Crises as Ill-Structured Messes

The field of crisis management has been seriously impeded by its failure to develop appropriate frameworks for the study of crises. This state of affairs is due at the very least to two major issues: (1) outmoded and invalid views of the nature of crises, and (2) the widespread use of outmoded and inappropriate concepts of inquiry. It is our contention that crisis management deals with problems that are inherently ill-structured. The eminent social systems philosopher and scientist, Russell Ackoff (1999), has coined the term “mess” to describe such problems. A mess is a system of problems that are highly interactive (that is, strongly coupled), but it is not the sum of the separate problems themselves. A mess is the product of the interactions among the problems that constitute it. A crisis, then, is an ill-structured mess—a highly interactive set of problems, each of which is ill-structured. The problems...