How successful leaders avoid predictable surprises

In relation to management theory, in particular, Russell L. Ackoff, a Wharton emeritus professor of management, said, “managers don’t solve simple, isolated problems; they manage messes.” And he defined a mess as “a system of constantly changing, highly interconnected problems, none of which is independent of the other problems that constitute the entire mess. As a result, no problem that is part of a mess can be defined and solved independently of the other problems”.
Whilst Ackoff described the problems as messy, Horst Rittel and Melvin M. Webber called them “wicked” in their 1973 treatise and contrasted them with relatively “tame”, soluble problems. Wicked problems are said to be difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. And problems that cannot be fixed, or for which there is no single solution.