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Jan 30Liked by E. Andrew Taylor

Thank you, Andrew. Speaking of messes, when does a mess become a hot mess? When does a hot mess become an existential crisis? At what point does the Overton window open? In all seriousness, our sector lacks any sort of diagnostic process that would distinguish between garden variety problems and intractable problems that require structural change to solve. I think a lot of managers spend a lot of time trying to "downgrade" higher-order problems in order to avoid paradigmatic change.

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Ha. I'm looking forward to your mess-measurement diagnostic tool – perhaps like one of those pain charts in the pediatrician's office. I do think the problem-solving culture of arts management can be a weakness here. A problem-solver tends/needs to see the world as a series of problems. As Ackoff writes in the same article quoted above: "Problems are abstractions extracted from messes by analysis…"

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