Wicked problems, mind mapping, and IBIS
[by Lynn C. Rees, after a reminder by Charles Cameron]
Wikipedia defines a mind map as:
…a diagram used to visually outline information. A mind map is often created around a single word or text, placed in the center, to which associated ideas, words and concepts are added. Major categories radiate from a central node, and lesser categories are sub-branches of larger branches. Categories can represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items related to a central key word or idea.
Using visuals to represent and explore issues has long interested me. The primary tool I use now is Freeplane, a software application for drawing mind maps. While many mind mapping applications are available, I use Freeplane because:
- it’s free/open source software (FOSS)
- it’s trivial for me to customize and extend its core features with my own software
A central and popular conceit of FOSS is Linus’ Strongly Worded Suggestion Law:
“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”; or more formally: “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone”
This conceit, over-hyped for most FOSS projects, is true in narrower cases. Since I use a few obscure Freeplane features, I’ve encountered a few obscure Freeplane bugs. Since Freeplane’s source is freely and publicly available and I’m a software engineer, I fixed some of those bugs myself. Some bugs I merely reported for Freeplane’s developers to fix. Some bugs I fixed but the fix hasn’t been merged into the main program.
This isn’t a significant issue. Since it is FOSS, I can take Freeplane’s source code, apply my fixes and customizations to it, and run my own version of the software which, under the terms of the GNU General Public License, I also make publicly available. Hoping to benefit from Linus’ Law myself, I’ve released source for some of my custom Freeplane add-ons for the Freeplane user community to use.
An add-on I released today is a first attempt to represent and explore a not infrequent topic here at Zenpundit: wicked problems.
Horst Rittel, who first devised the concept, ascribed ten characteristics to wicked problems:
- There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
- Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
- Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
- There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
- Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
- Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
- Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
- The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
- The planner has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).
Rittel’s own solution for solving wicked problems was the Issue-Based Information System (IBIS). IBIS involves four elements:
- questions
- ideas
- pros
- cons
An IBIS map starts with one root question (simplified here for posting efficiency):
First step
A question can be responded to with an idea.
Step two
Within IBIS, an idea is:
- a potential answer or solution to a question
- a trigger for further questions
Pros and cons can only respond to ideas.
Step three
Further questions can also respond to ideas, pros, and cons.
Step four
Following these few rules, Rittel argued that even wicked problems could be mapped. While IBIS can be used for individual visualization of wicked problems. Rittel designed it for a group. Used with other methodologies like dialogue mapping, Rittel figured a shared map could help establish shared understanding, facilitating distributed problem solving.
Rittel may be correct. I don’t know. While other structured analysis approaches exist, many of them suffer from too much representational granularity. Too much fine parsing tends to lead to inevitable ontological crisis.
For my own efforts, IBIS has a nice balance between too little structure and too much. This new Freeplane add-on facilitates use of IBIS within my existing toolchain.
Some ZP readers may find it interesting to experiment with. It requires Freeplane, available as a free download for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. The initial version of the add-on, FreeIBIS 0.1.0, is available as a free download here. If Freeplane is installed, all you should have to do is double click it to have it install. Commands are accessed under the Tools → freeIBIS menu within Freeplane.
I use the keyboard for mind mapping so I assigned the four IBIS functions to these keyboard shortcut combinations on MacOS X:
- ⌘? for question
- ⌘> for idea
- ⌘= for pro
- ⌘ for con
It may use the Control key instead of ⌘ under Windows. I don’t know. I don’t run Windows.
Fortunately, Freeplane has a convenient point and click way to reassign keyboard shortcuts under Tools → Select hot keys.
I am exploring further ways to integrate visualization techniques like Freeplane and IBIS with other structured techniques like ACH. Hopefully we’ll see more emerge in this area going forward.
May 21st, 2013 at 3:21 pm
Lynn, I enjoyed this article. I just wanted to add that while the mindmap artifact is extremely useful to characterize a wicked problem and make it understandable – we might even say necessary given the problem’s multi-dimensional properties, it is not sufficient.
If the problem is truly wicked, it is unlikely that any single person will be able to come up with a definitive solution to it because any single solution will underestimate the underlying complexity of the problem and ignore the interactions between problem vectors or dimensions.
In designing e-Deliberation, a web-based process where groups of up to several dozen people get together to resolve wicked problems, we included the use of mindmaps to discover the wicked problem vectors, and the IBIS-inspired question/Idea/Pro/Con qualifiers. But we added, in addition, a facilitated thinking process which includes the use of several forms of feedback, to support the group in deliberation to come up with a solution set that has the requisite variety to match that of the problem vectors.
