Characteristics

• Instability and uncertainty about relationships, patterns, priorities, and events
• Many stakeholders, and consistent disagreement about the nature of the situation
• Experts rely on opinion or analysis rather than on experiment
• Unknown unknowns
• Each problem is a symptom of another problem
• Many competing ideas about what to do, if anything
• Each situation is unique, with few or no historical references
• Boundary decisions are highly subjective, stopping points and criteria for success are unclear
• The situation includes cultural, political, and economic forces
• The situation has non-linear dynamic elements
• Stakeholders have limited ability to influence the system

Standard work

• When a decision could create harm of unknown magnitude, act with extreme caution
• Use long-term purposes and values to guide decision-making
• Include other people to create meaning and purpose
• Use separation to pull simple and complicated sub-problems out of the mess
• Build in adaptive capacity to prepare for unknowns
• Use collaboration and deliberative strategies to develop and implement plans
• Use competition and market strategies after collaboratively setting a basic standard for behavior
• Use authoritative strategies where speed is required or when collaboration results in a stalemate
• Make time for individual and group reflection to capture, understand, and interpret what is happening
• Use planning to learn about the situation and identify feasible objectives
• Provide ongoing, timely feedback about what is happening, and what is known and unknown
• Be pragmatic and look for what works rather than seeking precise answers
• Acknowledge data uncertainty and ambiguity; distinguish better information from worse
• Prevent uncontrolled expansion of work and avoid empty compromises
• Make progress where possible; balance innovation with incremental, trial and error progress
• Favor decisions that make sense when viewed from many different perspectives
• Favor decisions that are robust within a wide range of future possibilities and require fewer follow-on decisions
• Favor decisions that build in and maintain options

Warning signs

• Using routine context tools in mess context
• Using complicated context tools in mess context
• Stress, burnout, and frustration due to rapid change and high uncertainty
• Focusing on events and transactions and ignoring patterns and behavior over time
• Using boundary decisions to create simple, but ineffective problems and solutions
• “Cult of the leader,” desire for authoritative strategies to reduce discomfort, responsibility, or fear of the unknown
• Undermining collaboration with authoritative decision-making
• Hiding or ignoring underlying risks
• Problems at internal or external system interfaces
• Unbounded limits on system behavior

Proactive work

• Standard work in the mess context is mostly proactive work
• Require advocates of proposed methods to identify and respond to risks
• Make decisions with more focus on the consequences of risk than on the probability of occurrence
• Adjust design decisions as feedback is received
• Maintain schedule slack and contingency plans
• Develop plans that can accommodate a wide variety of circumstances
• Develop plans that cultivate conditions for decisive action later
• Deploy limited resources, keeping bulk of reserves ready to respond as the situation evolves
• Prioritize development over growth
• Prioritize actions by their importance divided by time to complete
• Build and maintain robust checks and balances
• Contain volatility close to the source
• Prioritize shaping what you want over stopping what you do not want
• Embrace volatility and run many experiments when you have little to lose