Wicked problems

“Despite efforts to discover the foundations of design thinking in the fine arts, the natural sciences, or most recently, the social sciences, design eludes reduction and remains a surprisingly flexible activity. no single definition of design, or branches of professionalized practice such as industrial or graphic design, adequately covers the diversity of ideas and methods gathered together under the label. indeed, the variety of research reported in conference papers, journal articles, and books suggests that design continues to expand in its meanings and connections, revealing unexpected dimensions in practice as well as understanding. this follows the trend of design thinking in the twentieth century, for we have seen design grow from a trade activity to a segmented profession to a field for technical research and to what now should be recognized as a new liberal art of technological culture.”

“Examines problems that are so complex, they cannot be solved fully.”

“I revisit rittel and weber’s essay on the ‘wicked problem,’ and relate it to more recent theories about rationality and professionalism. perhaps the most provocative challenge comes from deleuze and guattari’s difficult commentary on ‘the rhizome,’ which has currency within much design studio culture. i posit the controversial conclusion that ‘wickedness’ is not aberrant. it is formulations of professionalism which pay homage to the idea of formal rules, goal setting, and calculation as representing the norm of rationality, that present as deviations. © 2004 published by elsevier ltd.”

“Some of the most difficult policy problems of the modern era have been described as complex, intractable, open-ended and ‘wicked’. what are the key features of such problems? and are they really very different in nature from more routine problems? are we developing better ways to address these wicked problems? this paper sketches some key aspects of wicked problems, and illustrates the discussion with two contemporary australian examples – recent attempts to address the causes and possible solutions to indigenous disadvantage; and policy responses to climate change.”

“We examine the claim that design is demarcated from science by having wicked problems while science does not and argue that it is wrong. we examine each of the ten features rittel and weber hold to be characteristic of wicked problems and show that they derive from three general sources common to science and design: agent finitude, system complexity and problem normativity, and play analogous roles in each. this provides the basis for a common core cognitive process to design and science. underlying our arguments is a shift to a strategic problem-solving conception of method in both disciplines that opens up new opportunities for synergetic cross-disciplinary research and practice. © 2013 elsevier ltd. all rights reserved.”

“JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. we use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. for more information about jstor, please contact support@jstor.org. abstract the search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to the nature of these problems. they are ‘wicked’ problems, whereas science has d with ‘tame’ problems. policy problems cannot be definitively described. moreover, society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective defin policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; an sense to talk about ‘optimal solutions’ to social problems unless severe qualificati first. even worse, there are no ‘solutions’ in the sense of definitive and objective a”

“© 2013, © the author(s) 2013. the concept of ‘wicked problems’ has attracted increasing focus in policy research, but the implications for public organizations have received less attention. this article examines the main organizational and cognitive dimensions emerging from the research literature on wicked problems. we identify several recent approaches to addressing problem complexity and stakeholder divergence based on the literatures on systems thinking, collaboration and coordination, and the adaptive leadership roles of public leaders and managers. we raise some challenges for public management in some key functional areas of government—strategy making, organizational design, people management, and performance measurement. we argue that provisional solutions can be developed, despite the difficulties of reforming governance processes to address wicked problems more effectively.”

“The term ‘wicked problems’ is found in many disciplines, including public administra- tion, policy science, health education, ecology, forestry, and business administration, but the term is relatively unknown in applied eco- nomics. applied economics needs to become better acquainted with wicked problems; they are pervasive, and they present challenges if applied economics is to retain its relevance in today’s world. this paper explores these challenges but is necessarily exploratory, as widespread recognition of the complexity of wicked problems is leading to new kinds of research, but these research approaches are still evolving. my basic thesis is that normal science assumptions and approaches are in- adequate for addressing the complexities of wicked problems in a policy context, but that science, including social science, remains cru- cial for the development of alternative poli- cies. this exploration, therefore, is about both the characteristics of postnormal science nec- essary to inform alternative policies designed to address wicked problems as well as their implications for policy contributions from ap- plied economics. because many wicked prob- lems involve sustainability issues, i will focus mainly on sustainability problems.”

