“The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large. The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we...
There are two kinds of problems in this world: puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles can be solved by collecting information. Mysteries, on the other hand, require insight – they can’t be solved simply with more information.
Here’s writer Malcolm Gladwell explaining the difference between a puzzle and a mystery in a 2007 article: