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{{Drop|E|ven those who}} warn us most cogently about system intractability tend to financialise their analysis, so management consultants can grok it: hence by way of articulating this intractability, Russell Ackoff breaks the world down into  
{{Drop|E|ven those who}} warn us most cogently about system intractability tend to financialise their analysis, so management consultants can grok it: hence by way of articulating this intractability, Russell Ackoff breaks the world down into  
“messes, problems and puzzles”: situations having neither a well-formed question nor an answer (“messes”), those which have a clear question but not an answer (“problem”) and those which have a clear question and a determinate answer (“puzzles”).
“[[messes, problems and puzzles]]”:  
 
Not only does this miss a critical bucket (those which have an answer but not a question — call these “opportunities”) — but undeniably lost in the sound bite (if not on Ackoff himself) is the fact that almost all situations we face are a permanently shifting combination of all three. Puzzles are soluble, generic, and solving them is not valuable. Hence, “markets abhor commodities”: if everyone can do it, cheaply, there’s no ''margin'' in it.
 
(There is a value in puzzles, of course: just not one that can easily be reduced to a number: ask any fan of crosswords).
 
Modernists tend to treat messes as reducible to problems, and problems as reducible to puzzles, and the universal acid which works this magic as symbol processing capacity. Hence the headlong rush towards AI. But adding targeted random pattern generators to an already messy system will not, we respectfully submit, make it ''simpler''.
 
Nor is it true that questions, once formulated, and answers, once computed, stay put. This is precisely the definition of a complex system. Answers and questions change ''in response to each other''. Take the simple case of fashion.
 
Take Downtown Wellington bar scene. For a small town, the East Berlin of the South Pacific has always had a hiptster, alternative set, caused by its lousy weather and geography — it's hard to find a flat space to play sport, and usually blowing a gale so no-one wants to anyway — and centrally-located university with a developed liberal arts faculty. Being the centre of government, wellington also has a vibrant commercial sector and a good sized civil service. The bar scene is concentrated in a walkable space in between the university the “city” and government. There is a sort of apex predation of hip hangouts: first the hipsters will find and frequent some grungey bar out of the way, then a few of the younger progressive lawyers catch on, anxious to be on scene, then the civil servants. By the time the accountants cotton on  the architects and musos have long gone


====Helping the machines to read us====
====Helping the machines to read us====
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