01 —— Making Sense of the Mess · A book by Darla Tarawneh · Out 2026
Making Sense of the Mess is a book on problem framing and decision-making — about why smart people solve the wrong problem, and how to see what they're missing before they spend a quarter, a roadmap, or a relationship on the wrong thing.
Most teams don't have
a solution problem.
They have a
framing problem.
01 — The Premise · Why Problem Framing Matters
The gap between the problem you think you have and the problem you actually have.
One in ten mothers died in this hospital.
In the next room, one in twenty-five.
1840s Vienna General Hospital. Two maternity clinics, same building, same ventilation, same patients. One killed more than twice as many women as the other. The doctors blamed bad air. They blamed overcrowding. They blamed the women themselves. They improved ventilation. They adjusted diets. The death rate did not move.
They were brilliant. Among the most rigorous, best-educated professionals of their day. They were solving the wrong problem with extraordinary competence.
One man, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis refused the question everyone else was asking. The fix was not a new technology. It was a basin of chlorinated lime, and the willingness to question what everyone had accepted as given.
We call this the Framing Gap. The distance between the problem you think you have and the problem you actually have.
It does not feel like a gap. It feels like clarity. Your first reading of a problem arrives fast, fully formed, and confident. It has the shape of insight. And because it feels so complete, you do not question it. You start solving.
The Framing Gap doesn't open because you're careless. It opens because you're certain.
From the inside, you cannot tell the difference. The analysis is thorough. The solutions are elegant. Everything looks right.
Except the mothers keep dying.
01 — The Premise · Why Problem Framing Matters
Five parts. Twelve chapters. One discipline you can run on Monday
Making Sense of the Mess is structured as a working method, not a theory of mind. Each part takes you one stage deeper: from seeing the right problem, to generating real options, to shipping the smallest test before the bet gets expensive. It's a practical guide for product teams, founders, leaders, and anyone responsible for getting clarity out of complexity.
1.0 Surface the Real Problem
Most problems arrive as symptoms: low retention, team conflict, unclear strategy, or a repeated customer complaint. The danger is that teams often treat the loudest symptom as the real problem. This step helps you look beneath the surface to find the pattern, structure, or assumption creating the mess.
2.0 Empathy as Investigation
Empathy is not just a soft skill. It is a way to gather evidence that dashboards, reports, and meetings often miss. This step helps you observe what people actually do, notice tension and workarounds, and understand the lived experience behind the problem.
3.0 Narrow the Focus After Stretching
The first clear answer is often the most familiar one, not the best one. This step helps you stretch the frame before narrowing your focus. By exploring multiple ways to understand the problem, teams avoid locking onto the wrong solution too early.
4.0 Stress Test the Frame
Before committing to a solution, the problem frame needs pressure. This step helps teams challenge assumptions, look for ignored evidence, and ask what would make their current understanding wrong. A strong frame should survive scrutiny before it guides action.
5.0 Evolve Through Evidence
Clarity is not a one-time decision. Once you act, reality gives you new evidence about what is working, what is changing, and what still needs to be understood. This step helps teams move with focus while staying flexible enough to learn.
03 — A Taste of the Frameworks · Tools for Problem Framing & Decision-Making
Each chapter in the book ends with a tool you can use the same week. Frameworks built from product strategy, design thinking, behavioural science, and twenty years of postmortems. Here are four of them.
One sentence. One test. Run it on a problem you've been carrying.
01
Most strategy docs describe what's wrong. Almost none describe what right looks like. Without a written destination, two teams can agree on every deliverable and disagree on every direction.
When this is solved, [who] can [do what] so that [meaningful outcome], without [current friction].
02
You don't have an idea problem. You have a stopping-too-early problem. When the room runs out of options, it's stuck inside one move. Switch to a different one.
Change. Combine. Flip. Remove. Constrain. Borrow.
03
Most decisions you're treating as one-way doors are two-way doors with a price tag. The error most teams make: applying one-way-door process to two-way-door decisions. The cost is paid in time, not money.
Decide as if it's reversible. Commit as if it isn't.
04
Wordle started as a gift for one person. Dropbox started as a three-minute video. The people with the most resources are consistently beaten by the people who test first.
Which assumption, if wrong, kills everything else? Test that one first.
05
The 10% Test helps you find leverage point. If a change only improves the visible symptom by a small amount but leaves the pattern untouched, it is probably not the real lever.
If this worked perfectly, would it change the system by at least 10%, or would the same problem return in another form?
06
The Pre-Mortem helps weak assumptions before commiting. Instead of asking why a plan might succeed, it asks the team to imagine the plan has already failed and explain what went wrong.
Before committing, ask: It is six months from now, this failed. What happened, and what should we change now?
A good frame does not make the problem smaller. It makes the right problem visible.
Read · Essays from the Book
Ten essays. Free. Each one a chapter in disguise.
Long-form pieces on problem framing, decision-making, and design thinking — drawn directly from the book. Read them as previews; share them with the team lead who needs them.
Essay 1
Write the Ending Before You Begin
Most teams start by describing what is wrong. Few take the time to describe what right would look like. This essay explains why writing the end state first gives teams a clearer destination before they waste time building toward different versions of success.
Essay 2
The Pigeon Problem
AI can make teams faster, but speed is not the same as understanding. This essay explores what happens when teams jump from brief to solution too quickly, and why the pause between the problem and the answer is where real thinking happens.
Essay 2
You Are Solving the Wrong Problem
Smart people rarely fail because they lack effort. They fail because they solve the symptom with confidence. This essay introduces the Framing Gap: the distance between the problem you think you have and the one you actually need to solve.
Essay 4
Every innovation requires six moves
Breakthrough ideas rarely appear from nowhere. They usually come from changing, combining, flipping, removing, constraining, or borrowing something that already exists. This essay breaks down the six moves that help teams generate better options before they narrow too soon.
04 — About Darla Tarawneh, Author of Making Sense of the Mess
I have been the team solving the wrong problem.
've shipped the download button that nobody could open. I've spent a quarter optimising the funnel that wasn't the constraint. I've watched my own offsite produce an app for the pigeons. Making Sense of the Mess started with the patterns underneath those failures.
Across two decades, I've led product, design, and strategy for early-stage startups and Fortune 500 teams. I've worked across five continents, in rooms where the architecture made correction more expensive than silence, and learned to read what that room is actually saying.
This book is what I wish someone had handed me before the costliest meeting of my career — a practical guide to problem framing, decision-making, and design thinking for the people who already know how to solve things, but want to make sure they're solving the right one.
20+
Years building
product & strategy
05
Continents
of practice
12
Chapters of
hard-won lessons
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