Let’s All Get Comfortable with the Mess
There’s a feature about the most successful multi-sectoral partnerships I have done. They are all a bit of a shambles.
Not catastrophically broken, mind you. Just perpetually messy in ways that make people uncomfortable. Meetings that raise more questions than answers. Workstreams that split, merge, and reconfigure like some kind of organisational amoeba. If you judged them by traditional standards of partnership excellence (clear roles, stable structures, predictable processes), they would fail spectacularly. And yet they work. They survive contact with reality in ways that the tidy partnerships somehow do not.
The long Bank holiday weekend gave me some time to dig into Patrick Hoverstedt’s new book, The Fractal Organisation Manual. Patrick outlines three levels of organisational diagnosis. I will not bore you with all the details (get the book if you are interested; I promise this is not marketing:)). The third level is where I want to double click in my notes today. Patrick calls the third level ‘’diagnosis by complexity balance’’, and it rests on the principle of requisite variety.
Requisite variety, borrowed from cybernetics, was articulated by Ashby as follows: the complexity of a system demands matching complexity in the approach to solving it. You cannot solve a complex problem with a simple solution. The system will absorb your tidy intervention and carry on exactly as before. This brings to light my favourite quote by H.L. Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
Which raises an uncomfortable question: what if the mess is not the problem? What if the mess is the appropriate response to working in a genuinely complex environment, and our discomfort with it is what needs fixing?
Appreciating the Environment
We cannot fully understand the environment we are working in, not because we lack intelligence but because the environment is dynamic, adaptive, and does not hold still long enough for full comprehension. Systems thinking operates from that acknowledgment. It shapes alongside what the environment wants, not what we wish or hope for.
The environment continues being what it is, indifferent to our preferences. The question becomes whether we are willing to work with that reality or whether we will keep designing interventions for a world that no longer exists (if it ever did).
Gone Are the Days of Simple Thinking
Our world is not a simple system anymore. It might never have been, but we could pretend it was when problems were more contained. Climate, health, food security, conflict, economic stability: none of these respect boundaries. They cascade across sectors, geographies, and timescales in ways that defy linear cause-and-effect logic.
The solutions we need do not demand complex outcomes (nobody wants a health intervention that requires a PhD to access), but the thinking behind those outcomes has to be robust, layered, and yes, somewhat complex. It has to factor in nuance that simple frameworks cannot hold.
Take healthcare partnerships. A national organisation trying to improve cancer outcomes cannot just focus on clinical pathways. It has to account for transport infrastructure, housing quality, employment patterns, cultural attitudes to illness, how benefits systems interact with treatment schedules, digital literacy, trust in institutions, data infra and a dozen other factors that are not medical but shape medical outcomes.
You could design a simple intervention that ignores all of that, and it will likely fail. Or you could design a complex intervention that acknowledges the mess and works within it, which will be harder to explain in a board meeting but stands a chance of actually working.
Multisectoral Partnerships Are Messy by Design
Most solutions now demand complex, multisectoral partnerships: healthcare, defence, food security, education, economic development. This creates a structural challenge. Multisectoral partnerships involve organisations with different mandates, funding cycles, accountability structures, and definitions of success. Getting them to align is like herding cats that speak different languages and cannot agree on whether there is even a destination.
The temptation is to impose order through governance frameworks, clear roles, reporting lines, and theories of change that everyone signs off on. These things are useful, certainly, but none of them eliminates the mess because the mess is structural. It is what happens when you try to coordinate independent actors with competing incentives around a problem that none of them can solve alone. You can manage the mess, but eliminating it is a category error.
Get Comfortable with the Mess
The shift required is intellectual before it is operational. We need to stop treating complexity as a problem to be solved and start treating it as a condition to be navigated. The mess is not a sign that the partnership is broken but rather a sign that the partnership is real.
If your partnership feels messy, chaotic, harder than it should be, that might be because you are working on something that actually matters: something that crosses boundaries, involves multiple actors with competing interests, and does not resolve neatly.
That is not failure. That is requisite variety in action. The question is whether we are willing to build the infrastructure to hold that complexity, or whether we will keep wishing for a simpler world that is not coming back.