Sent to GMU 27 September 2007. Warfield's hand-drawn figure of "Two Problem Situations" was first published 1982 as Figure 1 in a paper titled "Organizations and Systems Learning" in GENERAL SYSTEMS YEARBOOK. He delivered this paper as his Presidential Address to the Annual Meeting of the Society for General Systems Research, at Book-Cadillac Hotel, Detroit, Michigan on 26 May 1983, at the time he was completing his one-year term of office. His hand drawn figure was put on a transparency and displayed on the overhead projector during his speech. 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.

Warfield's  "Two Problem Situations" is the figure which Aleco Christakis always called "The Big Mess" when displaying it for lectures. For years it was used at the Center for Interactive Management as a transparency to illustrate Interactive Management concepts. It was used routinely in slide shows, workshops, reports and manuals, by Christakis and Warfield and other CIM staffers. After Christakis left the university he continued to use it for the same purposes, in his own new company. The drawing was finally put into a computerized graphic and published as Figure 4.1 in Warfield's 1990 book A Science of Generic Design. The digital graphic is not as artful as the hand drawn figure, I think, but software was limited at the time the book was being written in the late 1980's. I have three versions of the drawing saved in our home files which I am sending to Warfield Special Collection in 2007. Mine are all poor copies. The best hand drawn version is in collections of figures and tables for the book, and or in collections of teaching transparencies already sent to the Special Collection in the year 2000. The photocopies which I include here are just to create a unique record for this very popular drawing, and keep its history from getting lost. I am sending a view of Warfield's original drawing, copied from an old manual or book, then a version done by a computer graphics artist without the captions, and finally the version printed on page 135 of A Science of Generic Design, 1994, a computer graphic.

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