If like me you're wondering how a problem can be "wicked" and scoured the summary with a growing sense of futility: it turns out to be a term in social planning that means a problem that's difficult or impossible because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements.
I've seen something like this in B2B consulting. The decision makers (our customers) have a difficult time parsing all the complex variables and wind up making really bad assumptions that turn into a vicious cycle of broken expectations and even more complexity. I think the basic human flaw here is impatience.
The opposite experience was had in semiconductor manufacturing. Not a soul in those engineering offices would hazard the remotest assumption about a problem until many hours of confirmation occurred first. No one wanted to be the reason something got even more complicated.
A possible explanation, from the book Thinking Fast and Slow: when confronted with an intractable (or even just very difficult) problem, the human mind has a tendency to substitute an easier problem and solve that instead. It's tricky to catch yourself doing this, and group inertia makes it harder.
Interesting intellectually, but sort of self-defeating as a field of inquiry. The delineation between wicked and non-wicked problems is itself effectively arbitrary and artificial. It is odd and somehow amusing to see the 'academic' (analysis-paralysis) lens focusing on perception failures in the (bias toward action/fail fast/fail forward) field of 'entrepreneurial' activity.
Compare to received startup wisdom: reduction is fine, often 80:20 is good enough, and failures are expected. You miss all the shots you don't take. Sometimes moving in the right general direction with wrong perception is the best path to progress. Learning is a goal.
The percentage of failed ventures which can be directly attributed to reduction-related problems of founder perception is probably very small.
IMHO some other distinguishing factors of true "wicked problems", like housing, welfare, drug policy, traffic etc is that it tends to be very easy to make things worse if you are not extremely careful, and they are subject to ideological warfare, which means changes are contentious and consume significant political capital.
It's more like "working in enterprise" (aka a large, already somewhat successful business with all the factors that entails) than startup land where problems can be "unpicked" more easily because the system does not have as much state, history and inertia.
It's quite possible these people charging into these wicked problems don't understand they are charging into a wicked problem.
Nearly every problem involving people or the environment is going to become a wicked problem. The problem space is just so big and you can't really test at the scale you'll have to implement on.
And it's hard to know what works and what doesn't. Because sometimes things can get better due to something else and your solution just happened to be implemented while that was happening. And it's not like you can isolate either.
> Nearly every problem involving people or the environment is going to become a wicked problem.
Plenty of problems are well-defined. Even the ones involving people.
Just because people create situations that are wicked at the macro level, it doesn't mean that most problems reside there. If most problems were wicked, society would never evolve.
Just because a problem is wicked, it doesn't mean it can't be overcome. It's not all or nothing.
Also, just because a problem isn't completely solved, it doesn't mean progress isn't useful.
But figure that we don't have definitive ways to effectively teach people. We have ways that work somewhat for some people, but disseminating knowledge in ways people can understand is a wicked problem. Anything you can think of, we have probably tried. And there is still some segment of the population that it does not work on. And those methods will work on those people in other cases. But not the ones those methods worked on in the first place. So obviously the method is not general, it works in some cases.
People make problems wicked. Because every problem becomes incredibly multi-faceted as you are dealing with so many different fields at once.
And it is the navigation of these wicked problems that is responsible in part for evolving us. A lot of societal progress is the result of attempts to solve wicked problems.
I think you have inverted the logic: humans evolve because most of our problems are wicked. If our niche were simple we would not devote so many calories to our brains. (Something like 20% of the oxygen you breath is used in the brain alone!)
Test case based problem solving. Write some hilariously simple test case scenarios, solve those, ship it! I have yet to find a workplace that doesn't suffer from this bias towards simplicity in inherently complex problems. How do you explain to non-technical folks "its not that simple" without looking like a sandbagging son-of-a?
At the mall, I will rent a kid’s cart (often shaped like a car) for $9. You get a dollar back if you return it. However, instead of returning it, I usually find a family with small kids coming into the mall and ask if they want the cart.
