteristic of one person’s experience of the situation, or is actually in the nature of the situation itself. In other words, is a messy situation one that someone can’t see how to disentangle from everything else; that appears to them to be unbounded – and hence for that person it is unbounded? Or does saying the situation is unbounded mean that the circumstances are such that the situation really does have very extensive ramifications?
Figure 1Untangling messes can be tricky.
The first of these possibilities is attractive. It amounts to saying that a messy situation is whatever the person concerned experiences as a messy situation, and it implies that you will understand the situation once you become more familiar with it. We have all experienced situations that seem immensely complicated at first, but that proved easy, ‘once one knew how’.
In general, a situation that appears very messy to one person might only be a difficulty to someone with lots of experience of tackling comparable situations. In such cases it’s tempting to say that the same situation is a mess for one person and a difficulty for another. But this position has a serious flaw: it may sound reasonable to define a mess as any situation I experience as a mess, but there is something decidedly unsatisfactory about the converse: ‘if I think it’s only a difficulty, then it is only a difficulty’. The trouble is that this definition implies that no one can ever be mistaken about whether they are dealing with a difficulty or a mess, and yet I talked earlier about being trapped in one’s way of thinking. Such mistakes are actually rather common. Indeed, it is often the failure of my efforts to resolve what I had assumed to be a difficulty that makes me realise I’m really tackling something much messier. (Happily, the opposite mistake sometimes occurs too: what I had thought was a really unmanageable situation, turns out as I get closer to it, to be something that can after all be satisfactorily tackled on a local basis in a straightforward way.)
Allow approximately 10 minutes for this activity.
Reviewing Activity 1, compare your notes on the differences between difficulties and messes with those given in the video (repeated below). The following questions should help. You should definitely not be marking your list (‘I got that one’ or ‘I missed that one’). That is not the point of the activity. If anything, you should be marking my list in relation to your experience.
Video content is not available in this format.