This was the Presidential Address to the 1983 Annual Meeting of the Society for General Systems Research, in Detroit, Michigan, at the time Warfield was completing his one-year term of office. The talk describes the seven Interactive Management processes developed at the Center for Interactive Management at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. When writing this paper in 1982, Warfield commented to Rose Warfield that he felt it was one of the most important he had ever done. The paper deals with an approach to how humans might be able to tackle and solve the "gigantic mess" problems of society which are currently beyond human endeavor and often beyond human intellectual grasp. Countless excerpts from this article were printed in every Interactive Management report produced by Alexander Christakis, David Keever and other CIM staff during their years as Warfield's assistants. Warfield's graphic titled "Illustrating Two Problem Situations" appears here for the first time in print, as Figure 1. (This is the figure used in many talks and workshops by Christakis, who always called it the "Big Mess" figure)
On page 45 of the article begins the APPENDIX, which contains a step by step walk through description of each of the seven Consensus Methodologies in use at the Center for Interactive Management at University of Virginia. (The 1982 date of the citation is correct. The XXVII Yearbook received the article in 1982, and dated the Yearbook 1982, although the yearbook volume was not printed and distributed until the summer or fall of 1983, long after the May 1983 meeting in which the talk was presented
This material was shipped to Fenwick Library Special Collections, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA on 23 October 2000. Box 31 Folder 21 has the original manuscript prepared for presentation at the Detroit conference. Box 5, Folder 31 has the document also, but I think it is probably a printout of the retyping job done by Bonnie Seitz in 1996 because we wanted a digitized copy. This paper was printed in Volume 4 of the IASIS reports series titled: Education Papers by Warfield. A digitized version in MICROSOFT WORD-6, was typed by Bonnie Seitz (John Warfield has never proof read Bonnie's typed version).The complete WORD document is in 2 parts, the ABSTRACT (oasl83a.doc), and the main text(0asl83.doc). In 1996 Rose had Bonnie Seitz retype this paper, in order to get it onto computer disk for archiving, and it is now on Warfield's computer.. The typed manuscript, which includes figures, tables and an appendix, is 89 pages. Because paged separately, Bonnie was not able to combine Warfield's Abstract and main body of the Presidential Address into one file, so typed the abstract separately with a different filename of <Organizations and Systems Learning-Abstract.DOC>. R.w. circa 2000