Increasingly, businesses need to deal with wicked problems. When trying to solve them, they frequently discover other problems, which need to be solved. And so on and so forth. Not very forth really, more like muddling through. One might also say, that our chosen solutions are co-evolving with the problem space. Now and then we get lucky, and manage to climb back down into a black box with a sufficient degree of certainty and agreement wrt a specific patch of the problem, so as to allow us to throw a set of algorithms at the mess. But mostly, we muddle, and apply heuristics.

My favourite cheat, is to start with the problem construction instead, and apply ample amounts of actions, facts and small steps, until I get something I can live with. Until the next problem appears. You might call this my preferred heuristic. Chances are you have your own preferred bag of tricks, your own set of heuristics.

Computing: Systematic study of algorithmic processes that describe and transform information, most of it driven by a fundamental question: What can be efficiently automated?

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