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As some of you have heard me say before, I don’t believe the greater part of the situations confronting us in life can usefully be constructed as “problems” admitting to “solutions.” We should be so lucky as for things to be that discrete and bounded!

As systems theorists have been reminding us since the 1970s, we’d be far better off conceiving of such situations as *messes* than can (at best) be managed. It’s something to keep in mind the next time you hear someone advancing a problem/solution framing.