If like me you're wondering how a problem can be "wicked" and scoured the summary with a growing sense of futility: it turns out to be a term in social planning that means a problem that's difficult or impossible because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
I've seen something like this in B2B consulting. The decision makers (our customers) have a difficult time parsing all the complex variables and wind up making really bad assumptions that turn into a vicious cycle of broken expectations and even more complexity. I think the basic human flaw here is impatience.
The opposite experience was had in semiconductor manufacturing. Not a soul in those engineering offices would hazard the remotest assumption about a problem until many hours of confirmation occurred first. No one wanted to be the reason something got even more complicated.
A possible explanation, from the book Thinking Fast and Slow: when confronted with an intractable (or even just very difficult) problem, the human mind has a tendency to substitute an easier problem and solve that instead. It's tricky to catch yourself doing this, and group inertia makes it harder.
Interesting intellectually, but sort of self-defeating as a field of inquiry. The delineation between wicked and non-wicked problems is itself effectively arbitrary and artificial. It is odd and somehow amusing to see the 'academic' (analysis-paralysis) lens focusing on perception failures in the (bias toward action/fail fast/fail forward) field of 'entrepreneurial' activity.
Compare to received startup wisdom: reduction is fine, often 80:20 is good enough, and failures are expected. You miss all the shots you don't take. Sometimes moving in the right general direction with wrong perception is the best path to progress. Learning is a goal.
The percentage of failed ventures which can be directly attributed to reduction-related problems of founder perception is probably very small.
IMHO some other distinguishing factors of true "wicked problems", like housing, welfare, drug policy, traffic etc is that it tends to be very easy to make things worse if you are not extremely careful, and they are subject to ideological warfare, which means changes are contentious and consume significant political capital.
It's more like "working in enterprise" (aka a large, already somewhat successful business with all the factors that entails) than startup land where problems can be "unpicked" more easily because the system does not have as much state, history and inertia.
It's quite possible these people charging into these wicked problems don't understand they are charging into a wicked problem.
Nearly every problem involving people or the environment is going to become a wicked problem. The problem space is just so big and you can't really test at the scale you'll have to implement on.
And it's hard to know what works and what doesn't. Because sometimes things can get better due to something else and your solution just happened to be implemented while that was happening. And it's not like you can isolate either.
Essentially, you're always testing in production.
> Nearly every problem involving people or the environment is going to become a wicked problem.
Plenty of problems are well-defined. Even the ones involving people.
Just because people create situations that are wicked at the macro level, it doesn't mean that most problems reside there. If most problems were wicked, society would never evolve.
Just because a problem is wicked, it doesn't mean it can't be overcome. It's not all or nothing.
Also, just because a problem isn't completely solved, it doesn't mean progress isn't useful.
But figure that we don't have definitive ways to effectively teach people. We have ways that work somewhat for some people, but disseminating knowledge in ways people can understand is a wicked problem. Anything you can think of, we have probably tried. And there is still some segment of the population that it does not work on. And those methods will work on those people in other cases. But not the ones those methods worked on in the first place. So obviously the method is not general, it works in some cases.
People make problems wicked. Because every problem becomes incredibly multi-faceted as you are dealing with so many different fields at once.
And it is the navigation of these wicked problems that is responsible in part for evolving us. A lot of societal progress is the result of attempts to solve wicked problems.
I think you have inverted the logic: humans evolve because most of our problems are wicked. If our niche were simple we would not devote so many calories to our brains. (Something like 20% of the oxygen you breath is used in the brain alone!)
Test case based problem solving. Write some hilariously simple test case scenarios, solve those, ship it! I have yet to find a workplace that doesn't suffer from this bias towards simplicity in inherently complex problems. How do you explain to non-technical folks "its not that simple" without looking like a sandbagging son-of-a?
Is there a social problem that is not wicked?
Returning your shopping cart when you're done shopping. Just do it people!
Aldi requires a quarter to use a shopping cart. If you don't return your cart, someone else probably will for a quarter per cart.
Those small rewards don’t really work.
At the mall, I will rent a kid’s cart (often shaped like a car) for $9. You get a dollar back if you return it. However, instead of returning it, I usually find a family with small kids coming into the mall and ask if they want the cart.
Well, isn't that just returning it with extra steps and you paying a dollar more than you had to?