Knowledge Mapping for Complex Social Messes
A presentation to the “Foundations in the Knowledge Economy” at the David and Lucile
Packard Foundation, July 16, 2001
http://www.stanford.edu/~rhorn/SpchPackard.html
By
Robert E. Horn
Visiting Scholar, Stanford University
hornbob@earthlink.net
Social Messes
They’ve been called “wicked problems.” (by Horst Rittle) They’ve been called “ill-
structured problems.” (by Ian Mitroff) I call them “social messes.” (after Russell Ackoff,
who simply refers to them as “messes”)
What they are not is merely problems. Problems have solutions. Messes do not have
straightforward solutions.
Social messes
• are more than complicated and complex. They are ambiguous.
• contain considerable uncertainty – even as to what the conditions are, let alone what the
appropriate actions might be
• are bounded by great constraints and are tightly interconnected, economically, socially,
politically, technologically
• are seen differently from different points of view, and quite different worldviews
• contain many value conflicts
• are often a-logical or illogical
They are the messes of drugs and gangs and ethnic conflict and international crime
syndicates, messes that have strong links to civil wars in Columbia and the international
small arms trade and globalization and the rapid advance of technology. They are also
the more local messes, such as a couple I have been working on.
Multnomah County dynamics and dilemmas knowledge map
Multnomah County is the county where Portland, Oregon is located. Its county
commissioners knew they had a mess on their hands a couple of years ago in the delivery
of public mental health. They appointed a task force headed by a friend of mine, Elsa
Porter, a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and now a consultant to NASA.
Early on, she had to get the task force from many community sectors to have the same
mental model of the mess. The first – interim -- report of the task force was due in 3

months – a report on what the problems were. The second phase would be to develop
recommendations. She asked me to help the task force by creating one of my knowledge
maps to describe the dynamics and dilemmas of the situation in Portland.
First, I had to find out what the task force thought was important. Then, I created one of
my social mess maps. (Slide/Fig.1 To see this map in full detail, go
to<www.stanford.edu/~rhorn/portlandmap.html>) Its core is a cross-boundary causality
map that characterizes the situations, events, and phenomena. These items are connected
by arrows that stand for causes or influences. The situations, events, and phenomena are
placed in “sectors.” They are the blobs on the map. They are blobs deliberately. We
originally drew them as very neat boxes. But that gave the illusion of too much neatness
and not enough mess. The big yellow boxes on the knowledge map are the specific
problems associated with each sector. They pop out at you deliberately because they
form a kind of embedded executive summary of the interlinked set of problems – a
summary of the mess. The language is informal, not the formal bureaucratic language of
interim reports. If you read closely in one sector, you will see that the “case workers are
leaving in droves.” That is a good enough of a mental model for the task force. They
don’t necessarily need to have a table showing resignations over the last 18 months.
Cross-boundary causality maps
The colored arrows permit tracing multiple cross-boundary causality. The reason that the
case workers are leaving in droves is in part because they have to fill out more paper
work which is caused by a new federal and state regulations (crossing two organizational
boundaries) that changes the county data processing requirements significantly (another
boundary). But the county data processing department couldn’t create the new software
because (crossing another boundary) a new Silicon Forrest was growing up around
Portland and paying higher salaries to programmers than the county could afford. Also
Y2K was absorbing programmers at high rates as well. This in only one of 85 causality
and influence arrows that the task force chose to put on their mental map. They limited
themselves to the most important ones.
No report to the Commissioners –- just the map
So the knowledge map served two purposes. First it facilitated the internal task force
process, by helping form a common mental model and by providing the task force chair
with a tool for rapidly getting all of its members involved and committed to a “buy-in” to
their process. I might mention that the map you are looking at was actually used as the
interim report to the County Commissioners. There was no 60-page report written by the
task force. There was no written report at all. A large mural size version of the map was
used in the public meeting at which the report was presented. The county commissioners
were delighted with the map as an interim report. One of them said, “I see why we’re
hearing about problems.”
Another mess. A bigger one. The Alameda County Long Term Care mess. Seventy
funding sources. Four hundred organizations serving the disabled and elderly.