Making the Most of Mess

"If only regulators would read this book, instead of talking to each other and the businesses they regulate, we might have a chance of avoiding another major financial meltdown." - John Kay, Financial Times columnist

"In Making the Most of Mess, Emery Roe outlines an analytical scheme that helps us to make sense of today's messes and offers a true alternative to currently fashionable 'all or nothing' solutions. He is a highly creative, often provocative, truly original, and erudite thinker." - Arjen Boin, Professor of Crisis Management, Utrecht University

“Roe’s deep and disciplined discussion in this book is a ‘coherent frame of reasoning’ that dimensionalizes messes . . . It provides a coherent, inclusive language and vocabulary that enables people to sort conditions of mess into meaningful dimensions.” - Karl Weick, Public Administration

“Overall, Roe highlights the critical problem of managing complex, adaptive systems in real-time and underscores the importance of training policy and management professionals to function in these difficult operational contexts more effectively. The book makes a substantive contribution to the policy and management literature, especially in reference to complex adaptive systems.”  - Louise K. Comfort, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis

“The great merit of Roe’s book is that one of the core questions in public administration and policy science – how to unravel decisions (thinking and speaking) and actions (practice, doings) in tackling messes created by policy and administration (rather than by external sources and forces) – gets clear-headed and persuasive answers.” - Robert Hoppe, Critical Policy Studies