Recommended: Mastering the Mess.

As someone who regularly flips through Communications of the ACM each month and wonders why I still bother, Peter Denning's article Mastering the Mess (PDF) in the April 2007 issue was a very pleasant surprise.

The article deals with innovation, and in particular the disruptive innovations that are often needed for those really big problems ("messes"). Discussing the interplay between messes and types of innovations, this is a high-level article that nonetheless contains excellent practical and actionable insight. For example, what are common signs to indicate you've actually got a mess on your hands, what are the different categories of messes (existing domain knowledge sufficient, knowledge from another domain sufficient, no existing knowledge but repeatable behavior, and what are generally known as 'wicked problems').

Most interestingly, he outlines a strategy for creating the innovation needing to solve the mess. Again, high level, but very concrete steps: declare exactly what the mess is, learn about it, question the paradigm, think together, lead, and disguise. The article of course explains what each of those really mean, and what they are for.

Why do I like this? For people wanting to professionally contribute by solving a "big problem", a common issue is being stuck in terms of where they are, what they're doing, what the end goal looks like, and generally having too much to deal with all at once, resulting in a whole lot of frustration and wheel spinning. Without a huge amount of reading between the lines, here is a plan for trying to break that down, both in new ways of thinking about what the problem you're wanting to tackle is, but also by providing a good starting point for how to approach it.

Have you really learned all about your problem (not just done a superficial literature review)? Have you sorted through all the assumptions in the current belief system to see if one of those is the source of the problem? If you come up with a solution, would it be too radical for people to accept, and how could you sucker them into it? These are all things that tech innovators tend to sidestep in the rush to build something and get it out there. Works for some things, but not the big messes.

This isn't exactly all brand new, but I found it to be an extremely clear and concise exploration of the approach and strategy. It's a great starting point to reduce the mess of how to solve the mess to just dealing with the mess itself.