In other words, it is unlikely that simple solutions can solve complex problems. Tools such as mindmaps help characterize the problem, but to work out solutions that can be expected to resolve the said problems and gain the adhesion and support of the community in deliberation, one also needs a powerful thinking process.
Jean-Daniel Cusin
http://www.e-Deliberation.com
May 21st, 2013 at 4:08 pm
Interesting stuff.
I’m a big fan of David Allen’s GTD and also lateral thinking
I’m always looking for better problem solving methods.I just installed Freeplane and am giving it a whirl.
May 21st, 2013 at 5:11 pm
Good stuff, Lynn.
Re: link to IBIS:
So it is no surprise that Rittel and Kunz envisaged IBIS as the:
I can agree with, as well as counter, 2 through 10, by reframing the context of social-political change to the local level of time and responsibility, tempo in the situation.
Re: Hopefully we’ll see more emerge in this area going forward.
“Hopefully”? I got an A-Team bringing it forward now. We’re in pre-launch mode, and will reveal as soon as appropriate. Then, will be asking readers of this thread for inputs.
Thanks!
May 21st, 2013 at 7:39 pm
I used FreeMind mind-mapping software to map in great detail a dissertation I admired. I then used that map as a scaffolding for my own. Worked well.
May 21st, 2013 at 8:48 pm
Ever think of getting a bunch of people together that don’t know each other in order to crowd source wicked problems?
I was reading this article the other day about how IQ tests over the years may have been fooling us all along. People may not actually be smarter, and, in fact, may be less intelligent than in the past:
http://phys.org/news/2013-05-victorian-era-people-intelligent-modern-day-counterparts.html
This sort of reminded me of the theory that life spans haven’t increased in thousands of years:
http://www.livescience.com/10569-human-lifespans-constant-2-000-years.html
So, imagining for a moment that we aren’t really any smarter or healthier or even any better off overall than in the past (the chief argument for the success of modernism), the question becomes how are we really surviving?
May 21st, 2013 at 9:35 pm
I’ve used CMAP Tools to map out characters for a novel (history, personality traits, motives, goals, etc.). It’s a very easy-to-use, intuitive app, with a lot of utility. I particularly like the fact that you can have several different distinct maps and link concepts between them. For instance, for my character maps, I create separate maps for each character, but Character A is an ancestor to Character B, so I can draw an arrow from Character B, under family/history, to a the map of Character A, and vice versa.
May 21st, 2013 at 9:49 pm
I’m very interested in all these ways of handling complex issues — I admire IBIS a great deal, having first run across it while thinking in a small DC tank in 1999, lateral thinking was the first such mode I ran across years (probably decades) earlier, e-deliberation I’ll have to look into — and I’m eager to see what both Critt and Lynn come up with.
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Here’s my 2006 overview of the field, free from Scribd.
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My own main approach derives from Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, and essentially sees “multiple stakeholders” as “multiple voices” that need to be included, and this closely related to the musical forms of polyphony (literally “many voices”) and counterpoint (essentially the juxtaposition of sometimes clashing melodies to achieve a greater music than any one of them alone).
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As a result, I look to Bach for inspiration, and a lot of my thinking goes into “scoring” fugues in which concepts (whether visual, verbal, musical, mathematical or filmic) rather than melodies are the individual voices to be heard in juxtaposition.
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I’m also interested in developing a page for recording diverse opinions — once they’ve been expressed, debated, deliberated, clarified, condensed and collated — in a format to be based on the Talmudic page, as discussed briefly here on Zenpundit a while back. Anyone interested in this project?
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Lynn, Critt, Jean-Daniel and all — keep us posted here at Zenpundit. I’ll definitely alert you as Sembl gets closer to its eventual web-based launch — we’re now in the “seek funding for development” stage, having shown proof of concept in the National Museum of Australia’s Museum Game, albeit limited there to objects rather than ideas, and to the museum (physically) and its collection, rather than the open web.
May 21st, 2013 at 10:35 pm
As for solving wicked problems, I’m wondering if anyone here has explored what is called “open-space technology” (not to be confused with open-source technology)? I have not personally participated in such meetings, although I have done some reading. The general ideas, principles and procedures behind OST could be adapted to online collaborative work utilizing concept-map software and other software. (The aforementioned CMAP Tools apparently allows online collaboration, when it’s server-based, but I’ve never used it to collaborate.)
May 27th, 2013 at 11:31 am
Lynn,
Great article. I couldn’t agree more with some of the points you are presenting. I consider my self a former mind-mapping skeptic, but now I can honestly claim: every problem can be mind-mapped. Even wicked ones.