Everything is a Mess

"Give yourself credit," I said to my friend. "Everything around you is a mess."

"That's not very nice, John," they said.

"It's not about?you,"?I said. "It's about?everything. Everything is a mess."

Abby Covert defines a mess as "any situation where something is confusing or full of difficulty." Taken in this light, one might see that just about everything is a mess.

And what's interesting about messes is they're stable over time. This means that despite evolution, time, technology, innovation (you name it), the same messes continue to appear over and over.

Examples of Messes

We talk about this in my university course, Design Thinking in Education. My students are school principals, higher education administrators, journalists, engineers, and aspiring entrepreneurs who range in age from 22 to 60. Using Covert's book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, for inspiration, we go around the room answering the following question:

What are some messes you can identify in your life in these four categories, and what makes them a mess?

1. The structure of teams and organizations
2. The processes we undertake in working together
3. The ways products and services are represented, sold, and delivered to us
4. The ways we communicate with each other

Here are some messes. Recognize any?

• Committee membership mainly when committees are comprised of people based on their position or title, not on the work they can do.
• Strategic planning (just about anywhere).
• Vacation planning in times of COVID (OK, planning?anything?in times of COVID).
• The flood of communication options, e.g., Teams, Slack, email, Discord, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram.
• When knowledge-specific groups in an organization become cliques.
• Communication bottlenecks when the unit head has over 40,000 unread emails
• Problem-solving teams based on headcount and not service or functionality

Several things make these a mess

• Problems, goals, or purposes are ill-defined.
• Limited or ineffective communication is endemic.
• Things are just darn complex.
• The solutions offered don't really fix the problem. (See above: the issues are ill-defined).
• Discussions are built on differing assumptions what the organization needs
• Folks assume there can be a single, canonical solution (to that ill-defined problem. Ha!)
• The mess is connected with other messes in "tangled webs."
• Everything is composed of information & people

What Are Your Messes?

If messes are stable over time, and they'll continue to exist, what can you do? Sweeping them away is not an option. But mitigating them is. While you don't have as much control over the messes created by others, you can have some control over messes in your domain. The first step is identifying the mess you're facing. Covert (2014) recommends working through these questions (p.25):

• Stakeholders: Who are your stakeholders? What are their expectations? What are their thoughts about this mess? How might they describe it??
• Information: What interpretations are you dealing with? What information is being created through a lack of data or content??
• Current state: Are you dealing with too much information, not enough information, not the right information, or a combination of these?

Draw Your Mess

In my class, we?draw our messes. Drawing your mess can be pretty therapeutic.?Vanessa Baker?is a teacher. She drew her mess.

When Vanessa drew her mess she could see all the pieces that were invisible before. She discovered how things were connected, and which connections were strong or weak. And she was able to take in the scale; the mess is big. But seeing it's parts made it more approachable.

(By the way, parents out there: if you have ever signed a permission slip for your child to go on a field trip, this should give you pause and a renewed respect for teachers. Planning and carrying out a field trip is non-trivial. It's a mess).

In Brief

Everything around you is a mess, and that's OK. Identifying, acknowledging, and mapping a mess you are dealing with is a healthy step toward finding your own psychological safety within the mess. It can also give you insight into entry points within the mess. You may not find a complete answer to the mess, but you will have better questions to ask about it.