The world of systems is very wide and deep, and this column can’t be perfect and all-encompassing. My goal here is to emphasize that solutions based on incomplete models lead to incomplete solutions. I’m not calling them incorrect solutions, just incomplete solutions.

Every problem model is a mental construct. Unfortunately, this means that the problem “reality” and the problem “model” are not identical. The mental construct of the problem model depends very much on the person constructing the model. This is affected by the person’s mental models, heuristics, knowledge, wisdom, and biases. This leads to what I call “the incomplete solution.”

The system model must be as close to the actual system as possible. The problem model must be as close to the actual problem as possible. However, this cannot be done. Thus, the problem model is an incomplete construct. Furthermore, the solution must match the problem construct.; thus, the solution derived from the incomplete problem model is also incomplete.

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