“Hbr.org | may 2008 | harvard business review 99 o ver the past 15 years, i’ve been studying how companies create strategy – the most important responsibility of senior executives. many cor-porations, i fi nd, have replaced the annual top-down planning ritual, based on macroeconomic forecasts, with more sophisticated processes. they crunch vast amounts of consumer data, hold planning sessions frequently, and use techniques such as competency modeling and real-options analysis to develop strategy. this type of approach is an im-provement because it is customer-and capability-focused and enables companies to modify their strategies quickly, but it still misses the mark a lot of the time. strategy as a wicked problem ” wicked ” problems can’t be solved, but they can be tamed. increasingly, these are the problems strategists face – and for which they are ill equipped. companies tend to ignore one complication along the way: they can’t develop models of the increasingly complex en-vironment in which they operate. as a result, contemporary strategic-planning processes don’t help enterprises cope with the big problems they face. several ceos admit that they are confronted with issues that cannot be resolved merely by gath-ering additional data, defi ning issues more clearly, or breaking them down into small problems. their planning techniques don’t generate fresh ideas, and implementing the solutions those processes come up with is fraught with political peril. that’s because, i believe, many strategy issues aren’t just tough or persistent – they’re ” wicked. ” wickedness isn’t a degree of diffi culty. wicked issues are different because traditional processes can’t resolve them, ac-cording to horst w.j. rittel and melvin m. webber, professors of design and urban planning at the university of california at berkeley, who described them in a 1973 article in policy sci-ences magazine. a wicked problem has innumerable causes, is tough to describe, and doesn’t have a right answer, as we will see in the next section. environmental degradation, terrorism, and poverty – these are classic examples of wicked problems. they’re the opposite of hard but ordinary problems, which people can solve in a fi nite time period by applying standard techniques. not only do conventional processes fail to tackle wicked problems, but they may exacerbate situations by gen-erating undesirable consequences. in the areas of public policy, software development, and project design, experts suc…”

“Government officials and public managers are encountering a class of problems that defy solution, even with our most sophisticated analytical tools. these problems are called ‘wicked’ because they have the following characteristics: 1). there is no definitive statement of the problem; in fact, there is broad disagreement on what ‘the problem’ is. 2). without a definitive statement of the problem, the search for solutions is open ended. stakeholders – those who have a stake in the problem and its solution – champion alternative solutions and compete with one another to frame ‘the problem’ in a way that directly connects their preferred solution and their preferred problem definition. 3). the problem solving process is complex because constraints, such as resources and political ramifications, are constantly changing. 4). constraints also change because they are generated by numerous interested parties who “come and go, change their minds, fail to communicate, or otherwise change the rules by which the problem must be solved.”

“This editorial introduces three examples of innovative research from the 16th international digital government research conference (dg.o 2015). to position the contributions of these examples meaningfully, we first performed a brief bibliographic analysis of research articles in the knowledge domain of digital government. this analysis provided a detailed examination of the evolution of digital government research themes and helped us introduce the examples in this special issue to the research field. specifically, the research selected contributes to the theme of ‘digital government and wicked problems’ by examining people’s online political behavior, extracting citizens’ needs from massive quantities of text data, or engaging constituents across geographical boundaries. at the same time, the bibliographic analysis and research examples together led us to ask whether the research field is ready to adopt wicked problems as a central focus, as it appears that the field is only in the very early stages of understanding the importance of the theme. to facilitate the transition from the current research orientation of the field to the next stage, we provide several suggestions for directions in future research.”

“1 as my 5-year tenure as editor of the journal of mixed methods research comes to an end, i want to use this editorial space to present some challenges for our community of mixed methods researchers. the challenges emanate from the concept of wicked problems and the promises associated with mixed methods to understand complexity through diverse approaches. i borrow the term wicked problems from urban planners rittel and webber (1973), who described wicked problems as those that involve multiple interacting systems, are replete with social and institu-tional uncertainties, and for which only imperfect knowledge about their nature and solutions exist. hence, they argue that there are no completely right solutions to this type of problem; only better and worse solutions that are in part determined by how the problem is understood. levin, cashore, bernstein, and auld (2012) added the concept of super wicked problems distinguished by these additional characteristics: problems for which time is running out, there is no central authority, the persons trying to solve the problem are also causing it, and policies to address them discount the future. methodologically, camillus (2008) claims that wicked problems can-not be resolved by traditional processes of analyzing vast amounts of data or more sophisticated statistical analyses. examples of wicked problems include climate change, terrorism and con-flict, social inequities, health care, educational access, and poverty. identification of wicked problems and approaches to the use of research as a tool to inform decisions for action related to them have progressed since rittel and webber (1973) first pub-lished on this concept. for example, a special issue of the journal of mixed methods research focused on mixed methods strategies that were used to study social inequities experienced by marginalized populations to address wicked problems such as access to education for roma populations in europe (flecha, 2014), creating safe places for internally displaced gay and bisexual men and transwomen in columbia (zea, aguilar-pardo, betancourt, reisen, & gonzales, 2014), and building research capacity in the spinal cord injury community in new zealand (sullivan, derrett, paul, beaver, & stace, 2014). gomez (2014) claims that mixed methods approaches are particularly germane for approaches to address these wicked problems because they allow researchers from diverse groups to have a common language to guide their inquiry, p…”

“In 1973, horst w rittel and malvin a webber introduced the term ‘wicked problem’ in planning theory. they describe spatial planning as dealing with inherent uncertainty, complexity and inevitable normativity. this contribution picks up the concept of wicked problems, reflects on it from a planning-theoretical perspective, and proposes the use of cultural theory’s concept of clumsy solutions as a response to wicked planning problems. in discussing public participation processes in spatial planning, it is then shown what clumsy solutions mean for spatial planning. the four rationalities of cultural theory are then used to explain why public participation in planning can become wicked, and how these rationalities provide a response that copes with this wickedness.”