Definition
Messes is systems thinker Russell Ackoff's term for problems that are so thoroughly entangled with their environment, history, and other problems that isolating and 'solving' any piece generates new problems elsewhere in the system.
Goleman invokes Ackoff's framework in Focus to characterize the category of challenge that demands outer focus — the systems-aware, long-horizon, multi-actor attention that leaders and organizations need to navigate effectively in complex environments.
Why it matters
How it works
Problems versus messes
Ackoff distinguished problems — well-defined challenges with knowable solutions — from messes, which he defined as systems of problems so intertwined that addressing one in isolation worsens others. Poverty, addiction, urban decline, climate change, organizational dysfunction: these are messes. Each has recognizable problem-shaped components (housing, income, infrastructure), but each component's behavior is shaped by all the others simultaneously.
The failure mode Ackoff identified is 'solving' a mess by extracting one component, optimizing it in isolation, and declaring victory — while the systemic dynamics reassert the original mess through a new pathway. Urban renewal projects that displace poverty rather than address it; drug policies that shift supply without addressing demand; cost-cutting that preserves quarterly earnings while eroding the capabilities that generate long-term value.
The outer focus requirement
Goleman links Ackoff's messes to the third leg of his triple-focus model: outer focus. Outer focus is systems awareness — the capacity to attend to the larger patterns, feedback loops, and interdependencies in which any given action is embedded. Where inner focus is directed inward and other-focus is directed at individual people, outer focus is directed at systems: markets, ecologies, organizations, cultures.
Effective outer focus involves two complementary attentional stances: open awareness (scanning broadly for weak signals and unexpected connections) and strategic analysis (assembling those signals into a coherent model of how the system works). Most leaders overinvest in the second and underinvest in the first.
Systems archetypes
Peter Senge's work on systems archetypes — recurring dynamic patterns that produce predictable failure modes — provides practical outer-focus tools. Patterns like 'fixes that fail,' 'tragedy of the commons,' and 'shifting the burden' recur across industries and institutions. Recognizing an archetype in a novel situation compresses the learning needed to understand the mess's likely trajectory.