Learning to Love Mess

Are you a manager or a chef? Think about it.

Picture a restaurant kitchen on a busy Saturday evening. It’s a hubbub of noise, clatter, shouts, flying utensils, spilled sauces, broken eggshells. For those unfortunate individuals who have to clean it up afterwards, it’s a nightmare. It’s a mess.

Now switch to the average corporate boardroom. What comes to mind is just the opposite: mahogany table, middle-aged men in dark suits, white shirts, writing pads in neat leather binders, Mont Blanc pens, open laptops, quiet, polite discussion.

Mess gets a bad rap in business. Yet mess, I’d like to submit, is good.

Designer and professor Horst Rittell[1] claimed that many problems facing society were ‘wicked’. As distinct from ‘tame’ problems, wicked problems are difficult to define. These are problems that involve tradeoffs between multiple stakeholders and which can never really be ‘solved’ in the sense of finding an optimal solution; they can be seen as symptoms of other problems; and each one is essentially unique. As an example, because there is no real consensus on what constitutes success in the field of socio-economic development, projects in this arena are wicked; the same goes for urban renewal or curriculum design in public schools.

Wicked problems cannot be solved through linear methods.  The standard approach to problem solving proceeds by understanding the problems, gathering information, analyzing information, drawing conclusions and developing solutions. This is fine for tame problems that can be clearly defined and simplified. For wicked problems, however, this process does not work, because wicked problems are ill-defined and require an in-depth understanding of their context.

Contemporary business problems are often wicked: they are social problems that affect multiple stakeholders, with each attempt to create a solution changing the nature of the problem. Customers are messy.  They all want different things, and what they want varies from occasion to occasion. Heck, they don’t even know what they want. And colleagues are messy. Working in teams means accepting different perspectives and valuing the ideas of others.

Yet in most business schools, students learn how to solve ‘tame’ problems, not wicked ones. They learn to tidy up where they should learn to be messy.

By contrast, designers, long accustomed to dealing with mess, have developed several ways of thinking that help them understand such problems without glossing over their essential complexity. In contrast to the analytical perspective often taken in business where issues are narrowed and key variables isolated from each other, designers dive deeply into a problem, think broadly about it in context and generate new possibilities.

To be specific, designers excel in framing and reframing problems and in collaborating with others to develop solutions. User-centred designers make users the core of the design process, and some even bring users into the design process. Diversity in teams enhances the process because the more diverse the team, the broader the range of experiences it can offer. Designers learn to think of issues as a system of interacting parts rather than a set of independent components, and use structured processes to generate ideas in their teams.

The design model’s ability to address messy problems makes it an attractive idea for business. For business students, exposure to these methods not only prepares them to be superior managers, but pushes them to question their basic assumptions about problem solving.

Educating students to be business designers means helping them frame, deeply understand and solve messy problems. In a design course I taught recently in Austria, I worked with students in applying a design-based innovation process to an art gallery, a zoo and a financial service. The process involved provisionally identifying the problem to be solved, conducting ethnographic research and developing solutions.  However, the students learned more than just a design process: that problems are often not what they seem to be, and that uncertainty is not to be avoided, but welcomed. For many, this was not merely a new skill, but a profound personal transformation.

A diagram of the process the students followed is given in Figure 1. While the diagram appears quite neat, the process is certainly messy in practice. The messiness comes from the realization that the problem is not what it appears to be: after an initial statement of intent – a summary of what they were trying to accomplish - students took a deep dive into the customer, business and technological aspects of their problem, using a variety of thought tools to help them make sense of the information. Invariably, they found they had to rewrite their statement of intent at least once before proceeding to develop solutions, an experience that was both frustrating and enlightening.

One team embarked on a project to develop a financial service for students. The team’s early thinking was to provide easy credit for students and, thinking they had solved the problem, they learned everything they could about student credit.

But it soon became clear that this was not such a tidy issue. It emerged from the team’s ethnographic research that Austrian students were very reluctant to take on debt, however easy or inexpensive it may be: they would rather live with their parents or on very tight budgets. By this time, the team was already moving on to implementation plans for their easy-credit scheme, and this revelation came as a major setback – in effect redefining the project.

Instead of wanting easy credit, students needed to learn how to obtain grants, budget their limited funds and manage their finances. They were overwhelmed with information – but the wrong information. This created an entirely different kind of opportunity for the team, and after many iterations between proposed solutions, customer research, brainstorming and refinement, they developed an information clearinghouse that provided financial advice and connected students with services they needed.

For the students, the lesson was not to rush to a solution, but to understand the problem deeply first. One student wrote as follows about the experience:

The redefinition of our research question helped us to focus the problem. So I learned the right question can help me to [understand] the problem and to focus on the pain points … Each redefinition made us get two steps ahead.

Another source of messiness was the diversity of the students in the teams. In the Austrian course, students came from very different backgrounds. Within the Austrian students, there was a mix of men and women from urban and rural areas and with very different interests – one student had been brought up on a farm, while another played guitar in a rock band – and there were several exchange students from different parts of Europe.  In addition to language barriers, there were gaps in cultural understanding between several of the students. At times, these gaps led to misunderstandings and tension within the project teams.

Digging deeply to resolve these problems, students found that the empathy they were developing with users could also be applied to their colleagues. By conducting ethnographic research, they had learned to listen and suspend judgment. Now they used these same skills to hold back from criticizing each other’s ideas. With a new, tolerant atmosphere in the groups, ideas began to flourish.

Although the design process was highly structured, making sense of all this mess did not mean trying to tidy it up. Conventionally, students learn to solve problems by dividing them into separable elements and analyzing each element separately. But because changing one part of these problems affected all the other parts, the students had to keep the truly complex interactions of all the elements in view, and to do so, they needed to represent the problems in all their messiness.

The students used several tools for this, but perhaps the most dramatic was developing prototypes of the customer experience. Using scissors, tape, glue and magazines, students were encouraged to make a mess – as indeed they did – to draw out further insights about their innovation. Visual representation of the project brought out ideas that went beyond words and helped the teams communicate with each other:

It is important to be able to express the thoughts and emotions not only with words, but even with pictures and other creative techniques because not every feeling can be expressed only with a word. Only if there is something … your colleagues can touch, can they start to understand the meaning of the idea.

For business students accustomed to tidy theories imparted by well-dressed professors in orderly classrooms, this tactile approach was new and inspiring.  Now the classroom was a busy kitchen, a hub of activity, noise and creation.

But beyond the fun was a serious lesson: that uncertainty in problem solving is not to be feared, but welcomed.  The initial frustration students felt early on gave way to a realization that their final ideas were much more robust as a result of their willingness to suspend judgment and work with half-formed ideas. This gave them a new-found confidence in their ability to solve any problem that came their way:

Having a look on my everyday life, I often find myself looking out for possible solutions when I recognize a problem. I cannot stop that, it is crazy! But I like it. Next week, I start an internship in the international human resources management at an Austrian production concern. In my mind, I already have so many approaches to innovate the existing tools and habits that I would like to go there and change everything.

 Some have suggested that the MBA should become an MBD: Master of Business Design. But perhaps an even better idea would be MBM: Master of Business Mess. As every chef knows, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

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[1] Rittel, Horst and Melvin Webber (1973) "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning," Policy

Sciences 4, Elsevier Scientific Publishing, Amsterdam, pp. 155-159.