The challenge facing Starbucks was ill-structured. By that I mean that no one could be sure how to define the problem, there was no obvious list of good approaches or actions, and the connections between most actions and outcomes were unclear. Because the challenge was ill-structured, a real-world strategy could not be logically deduced from the observed facts. Rather, a diagnosis had to be an educated guess as to what was going on in the situation, especially about what was critically important. The diagnosis for the situation should replace the overwhelming complexity of reality with a
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