Monday, September 8, 2008

Untangling the Mess?


Genesis of Mess Management – Study of the System-in-focus




We all have a very archetypal way of approaching what we also call the core competency of us MBAs – problem solving. Breaking it down into the three major components, problem solving is –

1.      1.  Understand the system

2.       2. Define the problem

3.       3. Solve the problem

The obsession of the business community however hovers around the latter two. ‘After all, what is so very complicated about the system? We are a part of it and had been so. Cracking the system is easier’ is the mentality that resonates in board rooms. But, for them problem definition and approach are of utmost importance. This attitude is the reason for our limited knowledge of the system and higher knowledge of its heightened problems. We never look beyond the scope of our problems. In fact, even though definition and solution of the problem follows understanding the system, we see the system only with a perspective of identifying the problems. Our study of the system is like that of a policeman frisking a man with a purpose of finding a stolen wallet hidden somewhere in his clothes. If we ask the policeman what was the color or pattern of clothes the latter was wearing, he will not even remember as he had never looked at them. All the while during the frisk, he had been looking at the invisible wallet. 

Due to such thinking, we lose the benefits that arise out of studying the system in the long term. After one problem is solved, we are soon back at the discussion table with the same system but with a different set of problems capturing our mind. This happens because we had never studied the system at the first place, we had studied only our focused problems. 

The flawed approach in the above is not hidden from the thinking minds of our world. The development of Mess Management as a tool certainly had this issue in mind.

The Systems view discussed above is where Mess Management takes over. What faces corporations is not one problem but an interconnected set of problems – The Mess. The idea is not to study one or a few problems that are troubling us but to get to all the factors that form a part of the system. The mess is represented through the help of an Influence Diagram.

However the beauty of Mess Management is not really in untangling the mess – it is in dissolving the mess. Let us delve a little deeper into what I understand about this concept. Many of us would have experienced a ‘bully of the class’ during childhood. I remember my nursery school days – she would snatch my tiffin box and if I resisted, I had had the better of her. The idea of complaining to the teachers never came because she was the one forming teams on the playground. If I had complained, she would never allow me to play games. Then one day, my elder brother gave me an idea. I put a stale spinach leaf in my sandwich. And wow! It worked magic. She never touched my tiffin box again. This example is actually ‘dissolving the mess’. Notwithstanding my mess of problem with the bully, my brother introduced another problem – the stale leaf to dissolve the mess. He has a view that the action would reorganize the mess in a manner so as to ameliorate my life.

When I studied the concept of mess management in the course Corporate Planning, I knew I had been introduced to it very young in my life, thanks to my brother. Today when I look deeply into that incident, I can understand what my actions had done to the mess that my school life was in. It had introduced a negative stabilizing loop to bring the aggravating state of affairs to its much needed halt.

I wonder if my brother had any idea of what he was doing. Only if he knew the depth of his prodigious idea, that it laid in the mind of a systems thinker too.


Dissolving Versus Resolving or Solving

For all those who found the above story of dissolving the mess interesting, it would be a good idea to culminate the learning the difference of ‘dissolving’ from what we human being often do – ‘solving’ and ‘resolving’. As we found in the above post, dissolving is rearranging the system, adding new elements of complexity so as to stabilize the system. Solving, on the other hand, is when we strictly follow a methodical approach to defining and solving a problem, not taking cognizance of a systems perspective of problem – a mess. Whereas, resolving is trying to cope with the system through a superficial treatment. Like when we take pain killers for headache, we just work at the symptom – the headache and not the root that is causing the headache, maybe sleepless nights.


1 comment:

Unknown said...

The way we look at problem and situations is so ingrained in us, I think it is worth a few minutes to look at the view of the author.

Seeing things different from 'solve the problem' mentality brings many new perspectives. As they say ' sometimes it is easy to miss the obvious'. We look at the problem for too long, and then we can think about only the problem and nothing around it.

A close look at any chaotic, messy situation makes us look for something that can give us a clue for the problem solving. A long, close observation at it, and we often see what is called the 'method in the madness'.

What is needed is not to completely lost in the problem, but to keep track of where we are heading.