PONDERING THE LIMITS OF THE INTRACTABLE: ON ” WICKED PROBLEMS “

For the purposes of promoting clear thinking, Dave Schuler recently had a very informative post “Theseus’s Clew: strategies, meta-strategies, and “wicked problems” “; if you wish to look at the dynamics of conflict based scenarios with a clear ( some might say ” glittering”) eye, then you should read Dave’s post in full.

But for the more slothful of my readers, an excerpt from Dave on the nature of ” wicked problems”:

“Even more unfortunately there are many real-world problems that have neither engineering solutions like the first class or negotiated solutions like the second. These are the difficult problems and, in some cases, these have been called “wicked problems”.

There are many reasons that a problem may be a wicked problem:

* the problem may be ill-defined

* the stakeholders in the problem may have dramatically different world views and framewor for understanding the problem

* the problem may have no stopping rules

* the problem may be unique and previous experience may not be applicable

Or, in many cases, the very act of selecting an approach to solving the problem permanently forecloses other alternatives. It is impossible to arrive at an iterative solution to the problem.

Consider, for example, the mythological Greek hero Theseus. Theseus navigated through the Minotaur’s maze with a clew, a ball of yarn. The clew gave him the ability to trace back to his starting point. Without it he’d have wandered the maze forever.

That’s the key to any iterative solution: you’re able to return to some point of departure and try another way. But when the initial choice precludes returning to the starting point, i.e. the decision has consequences, you can’t just try another way. When you’ve chosen the second branch, the only way out of the maze was through the first branch, and the first branch is no longer accessible to you, you’re stuck. There may no longer be a solution.”

Dave offered some excellent strategies for dealing with “wicked problems”, all of which I find to be both useful and generally correct. But as he asked me for some feedback, I have to say that there is more to the story here and some nuances to “wicked problems” that Dave did not include in his concisely written post.

First of all, not all “wicked problems” were created equally wicked. We must differentiate between those problems that are intractable from those that are merely hard or prohibitively expensive. The latter involves a significant degree of human value choice while the former is effectively beyond any direct solution within our present power to efface. Many cutting edge scientific questions are temporarily intractable until, say for example, computing power increases by a given order of magnitude. Some philosophical or religious questions, perhaps dealing with the nature of God or the afterlife, are intractable in a permanent sense.

“Wicked problems” dealing with conflict in a complex social system are not usually intractable, though we often use that word to describe very difficult to solve conflicts in places like the Middle East or Northern Ireland. What we really mean in such cases is that the problems are exceedingly complicated as well as deeply rooted in terms of psychological and emotional investment for those involved. We often describe the second aspect as being “self-destructive” or ” irrational” but in economic terms it is not irrational behavior if you place overriding value on minimizing your opponent’s gains ( though it may indeed be self-destructive to execute such a strategy at all costs) even if that value-set is a product of your own skewed perception of events.

How to deal with such ” wicked problems”? Here are several options to consider for non-intractable but difficult scenarios:

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