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 that constitute a crisis are themselves complex systems, which, in turn, are members of other complex systems and so on and so forth. The end-result is that the field of crisis management is itself inherently ill-structured or a mess (Mitroff and Linstone 1992; Mitroff 2003). Moreover, the failure of crisis management experts to realize and to accept these ideas is responsible for much of the confusion and lack of progress in the field. Like Arjen Boin in the previous piece in this forum, we call for a serious reconsideration of the concepts that form the basis for the study of crisis management. Although, as the reader will soon see, we disagree with his emphasis on arriving at a common definition of key concepts. By definition, well-structured problems are the only kinds of problems about which stakeholders—both those who affect and those who are affected by them—can attain widespread agreement regarding …